The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

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In this information drought, another, unofficial, legal system sprang up. This came about because of the way in which Soviet citizens reacted to the demands that were being forced upon them to adapt to the new norms and models of behaviour. This second legal system (Legal System-2) developed through genuine and imagined dialogues with government officials at all levels. The hidden official law led to the creation of unofficial laws in situations where nothing was actually being demanded, but citizens guessed that some sort of official rules or norms existed. In such cases, as I shall try to show, the unofficial law was not complete or uniform for the whole population. It contained variations, which were worked out by particular groups (such as limitchiki or former spetsposelentsy).⁵⁹

      As a result of this, the passport system to some extent contained elements of these two laws in the way in which it functioned.

      If we look at the passport as a document, we can see in it the bureaucratic version of the person (‘the documented “I”’), thanks to which the person is given the right to exist in the eyes of the state. In many ways it was only thanks to the passport that the person became a member of society. At first glance, there was no alternative to this transformation: everyone was pressed into the same mould; however, within the framework of this mould there were gaps that were filled in by the unofficial law.

      The fundamental question that I have tried to answer is, how did the Soviet passport system operate in both its official and its unofficial variations (Legal System-1 and Legal System-2)? The way in which the prescribed identity was created and spread by the authorities will be emphasized; and also how it was accepted, assimilated and ‘corrected’ by the Soviet people. Such an approach to trying to understand the Soviet passport and the passport system, it seems to me, demands the investigation of a few more precise questions:

      1 How did the tradition come about in the pre-Soviet period of describing the person (the ‘passport portrait’)?

      2 What did the official Soviet ‘passport person’ look like (Legal System-1)?

      3 How did Soviet citizens relate to their official image and the rules of the passport system, and how did they adapt it to suit themselves (Legal System-2)?

      The three parts of this book are devoted to investigating these questions. To answer the first question, one has to examine the social history of the passport in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet Union, emphasizing how the institutions of power developed the passport portrait. It is important to note that the functioning of the passport is not the same as the establishment and maintenance of control, and at different times the passport system had different meanings. These issues will all be considered in the first part of this work.

The second part is devoted to the official bureaucratic view of the passport as a document, examining its contents: its designations, its properties and its design. Here I discuss the passport as a document: how it was created and improved according to the model for identification that was applied to make the official image of the Soviet person. This has never been examined previously; but it is essential to explain the evolution of the ideas of the official ‘authors’ of this document as to how they perceived the Soviet ‘passport person’.

      Finally, in the third part I look at the role that citizens themselves played in forming the passport rules. Using reminiscences, interviews and witness testimonies, I examine a number of ways in which the passport rules (the official methods for identification) were mastered, used and transformed into what they eventually became. To do this I looked at the unofficial norms and rules that were linked to the passport, its use in a variety of situations and the reinterpretation of its functions (Legal System-2).

      It should be said that this book gives only the most general picture of the Soviet passport system; indeed, not even a picture but merely a few sketches of it. A great deal is missing that would be needed for a complete description of the subject. Virtually no attention is paid to how passports were issued on the ground, notably in the so-called ethnic outposts. Different periods of the history of the Soviet passport are examined in varying levels of detail. The ways in which the passport was used are much more varied than I have described here. In reality, this book is no more than an outline of the subject of ‘the Soviet passport’.

9.

      In my research I have used both published and unpublished sources. Among the former are legal acts and documents which appear in the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire; Collected Statutes of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR); Collected Laws of the USSR; Bulletins of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs [USSR NKVD – the name of the Soviet secret police from 1934 to 1946, later to be called the KGB – Tr.]; collections of documents on the history of the Main Directorate of Labour Camps [GULAG – the system of Soviet labour camps, which was hugely expanded under Stalin – Tr.]; Soviet militia (police) reports; and reports from the higher bodies of the Communist Party and state apparatus. I used also Soviet publications from the 1930s to the 1990s (among others the newspapers Pravda, Izvestiya, Trud and Smena) as well as memoirs relating to various periods of Soviet history. In order to examine ‘the passport myth’, I needed also to look at fictional examples where necessary. Sections which deal with the history of the Soviet passport system and the completion of passport details are based principally on archive materials (mostly from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)), taking into account published sources and research on Soviet history.

In order to examine how the passport was used, I relied heavily on the interviews carried out between 2007 and 2011 which were conducted as part of the project National Identity in Russia from 1961: Traditions and Deterritorialisation (made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), under the leadership of Professor Catriona Kelly). These interviews, it should be noted, cannot be regarded as wholly reliable or accurate witness statements, even though they were recorded with people who had life experience of the Soviet passport. They are better described as reminiscences and, as with all reminiscences, they inevitably alter the past (for information about the interviews, see the Appendix).

Notes

      1 1. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, p. 306.

      2 2. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “identity”’.

      3 3. There is a huge body of research available about the passports of various countries. Many of these works will be referred to in the appropriate sections of this book. Here I should like to indicate just a few authors, whose works appear in the Bibliography: John Torpey, Martin Lloyd, Mark B. Salter, Craig Robertson, Philip Frankel, Leo Lucassen and Yelena Breus.

      4 4. This situation still pertains to the modern Russian passport. In fact, the areas in which the passport is used have grown significantly in the post-Soviet period. It is now compulsory to produce the passport not just when purchasing air tickets but even for train journeys, too. It has to be shown for all bank transactions, and so on. Not surprisingly, those who remember life in Soviet times now think that, ‘in the old days we were hardly ever asked to show our passport’.

      5 5. Bol’shoi yuridichesky slovar’ (The Great Dictionary of Legal Terminology), V.N. Dodonov and others.

      6 6. Amongst the reasons for the much wider understanding today of what a document is, it is worth pointing out its use in the terminology of Internet resources, whereby any text (including ‘empty’ texts) is referred to as ‘a document’, although the original meaning of СКАЧАТЬ