The passport regime in the USSR for almost half a century reduced the peasants to the status of serfs, and made the rest of the citizens registered and controlled cogs in a huge state machine. When the proletarian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote the famous poem about the Soviet passport in 1929, in fact, citizens of the USSR did not have any passports. They appeared later and not at all ...
"Red-skinned passport", as the poet called this document, was only for diplomats traveling abroad. As an internal identity card in those days, they used any certificates, up to those issued by house managements.
The first passports began to be received by mere mortals in 1933, and even then only in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kyiv and some other large administrative and industrial centers of the country.
As stated in the decree of the government, the Council of People's Commissars (Council of People's Commissars) of the USSR, passportization was started in order to "cleanse these populated areas from hiding kulak, criminal and other antisocial elements."
The experience was appreciated positively, and in the subsequent pre-war years, residents of small and large cities of the Land of Soviets received passports. But the inhabitants of the villages and villages of the vast homeland until the mid-1970s lived without the main document of a citizen.
The fact that more than 60 million adults, even half a century after the formation of the Union, could not get Mayakovsky's pride out of wide trousers was a de facto recognition that under developed socialism a huge mass of people lived under serfdom. The absence of a passport meant that a person could not arbitrarily move to the city, without the approval of the collective farm authorities had no right to get a higher education, change their occupation, and even more so, place of residence.
Savvy peasants found all sorts of loopholes to get a passport as a small ticket to a big life.
“Where were they to go?” says Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1953-1964, who introduced democratic changes to the passport system. “Peasants went to the city en masse because they could survive there.”
However, in the cities, the owners of the "hammer and sickle" enjoyed very limited freedom. The passport, with its obligatory registration and other attributes of socialism, bound the population hand and foot.
Serfs of the 20th century
In the year when Mayakovsky poured out in verses about the Soviet passport, total collectivization was declared in the USSR. The process demanded that millions of citizens be driven into collective farms and kept there by any administrative means. In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, that is, the townspeople from the villagers, in December 1932, the Council of People's Commissars issued an order to issue the first passports, which greatly simplified the selection of the population.
One of the goals of the government was the desire to relieve the cities and workers' settlements "from persons not connected with production and work in institutions and schools and not engaged in socially useful work." As a result, in the first four months of 1933, more than 700,000 people were evicted from Moscow and Leningrad.
Then the case was put on the conveyor, and by 1937 the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) reported to the Council of People's Commissars on the work done. The document, drawn up in the most terrible Soviet department, stated that within the 100-kilometer zone around Moscow, Leningrad and the 50-kilometer zone around Kyiv and Kharkov, passports were issued to everyone who was entitled to them.
“In other rural non-passportized areas, passports are issued only to the population who go to otkhodnichestvo [temporary work of peasants on the side, the term came from feudal Russia], to study, for treatment, and for other reasons,” the text of the report read.
This rule survived the NKVD, which after the war was transformed into the Ministry of Internal Affairs. For another 40 long years, until the mid-1970s, a peasant who wanted to go somewhere beyond the district center had to obtain permission from the village council, from the chairman of the collective farm, and the district authorities. The validity of this precious "dismissal" was no more than 30 days.
“Since then, the abbreviation VKP (b) [All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks] has been popularly deciphered by the people as “the second serfdom of the Bolsheviks,” ironically Yuri Pivovarov, director of the Russian Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences.
The parallel is appropriate. Sergei Khrushchev recalls that in Tsarist Russia they tried with all their might to keep the villagers on arable land even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
“Peasants were not given passports as people who had to remain under control, because if they were allowed to move around, they would undermine the economy,” Khrushchev explains the logic of the tsarist regime, adopted by the Bolsheviks and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
The Soviet passport of those times was a special document. Its owner, although he received some civil rights, was deprived of privacy. The passport indicated not only the surname, name, patronymic, but also nationality, residence permit, marital status, children, the presence of a passport and even social status - worker, employee, student, pensioner, dependent.
