The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

AMM– Archive of the International ‘Memorial’ Association (Arkhiv Mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva ‘Memorial’).ASSR– Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; as well as the individual republics within the USSR, there were also ASSRs which had many of the same rights as the SSRs except the right to secede from the Union. In practice, no SSR had this right anyway.ATsIYeU– Archive of the Judaica Centre of the European University of St Petersburg (Arkhiv Tsentra Iudaiki Yevropeiskogo universityeta).CPSU– Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya partiya Sovietskogo Soyuza), the name, from 1952, of the party which ruled the USSR.GARF– State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvenny arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii).KGB– Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti); the last name of the Soviet era for the secret police, initially established by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the Cheka.KhPZ– Kharkov Steam Engine Building Plant (Khar’kovsky parovozostroitel’ny zavod).MTS– Machine Tractor Station (Mashino-traktornaya stantsiya).MVD– Interior Ministry (Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del).NEP– The New Economic Policy introduced in the 1920s, which allowed a certain amount of free market capitalism in order to help the economy recover from the ravages of the Civil War. Those who profited most were nicknamed NEPmen and were refused passports when the passport system was introduced in 1932.NKID– People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs; the original title of what would become the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.NKVD– People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs; in the early years of the Soviet state, the NKVD RSFSR (for the Russian Republic) was responsible for policing, but not the secret police, which was under the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VeCheKa), often abridged to Cheka. The NKVD RSFSR was disbanded in 1930. But in 1934 the USSR NKVD was formed, and the secret police came under its remit. AlsoUNKVD– the Directorate (Upravleniye) of the NKVD.OGPU– The Unified State Political Directorate (Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye), the title of the Soviet secret police from 1923 (before which it was the Cheka) to 1934, when it was re-named the USSR NKVD. The next notable name change came in 1953, when it became the KGB.OVIR- The Department of Visas and Registration (Otdel viz i registratsii), the office where many Russian documents are issued.PSZ– Complete Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoye sobraniye zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii).RCP(B)– Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks); ‘Bolshevik’ (meaning majority) had come from the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party into two factions, Bolshevik and Menshevik, in 1903. In 1925 the Party was renamed the All-Union Communist Party, and in 1952 it became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).RGASPI– Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiisky gosudarstvenny arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii).RSFSR– Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic; the official name of Russia within the USSR, until the collapse of the country at the end of 1991.SNK– Sovnarkom, or Council of People’s Commissars; the name of the government of the USSR from 1923 to 1946.SU RSFSR– Collected Statutes of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the RSFSR (Sobraniye uzakonenii raboche-krestyanskogo pravitelstva RSFSR).SZ SSSR– Collected Laws and Instructions of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the USSR (Sobraniye zakonov i rasporyazhenii raboche-krestyanskogo pravitelstva SSSR).TsGA– Central State Archive (Tsentral’ny gosudarstvenny arkhiv), St Petersburg.TsGAIPD– Central State Archive for Historical and Political Documents of St Petersburg (Tsentral’ny gosudarstvenny arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov Sankt-Peterburga).TsGAKFFD– Central State Archive of Cinematographic and Photographic Documents (Tsentral’ny gosudarstvenny arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov) in St Petersburg.TsIK– Central Executive Committee of the USSR (Tsentral’ny ispolnitel’ny komitet SSSR).UNKVD– see NKVD.VAPRF– Bulletin of the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii).VKP(b)– All-Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) (Vsyerossiiskaya Kommunisticheskaya partiya (bol’shevikov)), the name of the ruling party from the time of the October Revolution of 1917 until it became the CPSU (see above) in 1952.VTsIK– All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Vsyerossiisky Tsentral’ny ispolnitel’ny komitet SSSR); the highest legislative and administrative body of the RSFSR from 1917 to 1937.ZAGS– Russian term for a registry office (otdel zapisi aktov grazhdanskogo sostoyaniya).ZATO– Closed Territorial-Administrative Formations (Zakritiye Territorial’no-Administrativniye Obrazovaniya); ‘closed’ towns and cities; only those who lived there were allowed to enter.

Foreword

       ‘Remove the document – and you remove the man’

      In the English-speaking world, the word ‘passport’ signifies a document that permits free passage beyond the boundaries of the state where the holder resides. The concept is distinct from that of an identity document (ID), which demonstrates to the satisfaction of officials within a person’s home country that they actually are who they claim to be. A passport may sometimes be used in the latter capacity, but does not have to be – in the US in particular, a driving licence is the regular form of ID.¹ In Britain, perhaps partly because the right to roam is seen as an essential freedom (the history runs from protests against enclosure in the eighteenth century through the foundation of the Ramblers’ Association in 1935 to campaigns for access to private landholdings and community buyouts in the 2020s), and because of ingrained notions of personal privacy as sacrosanct, the imposition of a unified state ID system has met fierce resistance. In 2004, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett’s plan to introduce compulsory identity cards provoked uproar, and by 2010, the plan had been scrapped.² It has not been revived.

      The resistance to generalized ID means, in turn, that English-speaking observers are by and large peculiarly ill-equipped to understand political and social cultures such as Russia and the USSR, in which the use of identity documents is elaborately institutionalized, and forms an embedded element of everyday practices.³ In a travelogue about a visit to the former USSR, Colin Thubron recorded a meeting with Stepan, an elderly man from the Evenk people (a former hunter-gatherer community in Eastern Siberia). Stepan was Thubron’s neighbour in the local cottage hospital while recovering from being burned during a fire at his house. He described how suddenly the fire had happened:

      ‘I had time to run in once, before it was too late. Only once.’

      What had he carried out, I wondered, in those few seconds? Had he salvaged a few hoarded roubles, a precious garment, a sentimental photograph? ‘What did you save?’

I strained to catch his voice. It came tiny, self-satisfied. ‘My passport.’

      He pulled it from his jacket as if to be sure it remained. […] It was a sensible choice to retrieve, I knew; but I felt his degradation. His hand was trembling, until I held it in mine. And I realised I was angry: angry that even into this remote life Moscow had intruded its ossifying order, grounding and claiming him. Without his passport he could not move, did not live. He had risked fire for it.⁴

      To the outsider’s gaze, the situation was simply ‘degradation’, the symptoms of an ‘ossifying order’. Yet, as even Thubron noticed, the man’s voice was ‘self-satisfied’. For Stepan, the ownership of his pasport (the Russian spelling) was not a source of humiliation, but an object of pride.

      It is the central ambiguity of a document that was at once a weapon of state control and an instrument for the creation of identities, and even for self-assertion, that lies at the centre of Albert Baiburin’s history of the Soviet ‘internal passport’, or state identity card. As the intricate and sophisticated discussion in the book shows, the Soviet document, especially in the Stalin era, acted as a very real obstacle to freedom of movement. Large categories of the population, particularly in the Soviet countryside, were migrationally disenfranchised, to all intents and purposes tied to