The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin

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1 The Formation of ‘the Passport Portrait’ in Russia

      Historically, the passport has had two fundamental purposes. The first is linked to the rise and spread of documents, which allow the bearer to cross the borders of a particular territory. The second is the creation and use of documents intended to identify the bearer. These two purposes come together in the modern passport. In the first instance, the passport’s history is directly linked with the history of the foundation of the state, and specifically with its territorial definition; the very understanding of the concept of a border becomes relevant when there is some sort of regulation for traversing it. The equivalent of a passport as a permit (or a petition) to cross a border can be found in the earliest sources.¹ The fundamental prerequisite for the appearance and the functioning of such documents (as well as the establishment of the frontiers of the early states), seems to be linked, firstly, to rulers establishing control over the crossing of their territory by ‘aliens’; and secondly, to the relatively high level of the use of written texts.

      An important point to bear in mind at the outset is what the term ‘passport’ means to different people. Someone brought up in the Western world immediately associates the word with foreign travel. As we shall see, this was not always the case; but since the late nineteenth century, in the West ‘passport’ has meant only a document allowing the bearer to travel to other countries. This is not the case in Russia. To this day, most Russians associate ‘the passport’ with the identity document which all Russian citizens aged fourteen and over must have. (Until 1997 internal passports were issued only from the age of sixteen.) Only about 20 per cent of Russians today have a passport for foreign travel. Hence, when I call chapter 2 ‘Fifteen Passport-less Years’, I am referring to the lack of an internal passport. Russians who travelled abroad in the early years of the Soviet Union still needed to have a passport for this purpose.

In this chapter I shall be dealing mainly with the purpose of ‘identification’; and not with the passport in general but specifically with the Russian passport (up to the establishment of the Soviet Union). We are talking here about the formation of the official portrait – a visualization of how the person was regarded by the state authorities. However, before going into details, I shall say a few words about the European passport tradition, which, of course, affected developments in Russia.

      In the countries of Europe, the increase in the use of passports is part of the overall picture of the early stages of the transition from pre-modern society to the modern, which took place in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.² This transition was marked by the drive to consider a person as an individual and to rationalize his behaviour; by the spread of written communication, costing and planning; and by the creation of indirect forms of control by the state towards its subjects. The passport (or more precisely, its early equivalent) was used both in its ‘direct’ meaning (to pass through a port or through various borders), and also as a way of dealing with vagabonds, the poor and criminals. The increase in the use of passports in Germany in the fifteenth century, and later in other European countries, was connected not only to the growth of trade links and the number of pilgrims, but also with the associated rise in social activity brought about by the increase in the numbers of tramps and people on the run. The passport became the privilege of those who did not wish to be considered as tramps. It performed a defensive function as a kind of certificate of protection. Such a document usually declared that its bearer belonged under the protection of their sovereign (as the modern British passport still does). The invention of the printing-press in the middle of the fifteenth century allowed for the production of standardized documents, and at that time it was virtually impossible to make forgeries.

      The use of documents as a means of identifying the bearer comes much later. According to Valentin Groebner, even in the sixteenth century in European countries external signs, perhaps only tangential to the bearer, were still used for this purpose.³ These included, for example, signs of a man’s social status, such as particular details of the clothes of an ambassador or a courier. But such signs could not reliably guarantee the identity of the bearer. The same could be said about letters of recommendation, because as a rule the person presenting the letter was not described in it, and even a mention of their name was no defence against a possible substitution.

      It seemed that the only reliable way to solve the problem of identification would be a description of a person’s individual external characteristics. And yet right up until the modern era, the most noticeable element of a person was considered to be their clothing; what one might call their ‘individuality’, if noted at all, concerned their occupation, rather than any particularities of their face or body.⁴ It is no coincidence that the portrait is among the later genres of painting.

      Such an impersonal understanding of the individual was typical in Russia also. Perhaps in this sense linguistic details are especially significant. Relevant here is this quotation from Viktor Vinogradov’s unfinished СКАЧАТЬ