In 1939, the following explanation of such “openness” appeared in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Soviet legislation, unlike bourgeois legislation, never veiled the class essence of its passport system, using the latter in accordance with the conditions of the class struggle and with the tasks of the dictatorship of the working class at different stages building socialism.
Since 1940, unauthorized withdrawal from state, cooperative and public enterprises, the transfer from one enterprise or institution to another were strictly prohibited. At the same time, another line was added to the Soviet passport - the place of work. Even after Stalin's death in 1953, during the so-called Khrushchev thaw, the passport system remained as strict and uncompromising for several more years. One of the reasons is that poverty ravaged the villages. To move to a city where there is work and a modest salary has become an unrealizable dream of the impoverished peasantry.
"If they had given passports in 1953, the country would have begun to starve. Everyone would have fled [from the villages]," Khrushchev Jr. explains.
rural hour
With the growth of industrial production and, as a result, with the emergence of an acute shortage of workers at large enterprises, changes have been outlined in the lives of passportized and non-passported citizens.
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev abolished criminal responsibility for leaving work without permission. And the next year he softened the conditions for the departure of collective farmers outside the village. According to the plan of the Soviet leader, everyone, regardless of origin, could get a passport and go to raise virgin lands, revive industry, and conquer the taiga.
The lights of large and small towns attracted the Soviet youth with terrible force. There, unlike the villages, life was seething: it was possible to build a career, get a good education and relative freedom of movement.
To prevent the exodus of slightly released villagers from becoming massive, Nikolai Dudorov, who at that time held the post of Minister of Internal Affairs, issued an order: “Do not allow citizens from rural uncertified areas to be sent outside the region, territory, republic for seasonal work on the certificates of village councils or collective farms, ensuring the issuance of short-term passports to this category of citizens for the duration of the contracts they have concluded.
But it was already impossible to keep the human mass. From 1960 to 1964, during the last four years of Khrushchev's rule, 7 million people left the villages for the cities.
Kiev resident Nadezhda Kochan is one of them. Her path from the Chernihiv village with the remarkable name "Ilyich's Way" to the capital of Ukraine was very thorny. From the age of 15, she worked on a poultry farm, but dreamed of becoming a doctor. To do this, it was necessary to move to the city and get a passport. At the age of 17, a lively girl went to Nizhyn with her friend to enlist there in the Komsomol construction site. "I didn't care where they sent us. As long as they gave us a passport," she says.
Kochan was offered a work permit to Sakhalin. The Komsomol member, in a fit of happiness, exclaimed: "Yes!" But the sensible mother said, "No." As a result, by hook or by crook, the young collective farmer was accepted to the Kyiv plant of reinforced concrete structures, where her brother worked, who helped with employment. For another five long years, Kochan fought for the right to obtain a passport. The story ended lyrically - with marriage to a Kievan.
Valentina Bondarenko from the provincial town of Ordzhonikidze, in the Dnepropetrovsk region, whose youth fell on the 1960s, tells how in her native village of Velyka Lepetikha, in the Kherson region, the guys tried to gain a foothold "on the mainland" and get a document of a full citizen, settling after army at large construction sites of socialism, enrolling in the ranks of the Soviet militia.
Girls were looking for happiness, if not in a successful marriage, then in successful employment with high-ranking officials as a nanny, cook, housewife - anyone, if only with the right to obtain a passport.
Passportization of the whole country
The villagers dreamed of a passport as a symbol of freedom, although the townspeople - the happy owners of a document with a coat of arms on the cover - did not have it in full.
Although movement around the country was not regulated, the choice of a permanent place of residence was limited to registration. Life without a residence permit entailed a fine, and in case of relapse - corrective labor for up to one year. District police officers and even janitors had the right to control the population for registration.
On charges of violating the passport regime, criminal cases against dissidents were easily fabricated. For example, on July 22, 1968, the Soviet human rights activist Anatoly Marchenko wrote an open letter addressed to the Soviet and foreign mass media about the threat of an invasion of the USSR into Czechoslovakia. A month later, on August 21, just on the day the Soviet tanks entered Prague, Marchenko was sentenced to a year in prison, but not for his Czechoslovak demarche, but allegedly for violating the passport regime.
