The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

accessed 20 October 2020.

      26 26. ‘Zapiska A G Beloborodova v Politburo…’, p. 102. [The ‘Turk-Republic’ Beloborodov refers to was at the time the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. It was created in 1918 with Tashkent as its capital. It formed the basis for the Union Republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, founded in 1924–5. – Tr.]

      27 27. Despite this, attempts to establish control over the movement of the population did not stop. On 13 July 1922 the statute ‘On address bureaux’ was published. Address bureaux were set up to register the comings and goings of all citizens, and the housing directorate was obliged to hand the local militia lists of everyone who had entered and left their buildings. These lists were kept for two years. The text of the statute was published in the book, Militsiya Rossii…, p. 140. In 1926 a new statute on address bureaux was published, in which it was stated: ‘For the full and exact registration of the population there must be address lists which include the names of all citizens over the age of sixteen years’ (NKVD Bulletin for 1926, No. 28).

      28 28. ‘On personal certification’ (‘Ob udostoverenii lichnosti’), Decree of the VTsIK and SNK RSFSR, 20 June 1923. See SU RSFSR, 1923, No. 61, Art. 570.

      29 29. Later, and in line with the resolution of 18 July 1927, an identity document could be issued on the strength of a trade union membership card or a card issued by an educational institution. See SU RSFSR, 1927, No. 75, Art. 514.

      30 30. [Private traders who took advantage of the possibilities presented by the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which allowed a certain amount of private business. Many believed that this was against the spirit of socialism, hence the inclusion of the NEPmen on this list. – Tr.]

      31 31. A few months earlier a certificate had been introduced for ‘officials’ (Decree of the SNK RSFSR of 19 December 1922). The first point of the Decree stated: ‘All institutions are to produce a single type of permanent personal certificate for their officials. On the one side this is to show in the appropriate manner verified details of the position held, with the name, patronymic and surname of the official. On the other side, it must show references to or extracts from the articles of the law or resolution about the organization which has set the rights and obligations by which the said official is in post. The list of responsibilities which give the holder the right to have such a certificate must be drawn up by the leader of the institution’ (Khronologicheskoye sobraniye zakonov…, pp. 64–7). These instructions were for ‘middle management’. ‘Senior management’ was covered by a Decree of 13 February 1924; Khronologicheskoye sobraniye zakonov…, p. 83.

      32 32. Sistematichesky sbornik deystvuyushchikh rasporyazhenii…, p. 294. [The reason the title might be ‘frightening’ is that the word propiska became hugely significant in Soviet times. Without the necessary propiska, a citizen could not move to a particular city or town. See below. – Tr.] Also in 1925 the Presidium of the TsIK USSR confirmed the ‘Situation on Entry to and Exit from the USSR’. Apart from the orders issued by Trotsky and Petrovsky (see above, this chapter, nn. 5 and 7), this was the first legal act concerning the question of entry to and exit from the USSR. The NKVD was given responsibility for the issuing of foreign travel passports to Soviet citizens and issuing entry visas to foreigners; the NKID, for diplomatic and official passports and visas for foreign travel.

      33 33. Bearing this in mind, the official article about the passport in the sixth volume of the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia, published in 1930, is especially significant. It states: ‘PASSPORT – a particular document to confirm the identity and rights of its bearer when absent from their place of permanent residence. The passport system was an important weapon of police activity and tax policy in a so-called “police state”. The passport system operated in pre-revolutionary Russia, too. The passport system was especially burdensome for the working masses, and inconvenient for the civil workings of the bourgeois state, which at times abolished or weakened it. Soviet law does not recognize a passport system.’ The article was very quickly out-of-date. Within two years a passport system was introduced.

      34 34. Dmitry Khmelnitsky, ‘Neskuchnaya istoricheskaya epokha’, http://www.port-folio.org/2005/part211.htm, accessed 17 April 2017.

      35 35. In the article, ‘The passport system’ in the 1939 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the return of the system is explained thus: ‘The Soviet legal system, in contrast to the bourgeois one, never drew a veil over the class nature of its passport system, using it in conjunction with the conditions of the class struggle and the tasks of the dictatorship of the working class at different stages of the building of socialism.’ Bol’shaya Sovietskaya entsiklopediya, Vol. 44, 1939, p. 11).

      36 36. [Curiously the original surname entered was ‘Vasilyeva’ but this has been changed by a different hand to ‘Savelyeva’. – Tr.]