The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

out the christening, the wedding or the burial of the parishioner. The register of births included the following details: date of birth and christening; first name and surname; place of residence and religious denomination of the parents and godparents; and whether the birth was within or outside wedlock. Other religions, too, were ordered to keep registers: Lutherans from 1764; Catholics from 1826 (although in practice these had been kept from 1710); Muslims from 1828; Jews from 1835; Raskol’niki [schismatics, the Old Believers who split from the Orthodox Church at the time of the Church reforms in the seventeenth century – Tr.] from 1874; and Baptists from 1879. In practice, the registration of births, marriages and deaths of many of the minority ethnic groups of Siberia and Central Asia did not take place at all, even though the police and local administrations were legally responsible for this. In Turkestan, for example, the registers were supposed to be kept by the ‘people’s judges’, or mullahs. Up until 1905 the registers of the Raskol’niki and Orthodox sectarians and Evangelical Christians were handled by the police.³¹

      Entries in the registers (and later in civil registration) became important parts of the foundation on which the passport system and its use as a means of identification depended, because the details that were recorded here (particularly information about the birth) were the defining ones for identifying the individual. Proof of age was essential not only for establishing identity (it was something entered in the designation ‘identifying features’) but also for determining whether someone was eligible for military service.

Details about the place of residence seem at first glance to be incidental to the individual’s characteristics; but from the introduction of the passport (and not only the Russian passport) they become crucial, since the passport was issued only if it was essential to travel. It may appear, therefore, as if the passport might aid the population’s ability to move around; but in actual fact it worked the other way round, because it was never issued to all those who wanted one. The passport system was designed not so much for those who were given a passport, but rather for those who, for one reason or another, were not given one. A person who did not have a passport was automatically denied a number of rights; and chief among those was the right to travel freely. One of the fundamental purposes of the Russian passport system was to pin a person down to their place of residence by limiting the issuing of passports, thus controlling freedom of movement. Once the ‘place of permanent residence’ was enshrined in a legal category, a separate article was written into the ‘Decree on Passports’. For nobles, officials, honorary citizens and merchants, this was considered to be their place of service or business, and also the place where they owned property. For the lower middle classes and artisans, their place of permanent residence was the town, trading quarter or community where they were registered. For the peasantry, it was their rural community. Those who had no permanent place of residence were considered to be vagrants (runaways or the poor), against whom a constant battle was waged. Furthermore, details about the place of residence made it possible to check other information in the passport and establish whether or not it was true or false (in reality, this was only insofar as the accuracy of the latest entry in the register). The place of residence was automatically shown as an affiliation to the local community, such as the obshchina (see above, note 5).

      The first name and the place of residence became the basic method for marking a person out as an individual (and they still are), while the social estate that a person belonged to became an instrument of social categorization.³² A little later, religion and ethnicity would be added to the list. The social estate to which you belonged determined your rights. The divisions were: nobility, clergy, merchants, lower middle class and peasantry. It could be said that such categories were brought in as a means of ranking the different groups of the population, since they were based on the unequal status of these groups. The passport placed its owner into one of these groups, or created and strengthened new classifications (such as ‘ethnicity’; see chapter 5). For identification purposes the name and place of residence were sufficient; but the passport was never simply an identity document. From the very beginning it became one of the principal methods for strengthening the social structure.

Indicating a person’s social status (their title or rank and occupation) became one of the few essential details in identification documents; it was as important as their name. Title became in its own way an ‘inherent’ characteristic of a person (it indicated their ‘breeding’). It was fixed for all time and was determined by their origins – who their parents were and their ancestors before that. It was only when it began to be possible to move to another social estate that the attitude to this characteristic began to change. (After Peter the Great’s time it became possible for people to move up the ranks of service. Change could come about also through education or being granted honorary citizenship.) Whichever way, the indication of a person’s status determined and confirmed the existing social stratification, or (as happened at later periods of Russian history) the social stratification that was being created.³³

      A significant step towards the creation and operation of the passport as an identity document was the inclusion of information about a person’s physical appearance in the list of essential details: the designation of identifying features. What had originally been written in the Legal Code of 1649 as a demand to describe ‘villeins by their features and identifying marks’ was made more detailed. For the ‘letters of passage’ issued in Peter’s reign, the instruction was that ‘the one who is being allowed to travel be described by height, face and without fail his identifying features’. In the ‘Regulations on Passports and Runaways’, published in 1832,³⁴ the following identifying features were listed: ‘age; height; colour of hair and eyebrows; colour of eyes; nose; mouth; chin; face; distinguishing features’. However, by the start of the twentieth century, the only details required in residents’ permits and passports were ‘height; hair colour; and distinguishing features’. It is curious that ‘colour of eyes’ had been removed from the list, even though it is impossible to change their colour, whilst hair colour can be changed. This shows again the imperfect logic behind the denomination of distinguishing features, and how the link between these and the referent (the passport holder) was at best tenuous. The emphasis had shifted to other identifying details, most notably the signature (see chapter 5).

      During Empress Elizabeth’s reign (1741–62) a detail was added to the passport template which at the time appeared to be simply a technicality: instead of the date being printed, it was written in by hand when the passport was received.³⁵ This introduced a characteristic of modern passports (and other documents): the combination of the printed and the handwritten, which widened the scope for the use of documents. It was one example of how the technical side of the passport’s function was still developing. In 1798 a decree of the Senate introduced templates for different types of passports depending on the length of their validity (one, two or three years);³⁶ and slightly before this (in the same year) it was announced that the validity of a passport could be extended.³⁷

All of these measures were designed for printed passports, but at the same time various handwritten forms continued to exist. Attempts had been made earlier to introduce printed passports (such as Catherine I’s Decree of 1 February 1726), but these did not produce the desired result. There were two main reasons for this: the printed templates were expensive, and they were difficult to produce. As a result, there were great problems trying to expand their use. In 1803, Tsar Alexander I once again addressed the issue of the multiple formats of passports. It was announced that merchants, members of the lower middle class and peasants would not only be issued with an identical type of passport but that it would definitely be a printed one.³⁸ Making printed passports compulsory was undoubtedly prompted by the need to reduce the number of forgeries, but clearly this was not the only reason. Bringing uniformity to official documents illustrated how much state bureaucracy had increased. The bureaucracy was gradually beginning to exert full control over the right to issue passports and, as a result, the establishment of a person’s identity.

      Under Empress Catherine II, passports were used as a means of controlling where settlers from European countries could live. After