The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Albert Baiburin
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509543205
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stamp, decree of appointment, certificate, register, circular, and so on – that led to the establishment of a properly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in this sense, has all the appearances of ‘rationality’ even as it is invested with the most mysterious properties of magical efficacy.30

      Relating this to the certification of a person, this ‘mysterious efficacy’ leads, as well as everything else, to the formation of individual identity in a unified system; yet another oxymoron typical of bureaucratic logic.

      The bureaucratization of society is one of the most notable cultural developments in the modern era.31 Using documents, state institutions placed various aspects of life under a special regime. These were mainly those connected to the person and their place in time and space. As mentioned above, the authorities consider such a regime essential in order to strengthen what they regard as most important when it comes to trust. But not only for this. When something needs to be altered, they believe, this should be conveyed in the official language of the document. This means that the document itself becomes a template for the changes that the state wants. This fits Bourdieu’s and Michel Foucault’s ideas about the state wanting to exert maximum control not only over a person, but symbolically over the way he or she defines themselves, calls themselves, or classifies themselves.32 What’s more, as Anthony Giddens writes, in contemporary societies a similar level of control is exercised mainly with the aid of documentation.33

      When bureaucracy takes over the life of society one result is the creation of a person’s documented double. Rom Harré came up with the concept of ‘file-selves’, a type of dossier containing documents about a particular person.36 This dossier could contain a whole variety of documents: a personal history, references, different types of certificates and so on. Each of them carries specific information about some or other aspect of the person; thus one could say that the real ‘I’ is made up of a multitude of documented variants. Sheila Fitzpatrick maintains that, ‘The making of files was a basic project of the Soviet state from its early years.’37 In the Russian translation of her book, Tear Off the Masks!, the concept of ‘fileselves’ is translated as ‘the documented “I”’, which can be found in the personal dossiers of various organizations and institutions, in files containing kompromat, and in internal passports. In contrast to Harré, who believed that the documented ‘I’ usually did not depend on the person themselves, Fitzpatrick highlights the way in which the Soviet dossier was brought together: its contents could be altered not only by those who compiled the dossier or those who held it, but also by the person whose dossier it was. They could do this by such methods as giving false information about themselves, changing their personal history, or altering the details about themselves in their passport. Furthermore, they had the possibility to challenge the information contained in official documents. The documented ‘I’ did this with dynamic effect, by submitting a wide variety of alterations. The Soviet passport could probably be seen as a special example of the documented ‘I’, with which every owner (or reader) could associate.

      Examining a document such as a passport involves looking at questions of the individual person, and at the way in which the authorities tried to create the image of the Soviet person by allocating what the state considered to be essential characteristics. A significant amount of research has already been conducted in this conceptual field. For a long time the prevailing view was that in the Soviet era the personality was simply suppressed; but now fresh approaches to the question have suggested there were positive effects from the ‘cultural construction’ of the Soviet person. Jochen Hellbeck considers the cultural policy of the Soviet authorities as ‘a project to transform imperfect human beings into universal socialized subjects’.38 Using as his basic source the diaries of Communist Party members who actively participated in collectivization, he insists that revolutionary practices had a productive effect on the consciousness and feelings of the Soviet people.39 Hellbeck’s position, which goes against the accepted one-sided view of the personality in a totalitarian society, is vital to future investigation in this area. It is worth pointing out that this concept maintains that the person is not simply someone mechanically carrying out ideological orders, but a subject who is capable of considering and altering them, and adapting them to his own wishes.

      Finally, in order to study how Soviet people reacted to the rules of identification that were imposed upon them, it is undoubtedly useful to take into account the ideas of Michel de Certeau about ‘the tactics of the weak’, which, ‘bring countless petty changes … to the law, reflecting their own interests and rules’.44 In Soviet practices of interaction with officialdom, this tactic is especially typical.

      In recent times interest has grown noticeably in the study of documents, such as the passport and others, which confirm identity. Evidence of this is the international project, Documenting Individual Identity: Historical and Comparative Perspectives since 1500 (IdentiNet) led by Jane Caplan and Edward Higgs, in which identity documents are the principal items of study. Under the auspices of this project a series of research papers has been published dedicated to the history and functioning of identity documents in a number of cultural traditions.45 Amongst these, of particular interest is the picture John Torpey presents of the evolution of the passport, which looks closely at the efforts of the authorities to establish control over movement since the time of the French Revolution. Certainly, there were ups and downs in this process. There was a weakening of control in the second half of the nineteenth century, brought about by the construction of the railways and a sharp rise in mobility; but this was followed by a period when tighter control was imposed once again.46