He then went to Paris and
did research at the Sorbonne in Indo-Aryan, Slav and Indo-European Linguistics, Greek and Latin.
But, by the mid-1970s, the demographic demise of the USSR's Slav majority had become a state secret
and a major policy concern;
Although the image projected was Slav, if not Russian,
the Soviet Union was in fact home to hundreds of distinct ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious groups.
It was hard to say whether he was a Slav or not, yes,
perhaps the person who had just adopted Christianity could hardly have been Greek, but Feofan the Byzantine is silent about his ethnicity.