The passport system gave the state opportunities for total control over the population. And this function of hers came into conflict with the tsarist-Stalinist ideas of serfdom for the village.
In 1973, Interior Minister Nikolai Shchelokov realized that a third of the country's population - 62.6 million people over the age of 16 - were weakly controlled and almost unaccounted for as undocumented villagers. To remedy the situation, he sent proposals to the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee to change the system.
"It is assumed that the certification of rural residents will improve the organization of registration of the population and will contribute to a more successful identification of anti-social elements," the minister wrote in a memorandum. He was supported by all the leaders of the KGB and the prosecutor's office. And a year later, the last stage of the liquidation of the remnants of serfdom began.
The Council of Ministers of the USSR decided that from January 1976, the country should begin universal passportization. For the first time in the history of the state, workers and peasants were equalized in civil rights with the former. Another innovation - passports were no longer issued for a certain period, they became permanent.
Only by 1982, that is, nine years before the collapse of the Union, all its inhabitants who had reached the age of 16 became the owners of the document sung by Mayakovsky in the distant 1920s. Freedom and equality have finally come to the country, but only by Soviet standards.
“We are now saying that it is important to have a passport,” says Khrushchev son. “I live in Russia with a passport, but in America without a passport.” He says that they wanted to introduce passports in the United States, but the population opposed this, considering such a step as a restriction of freedom.
"In one society, a passport is an attribute of a full-fledged citizen, and in another it is the opposite," the descendant of the Soviet leader sums up.
Speaking of passports...
Has anyone already received an electronic identity card of a citizen of the Russian Federation?
Posted November 3, 2013
The FMS proposes to stop issuing internal passports by 2016. The Russian Migration Service has published a revised bill, according to which it is proposed to completely stop issuing internal passports as early as 2016. At the same time, plastic cards proving the identity of Russians can be launched in a pilot mode in a year and a half. According to the head of the Ministry of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov, this project will be the largest in the "electronic government".
The issuance of internal Russian passports may be completely stopped by the beginning of 2016, and the process of switching to ten-year plastic cards with chips and photographs in pilot mode may start in a year and a half. The relevant proposal was made by the Federal Migration Service (FMS) of Russia. "After the entry into force of this federal law, the issuance of a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation, proving the identity of a citizen of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Russian Federation, is terminated," the revised FMS bill reads, the text of which is quoted by RIA Novosti.
According to the bill, the issuance of internal passports in Russia should completely stop at the beginning of 2016. A pilot project for issuing a universal electronic card is planned to be launched as early as mid-2015, in the regions to be selected by the federal government. Previously issued passports will be valid until the date specified in them, but at the same time, plastic cards containing the personal identification data of Russians will become the main identity document.
December 27, 1932 Decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR No. 1917 "On the establishment of a unified passport system for the USSR and the mandatory registration of passports."
The internal Soviet passport was invented in the 16th year of Soviet power with deliberately criminal goals.
Few people remember this today.
At the end of December 1932, the USSR government issued a decree "On the establishment of a unified passport system for the USSR and the mandatory registration of passports." In January 1933, the passportization of the population and the measures arising from it began. And the events were serious. The country was divided into two parts - in some territories the passport system was introduced, in others it was not. The population was divided accordingly. Passports were received by "citizens of the USSR permanently residing in cities, workers' settlements, working in transport, in state farms and new buildings." Those who received passports were required to register within 24 hours.
In the first six months - from January to June 1933 - passportization was carried out with the obligatory registration of passports of Moscow, Leningrad (including a hundred-kilometer zone around them) and Kharkov (with a fifty-kilometer zone). These territories were declared regime. All other certificates and residence permits that existed before that lost their validity in the regime territories.
