The Soviet Passport. Albert Baiburin
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Название: The Soviet Passport

Автор: Albert Baiburin

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия:

isbn: 9781509543205

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?’

      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 their place of residence (this is the reason why political dissidents frequently referred to the political order as a ‘serf system’).5 Denial of passport-holding rights, as we discover, also kept in place other important sections of the population, for instance, former political prisoners or common criminals and their immediate families, and those who were considered actual or potential subversives. In border areas, on the other hand, you could not reside without an internal passport. Some were filtered out by the document and others filtered in. The pasport was without doubt a major factor in the efficient running of the police state.6

      The enormous resonance of the Soviet passport meant that it became a familiar symbol. Schoolchildren learned by heart Mayakovsky’s boastful celebration of the glories of the Soviet passport, concluding in the ringing lines:

      Read this and envy me –

      I am a citizen of the Soviet Union!

      Mayakovsky’s ‘passport’ was in fact a ‘service’-class foreign passport for travel outside the USSR, an item available to a narrow elite even in the USSR’s last decades, let alone in the isolationist 1930s. However, the schoolchildren who crammed these lines were expected to identify the object of celebration as the passports that they actually received at age sixteen – their state identity cards – and to feel pride in holding a document9 that would prove them a Soviet citizen among Soviet citizens. Just so, the ideal way of granting passports to sixteen-year-olds, as promoted by the Soviet media, advice brochures, and organisations such as the Communist Youth Movement (Komsomol) was a public ceremony at which young people publicly received their new identity documents from the hand of some Party or city dignitary.

      It is no wonder that people acquired a sense of specialness verging on awe about the document in a physical sense. As Baiburin records, every element of the pasport, from signatures to the question of what to look like in your photograph, was surrounded by popular mystique. Unlike some present-day passport regimes (e.g. the United Kingdom), the USSR did not in fact explicitly regulate people’s appearance in their photographs; however, the citizenry firmly believed that there were rules, and behaved accordingly.

      All the same, as The Soviet Passport also makes clear, the passport could have all kinds of meanings that official prescription had not anticipated. One particularly insouciant individual even remembers using his for various forms of private annotations – while also recalling how shocked the officials in the passport office were when they observed what he had done. The pasport was by no means only a means of stultification or oppression, though as shown by the heart-breaking letters written in the late 1930s by petitioners fearing they held ‘the wrong nationality’, it sometimes did have exactly that purpose and result. Who would have thought that a major advocate, in the post-war years, of relaxing the regulation of migrancy would have been Lavrenty Beria, the ruthless head of the Soviet secret police? As this unique and fascinating book records, the history of the passport offers an unexpected window on the Soviet (and indeed post-Soviet) world, laying bare a rich imaginative and experiential reality, as well as an at times depressing history of regimentation and bureaucratically-inspired frustration.

      Catriona Kelly

      Oxford, January 2021