Yet possession of the document also acted as a powerful force of social and cultural unification, as a token of citizenship in a positive sense – a resonance that became particularly significant in the post-Stalin era, as the numbers of those entitled to passports broadened, and its repressive function was to a large extent eroded by a constructive one. For Stepan, his passport was not just essential for proving he had the right to leave his village. Nomadic groups registered as members of reindeer, horse-raising or camel-breeding collectives were, like the Russian rural population, migrationally disenfranchised under Stalin. For them, the possession of a passport became an important sign of state favour, a recognition of equality attained. Similarly, it was vital, in the post-war years, for Kalmyk ‘special settlers’ (the population displaced in 1943 as a punishment for alleged large-scale collaboration with the Nazi invaders) both to obtain passports (which signified the right to move about as opposed to the duty to sign on with the local military commandant, as before), and to contest any restrictions that were imposed upon these.7 ‘Opting out’ of the passport system was the last thing the socially disenfranchised wished to do.8 The writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous dictum, ‘Remove the document – and you remove the man’, was an acknowledgement not only of the impotence of the individual unsanctioned by a stamped piece of paper, but of the personhood that could be derived from a document.
The enormous resonance of the Soviet passport meant that it became a familiar symbol. Schoolchildren learned by heart Mayakovsky’s boastful celebration of the glories of the Soviet passport, concluding in the ringing lines:
Read this and envy me –
I am a citizen of the Soviet Union!
Mayakovsky’s ‘passport’ was in fact a ‘service’-class foreign passport for travel outside the USSR, an item available to a narrow elite even in the USSR’s last decades, let alone in the isolationist 1930s. However, the schoolchildren who crammed these lines were expected to identify the object of celebration as the passports that they actually received at age sixteen – their state identity cards – and to feel pride in holding a document9 that would prove them a Soviet citizen among Soviet citizens. Just so, the ideal way of granting passports to sixteen-year-olds, as promoted by the Soviet media, advice brochures, and organisations such as the Communist Youth Movement (Komsomol) was a public ceremony at which young people publicly received their new identity documents from the hand of some Party or city dignitary.
It is no wonder that people acquired a sense of specialness verging on awe about the document in a physical sense. As Baiburin records, every element of the pasport, from signatures to the question of what to look like in your photograph, was surrounded by popular mystique. Unlike some present-day passport regimes (e.g. the United Kingdom), the USSR did not in fact explicitly regulate people’s appearance in their photographs; however, the citizenry firmly believed that there were rules, and behaved accordingly.
In other countries too, the national passport can and has easily become the object of sentimental fixation and symbolic resonance. From its inception in 1923, the Irish Free State passport was emblazoned in green, and carried a bilingual text (Pás – Passport, Saorstát Eireann – Irish Free State) and the image of a harp. More recently, the ‘dark blue’ (supposedly)10 cover of the British passport prior to 1988 (when dark red, machine readable passports were introduced) has become a symbol of ‘sovereignty’ in its own right, leading to the post-Brexit introduction of a cover whose hue does not resemble the shade of the original, and which is constructed to different dimensions – as well as being designed in France and manufactured in Poland. In the USSR, such patriotic associations were tied less directly to the colour of the cover (which changed at different points and only in the country’s final decade approximately echoed the scarlet of the Soviet flag), than to the emblem of hammer and sickle and the word паспорт itself, alongside, of course, the abbreviation of the country’s title, CCCP. The first Soviet passports included the word ‘passport’ not just in Russian, but in the languages of the different Soviet republics (a multilingual style also employed for cardinal numbers – one, two, three, five, etc. – on the obverse of rouble notes). The final, 1974, version of the passport was bilingual (Russian plus the official language of the given republic). Yet if this practice acknowledged linguistic and cultural difference, Baiburin also shows how the pasport was, among other things, a conduit of russification, both because of the pressures on holders to assimilate to Russian as the most ‘convenient’ ethnic group, and because they were required to supply a patronymic even when the particular republic or ethnic community was historically devoid of this linguistic and cultural tradition.
All the same, as The Soviet Passport also makes clear, the passport could have all kinds of meanings that official prescription had not anticipated. One particularly insouciant individual even remembers using his for various forms of private annotations – while also recalling how shocked the officials in the passport office were when they observed what he had done. The pasport was by no means only a means of stultification or oppression, though as shown by the heart-breaking letters written in the late 1930s by petitioners fearing they held ‘the wrong nationality’, it sometimes did have exactly that purpose and result. Who would have thought that a major advocate, in the post-war years, of relaxing the regulation of migrancy would have been Lavrenty Beria, the ruthless head of the Soviet secret police? As this unique and fascinating book records, the history of the passport offers an unexpected window on the Soviet (and indeed post-Soviet) world, laying bare a rich imaginative and experiential reality, as well as an at times depressing history of regimentation and bureaucratically-inspired frustration.
Catriona Kelly
Oxford, January 2021
Notes
1 1. An obvious reason behind this practice is that foreign passport holders form a minority, though an increasing one, of the US population: in 2007, the proportion stood at 27%, while in 2018 it was 42%, a figure significantly lower than in European countries, with an average of 60%, and the UK, at 73% in 2018.
2 2. There were, of course, many other arguments around the ID cards, particularly data privacy versus better access to information (Paul Beynon-Davies, ‘The UK national identity card’, Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases, Vol. 1, 2011, pp. 12–21), and, of course, opinion is not unified on the issue, but all the same, the contrast between the British (and more specifically English) firm belief in the right to move around without ID checks within the country seems to be the established counterpart to the conviction that impermeable borders are vital in terms of keeping out those who live outside it – a major motivating force in the campaign for Brexit.
3 3. This is not a question of a simplistic opposition between ‘Soviet’ (or ‘post-Soviet’, or ‘Russian’) and ‘Western’ prescriptions and realities. As has often been pointed out by specialists on the history of the identity document (see, e.g., Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds.), Documenting Individual Identity…), many European countries, notably France and Germany, also have a lengthy history of national identity cards that share some of the functions of the pasport.
4 4. Colin Thubron, In Siberia, p. 132.
5 5. As the Russian scholar Aleksandr Dmitriev has shown, these associations were so pervasive that the centenary of the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1961 provoked as much embarrassment and confusion as celebration. ‘Posle osvobozhdeniya: “Velikie reformy” i khrushchevskaya ottepel’ v perspektive russkoi istoricheskoi mysli’ [After Emancipation: The “Great Reforms” and the Khrushchev Thaw in the Perspective of Russian Historical Thought], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie no. 142 (2016),