Judge Marcus C. Rehnquist, presiding over the Chancery Court’s probate docket, has ordered a "dual-tracking" approach. A forensic genealogist will attempt to establish Mrs. Volkov-Morrison’s legal nationality at the time of the USSR’s dissolution, while a separate master will review the validity of the 2021 Will under Delaware’s Uniform Probate Code.
“The Soviet legal principle of ‘socialist inheritance’ prioritizes the collective,” the Belarusian filing reads. “Mrs. Volkov-Morrison never formally renounced her original nationality during the dissolution window of 1991-1994.”
“This is not about politics,” Judge Rehnquist stated from the bench. “It is about determining what set of laws—Delaware’s, the defunct USSR’s, or modern Belarus’s—governs the distribution of a deceased person’s property. We are in uncharted waters.” first soviet citizen will probated in the united states
“The USSR has no embassy, no consulate, and no legal successor for private civil matters dating to specific republics before the collapse,” said Professor Elena Hartwell of Columbia Law School, a specialist in post-Soviet inheritance law. “The court must determine: Was her ‘domicile of origin’ the USSR, the modern Republic of Belarus, or a stateless entity? This has never been adjudicated in an American probate court.”
The case has drawn intense interest from the estimated 750,000 former Soviet citizens living in the United States who naturalized after 1991. Many have outdated wills that refer to their "Soviet" birth. Judge Marcus C
The core legal challenge stems from the fact that Mrs. Volkov-Morrison was born in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) in 1939—a sovereign political entity that ceased to exist on December 26, 1991.
According to court filings, the estate is valued at approximately $4.2 million, consisting primarily of real estate in Delaware, a collection of Soviet-era art, and a bank account in Cyprus. The Will names two primary beneficiaries: her son, Dmitri Volkov of Brooklyn, New York, and a charitable foundation supporting Russian-language poets. Volkov-Morrison’s legal nationality at the time of the
However, a competing claim has been filed by the , acting through a private law firm in Washington, D.C. Belarusian authorities argue that under Soviet inheritance law, which they claim as a predecessor state to the BSSR, a portion of any citizen’s estate must revert to the state if heirs are not "direct bloodline dependents."