The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

or in principle any object that characterizes a particular era, such as objects in a museum – and not only in a museum). Such evidence from the past is given the status of ‘a document’, although, strictly speaking, in such circumstances the word ‘document’ has only a metaphorical significance. Nowadays the understanding of what constitutes ‘a document’ is used as widely as possible; the tiniest piece of information can be considered as such.⁶

      Documents have both a specific and at the same time a rather vague status, both in daily life and in academic study. For example, for historians, documents (if we mean written sources) traditionally make up the bulk of their material; but beyond that there are usually texts that originally were not created as documents. The status of ‘documents’ was given to them artificially later as ‘testimony to the past’. Of course, actual documents come into the category of sources, but in the overall mass of evidence they take up a rather insignificant place. Incidentally, in time these ‘documents’ in the widest sense take on the status of ‘genuine’ documents, while real documents lose this status as their shelf-life runs out; yet they remain documents in the wider sense.

Researchers who use documents often consider them to be bearers of objective information about the past. This is helped by the documents’ anonymity. Frequently no author is cited. Nevertheless, any document, even if it comes from the authorities, is always the result of the overlapping interests of various subjects, with different views on the reality it relates to and which is produced by it. As Yury Tynyanov wrote, ‘documents lie, just as people do’.⁷ So the question of authorship is relevant for documents, too. There are always specific ‘authors’ of texts hidden behind anonymous definitions such as ‘the authorities’, ‘state procedures’ and so on. But as a rule, they remain unknown.

      Furthermore, one way or another a document takes into account the point of view of the recipient. Even if the recipient’s position is completely ignored, an imaginary dialogue is created with them. And the recipient is not only the passport holder, but also those who will read it. This is especially significant for the passport, because a whole host of factors – economic, political and others – played a part in its development, as did various administrative levels and departments. So did the recipients themselves, as I shall try to show.

      Documents are traditionally studied in such applied disciplines as source studies and archive methodologies. However, there are matters beyond the boundaries of such studies which both produce and use documents, involving people as well as social and state institutions. The anthropological significance of documents is of no interest to these disciplines. There is a wide circle of social phenomena born out of the very functionality of these documents which has hardly been researched at all. This includes the cultural significance that is given to these documents, as well as the specific relations and practices that have come about by their creation and use.⁸

      In recent times this has started to change. Evidence of this is the project The Status of the Document in Contemporary Culture: Theoretical Problems and Russian Practice, under the guidance of Irina Kaspe. The project’s most significant result was the collective work, The Status of the Document: the Definitive Paper or an Alien Certificate (Moscow, 2013). This was perhaps the first time (at least in the Russian academic tradition) that the question of what ‘the document’ is had been thoroughly examined. This was inspired not just by the appearance of electronic documents, which meant that traditional methods had to be examined in a completely different way (as had happened, for example, in sociological research),⁹ but also a growing dissatisfaction with the way in which documents of various origins were studied.

Articles in this project contain interesting ideas and thoughts on the role of the document and the peculiarities of the way in which it functions in different cultural contexts, and these ideas will be explored in the relevant sections of this book. Here, perhaps, it is worth noting that Kaspe makes a useful distinction between the Russian terms dokumental’noye and dokumentnoye.¹⁰ Indeed, the term dokumental’noye (especially in such combinations as dokumental’nyi zhanr ‘the documentary genre’ or dokumental’nyi diskurs ‘the documentary discourse’) is linked to a particular tradition in research in which there is no significant difference between documents in the broad understanding (in The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘something written, inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or information upon any subject, as a manuscript, title-deed, tomb-stone, coin, picture, etc.’) or the narrow one (written documents produced for a given official purpose of the kind normally to be found in archives). We shall be dealing here with the second category, which I shall term the ‘documental’;¹¹ that is, texts that have been specifically created in order to preserve and represent information which, for one reason or another, falls into the category of ‘reliable’. The type and purpose of such documents can be described by words such as ‘attest’, ‘assure’, ‘affirm’, ‘certify’ and ‘identify’. They have a particular period of validity and certain specific features and properties. In common usage, actual documents and documents in the wider sense are grouped in the single category of the ‘documentary’. For the purposes of my discussion here, I shall disaggregate the material into two categories, and will concern myself with the ‘documental’, leaving the broader term ‘documentary’ to analysts for whom the distinction between different types of document has little significance.

      Even if we do not understand too well what the different sorts of documents are, what is important is they are easy to recognize. They make up a specific body of texts, or, to be more precise, a class of papers. Their quality and the very paper on which they were printed was so significant that documents frequently came to be referred to as ‘papers’. And it was this paper quality which led to them being described both respectfully and in a pejorative fashion.¹² Just as in the post-Soviet period we could immediately recognize advertising fliers that were pushed through our letter boxes, the document has long been instantly recognizable. It always has a certain look to it. Special forms and templates were devised for documents. (In Soviet times we knew them by their number: Form Number 1 was the main one, which a citizen would fill out in order to obtain a passport. This contained far more details about the person than the passport itself. Form Number 9 was needed to apply to register in a particular city, and so on.) This speaks about the limits of their contents, and about the fact that, by their very nature, documents were designed to be used in a narrow set of circumstances. They were instantly recognizable. It was not by chance that the templates for documents were the first texts to be laid out in printed form.¹³

      According to the Russian linguist, Sergei Gindin, there are two types of coherence in a text. One is internal or intrinsic, not requiring anything extratextual, while the other type of coherence depends on the relation to an external matrix or template and cannot be understood without relation to that.¹⁴ Like many other documents, the passport falls into the second category; but its layout has become so much a part of the consciousness of ‘the passport person’ that the basic details can be easily understood without referring to the template itself. Texts such as autobiographies written in the Soviet period bear witness to this: they give the sort of personal details found in passports, but with no reference to the actual passports themselves.

We are interested here in written texts. There is a different relationship to the written text than there is to the oral text. Until comparatively recently, the written document was regarded as an object which was endowed with magical powers.¹⁵ All the details of the document speak about its authority: the size and quality of the paper on which it is printed; the way in which it is protected; its properties; and so on. This all goes to create a particular aura for the document, which leaves one in no doubt that herein lies special, protected, information. Later on, when documents began to be printed, they were marked out by an indispensable group of handwritten details, such as a specific date, the person’s name, their own signature, and so forth. This combination of the printed and the handwritten can be seen as immediately demonstrating the formal nature of the document as well as the importance of the information contained therein. The printed part gives the standard information, which any similar document would have, while the handwritten entries are there to ensure its uniqueness. This dual nature determines the different attitudes