The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

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СКАЧАТЬ persistent problems needed to be solved, such as how to maintain trust in an ever-widening circle of contact with strangers. This new situation demanded new forms of responsibility – not only collective, but individual, too. It follows that the need for identification became more urgent, which was not possible without some form of documentation. What’s more, it became important somehow to define trust: what should be taken not simply in good faith but can be verified by something or someone. One of the reasons why documents became so widespread was the lack of trustworthy information in relations between elements in society.

      The widespread use of documents demonstrates that, along with the practice of ‘horizontal’ trust, various forms of ‘vertical’ trust took hold, too. If the former operate between ordinary members of society, the latter should govern the relationship between a person and the institutions of the state as well as interactions with ‘others’. I deliberately wrote ‘should’. In Russian circumstances these types of constructions did not always work, as constantly noted in literary and other sources, and in particular when it came to documents. The passport became mainly the embodiment of a lack of trust towards the citizen. In his review of The Status of the Document (edited by Irina Kaspe), Dmitry Kalugin notes that in Russia the document,

      … from the very beginning was a hostile force, standing against the citizen and the whole world, as an iron law of coercion and an instrument of social training, having its own logic, unfamiliar to the person to whom it is supposed to relate. This determines the status of the document, not only in a bureaucratic sense but, in actual fact, existentially, setting the basic parameters both for life itself and for the way in which it is represented.²⁶

      One might assume that trust was incompatible with the Soviet policy of coercion; but, as recent research has shown, this was not in fact the case. In Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s times, various types of trust did exist, based on both personal relations (through such phenomena as personal contact and blat²⁷) and accepted rules in the demimonde (for example, in criminal circles). Even in the power structures relations could develop based on trust, supported by institutional practices, kompromat, and so on.²⁸ The passport and similar documents which many people viewed suspiciously because they came from the authorities, nevertheless provided an essential level of trust in contacts between the citizen and officialdom, and sometimes even in informal contacts.

6.

      From a theoretical point of view, a number of concepts have real significance for my work. First of all, these might include the ideas initiated by Max Weber around the study of bureaucratic forms of government,²⁹ which have since been widely influential. The thoughts of Pierre Bourdieu are also of particular importance, and especially his work about the field of bureaucracy, in which he says that,

      Beyond the intuitive half-understanding that springs from our familiarity with the finished state, one must try to reconstruct the deep sense of the series of infinitesimal and yet all equally decisive inventions – the bureau, signature, stamp, decree of appointment, certificate, register, circular, and so on – that led to the establishment of a properly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in this sense, has all the appearances of ‘rationality’ even as it is invested with the most mysterious properties of magical efficacy.³⁰

      Relating this to the certification of a person, this ‘mysterious efficacy’ leads, as well as everything else, to the formation of individual identity in a unified system; yet another oxymoron typical of bureaucratic logic.

      The bureaucratization of society is one of the most notable cultural developments in the modern era.³¹ Using documents, state institutions placed various aspects of life under a special regime. These were mainly those connected to the person and their place in time and space. As mentioned above, the authorities consider such a regime essential in order to strengthen what they regard as most important when it comes to trust. But not only for this. When something needs to be altered, they believe, this should be conveyed in the official language of the document. This means that the document itself becomes a template for the changes that the state wants. This fits Bourdieu’s and Michel Foucault’s ideas about the state wanting to exert maximum control not only over a person, but symbolically over the way he or she defines themselves, calls themselves, or classifies themselves.³² What’s more, as Anthony Giddens writes, in contemporary societies a similar level of control is exercised mainly with the aid of documentation.³³

In their work, Beyond ‘Identity’, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper characterize the state as one of the most important agents for identification and categorization, having in mind ‘the formalized, codified, objectified systems of categorization developed by powerful, authoritative institutions’.³⁴ This includes identification documents, which classify people by social origin, ethnicity, sex, age and other factors. Of course, it is not only state bodies that use such categories for classification. Any organization (school, prison, production facility) has its own categories; but it is only the state that devotes the resources to ensuring that its system of classification is the same in all of its organizational structures.³⁵

      When bureaucracy takes over the life of society one result is the creation of a person’s documented double. Rom Harré came up with the concept of ‘file-selves’, a type of dossier containing documents about a particular person.³⁶ This dossier could contain a whole variety of documents: a personal history, references, different types of certificates and so on. Each of them carries specific information about some or other aspect of the person; thus one could say that the real ‘I’ is made up of a multitude of documented variants. Sheila Fitzpatrick maintains that, ‘The making of files was a basic project of the Soviet state from its early years.’³⁷ In the Russian translation of her book, Tear Off the Masks!, the concept of ‘fileselves’ is translated as ‘the documented “I”’, which can be found in the personal dossiers of various organizations and institutions, in files containing kompromat, and in internal passports. In contrast to Harré, who believed that the documented ‘I’ usually did not depend on the person themselves, Fitzpatrick highlights the way in which the Soviet dossier was brought together: its contents could be altered not only by those who compiled the dossier or those who held it, but also by the person whose dossier it was. They could do this by such methods as giving false information about themselves, changing their personal history, or altering the details about themselves in their passport. Furthermore, they had the possibility to challenge the information contained in official documents. The documented ‘I’ did this with dynamic effect, by submitting a wide variety of alterations. The Soviet passport could probably be seen as a special example of the documented ‘I’, with which every owner (or reader) could associate.

      Examining a document such as a passport involves looking at questions of the individual person, and at the way in which the authorities tried to create the image of the Soviet person by allocating what the state considered to be essential characteristics. A significant amount of research has already been conducted in this conceptual field. For a long time the prevailing view was that in the Soviet era the personality was simply suppressed; but now fresh approaches to the question have suggested there were positive effects from the ‘cultural construction’ of the Soviet person. Jochen Hellbeck considers the cultural policy of the Soviet authorities as ‘a project to transform imperfect human beings into universal socialized subjects’.³⁸ Using as his basic source the diaries of Communist Party members who actively participated in collectivization, he insists that revolutionary practices had a productive effect on the consciousness and feelings of the Soviet people.³⁹ Hellbeck’s position, which goes against the accepted one-sided view of the personality in a totalitarian society, is vital to future investigation in this area. It is worth pointing out that this concept maintains that the person is not simply someone mechanically carrying out ideological orders, but a subject who is capable of considering and altering them, and adapting them to his own wishes.

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