The year 1932, which ended with the introduction of passports, was terrible. The first five-year plan ended with catastrophic results for the population. The standard of living fell sharply. There is famine all over the country, not only in Ukraine, where millions die of starvation. Bread at an affordable price can only be obtained by cards, and only those who work have cards. Agriculture is deliberately destroyed by collectivization. Some peasants - dispossessed - are forcibly transported to the construction sites of the five-year plan. Others flee to the cities themselves, fleeing hunger. At the same time, the government sells grain abroad to finance the construction and purchase of equipment for military plants (one Stalingrad tractor, that is, tank, plant cost 40 million dollars paid to the Americans). The experiment on the use of prisoners in the construction of the Belomor Canal was successfully completed. The scale of the economic use of prisoners is growing, and their number is growing accordingly, but this method cannot solve all problems.
The government is faced with the task of stopping unplanned movements around the country of the population, which is considered solely as a labor force. First, it is necessary to secure in the countryside that part of the peasantry which is necessary for the production of foodstuffs. Secondly, to ensure the possibility of freely transferring surplus labor from the countryside and from the cities to the five-year plan construction sites located in remote places, where few people of their own free will wanted to go. Thirdly, the central cities should be cleared of socially unfavorable and useless elements. In general, it was necessary to provide the planning authorities with the opportunity to manipulate large masses of the population in order to solve economic problems. And for this it was necessary to divide the population into groups convenient for manipulation. This problem was solved by the introduction of the passport system.
***
The meaning of the internal passport went far beyond a simple identity card. Here is what was said about this in the strictly secret minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated November 15, 1932:
"... About the passport system and unloading cities from unnecessary elements.
In terms of unloading Moscow and Leningrad and other large urban centers of the USSR from superfluous institutions not connected with production and work, as well as from kulak, criminal and other antisocial elements hiding in the cities, it is necessary to recognize as necessary:
1. Introduce a unified passport system for the USSR with the abolition of all other types of certificates issued by this or that organization and which until now gave the right to registration in cities.
2. Organize, primarily in Moscow and Leningrad, an apparatus for recording and registering the population and regulating entry and exit.
At the same meeting of the Politburo, it was decided to organize a special commission, which was called just that - the PB Commission on the passport system and unloading cities from unnecessary elements. Chairman - V.A. Balitsky.
The passport indicated the social origin of the owner, for which a complex classification was developed - "worker", "collective farmer", "single-owner peasant", "employee", "student", "writer", "artist", "artist", "sculptor" ", "handicraftsman", "pensioner", "dependent", "without certain occupations". The passport was also marked with a job offer. Thus, representatives of the authorities had the opportunity to determine from the passport how to treat its owner.
The "nationality" column looked relatively innocent and rather meaningless in comparison with the "social status" column, especially since it was filled in from the words of the passport holder. But if the fate that the ethnic deportations that overwhelmed the USSR in the next few years were planned by Stalin even then, it is clear that its only meaning is repressive.
In January 1933, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR approved the "Instruction on the issuance of passports." In the secret section of the Instruction, restrictions were placed on the issuance of passports and residence permits in sensitive areas for the following groups: "not engaged in socially useful labor at work" (with the exception of disabled people and pensioners), "kulaks" and "dispossessed" "escaped" from the villages, even if they worked in enterprises or institutions, "defectors from abroad" who arrived from other places after January 1, 1931 "without an invitation to work", if they do not have certain occupations or often change jobs (are "flyers" ) or "were fired for disorganizing production." The last point covered those who fled the village before the start of "complete collectivization." In addition, “disenfranchised people” (people deprived of voting rights, in particular “kulaks” and nobles), private merchants, clergymen, former prisoners and exiles, as well as family members of all the listed groups of citizens, did not receive passports, and therefore registration.
The violinist of the Vakhtangov Theater Yuri Elagin recalls this time in this way: “Our family was ranked among alien and class-hostile elements for two reasons - as a family of former factory owners, i.e. capitalists and exploiters, and, secondly, because my father was an engineer with a pre-revolutionary education, i.e. belonged to a part of the Russian intelligentsia, highly suspicious and unreliable from the Soviet point of view.The first result of all this was that we were deprived of voting rights in the summer of 1929. We became "disenfranchised". "deprived" among Soviet citizens is a category of inferior citizens of the lowest rank. Their position in Soviet society ... resembled the position of Jews in Hitler's Germany. Public service and the profession of intellectual labor were closed to them. Higher education was not even a dream. the first candidates for concentration camps and prisons.In addition, in many details of everyday life they constantly felt humiliated the backbone of his social position. I remember what a heavy impression it made on me that shortly after we were deprived of voting rights, a fitter came to our apartment ... and took away our telephone set. “The disenfranchised are not supposed to have a telephone,” he said briefly and expressively ...
Yuri Yelagin himself was lucky. As an "artist", he was included in the Soviet elite, received a passport and retained his Moscow residence permit. But his father did not receive a passport in 1933, was expelled from Moscow, arrested and died in the camp two years later. According to Yelagin, about a million people were then deported from Moscow.
And here is the data from the secret certificate of the Office of the Workers 'and Peasants' Militia under the OGPU to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Molotov dated August 27, 1933 "On the results of passportization of the cities of Moscow and Leningrad." From January 1, 1932 to January 1, 1933 The population of Moscow increased by 528,300 people. and reached 3,663,300 people. The population of Leningrad increased during this time by 124,262 people (reached 2,360,777 people).
As a result of passportization, in the first 8 months of 1933 the population of Moscow decreased by 214,000 people, and that of Leningrad by 476,182 people. In Moscow, 65,904 people were denied passports. In Leningrad - 79,261 people. The reference clarifies that the given figures "do not take into account the declassed local and newcomer element and the kulaks who escaped from the village, who lived in an illegal position ..."
Among those who were refused - 41% arrived without an invitation to work and lived in Moscow for more than 2 years. "Dispossessed" - 20%. The rest are convicted, "disenfranchised", etc.
But not all Muscovites applied for a passport. The certificate states: “Citizens who received a notice of refusal to issue passports after the expiration of the 10-day period established by law were mainly removed from Moscow and Leningrad. However, this does not resolve the issue of removing passportless ones. When passportization was announced, they, knowing that they would definitely be denied a passport, did not appear at all at the passport checkpoints and took refuge in attics, basements, sheds, gardens, etc.
In order to successfully maintain the passport regime .... special passport offices have been organized, which have their own inspection and secret information in the houses. Passport offices carry out rounds, round-ups, inspections of house administrations, barracks for seasonal workers, places of accumulation of suspicious elements, illegal shelters ...
These operational measures detained unpassported:
in Moscow - 85,937 people.
in Leningrad - 4,766 people,
sent by way of extrajudicial repression to camps and labor settlements. The bulk of the detainees were fugitives from the Central Chernozem Region and Ukraine, who were engaged in theft and begging in Moscow.
It was only the beginning of the most terrible decade in the history of the USSR.
One of the means for monitoring suspicious persons, in the form of state security protection. By monitoring their own subjects and arriving foreigners, the authorities may require them to provide identification, as well as evidence that they are not a danger to the peace of the state. These requirements, easy to fulfill in the place of permanent residence of a person, become difficult for travelers, as well as for foreigners. To give them the opportunity to prove their identity, states introduce passports that indicate occupation, age, place of residence, facial features, as well as the duration, purpose and place of travel. At the same time, a passport is also a permission to leave a person; a prohibition is established to travel without taking a passport, as well as the obligation to register a passport at places of stay; strict police measures are introduced against travelers without valid passports. The collection of such regulations is called passport system.
The origin of the first links of accounting and documenting the population in Russia dates back to 945. And for the first time, the requirement of an identity card was legislatively fixed in the Council Code of 1649: “And if someone goes to another State without a letter of passage, arbitrariness for treason or some other bad thing, then look for him hard and execute him with death.” “And if it is announced in the investigation that someone who traveled to another State without a travel document, not for bad, but for trade, and punish him for that - beat him with a whip, so that it would be disrespectful to do so.”
May 28, 1717
It turns out that the system for issuing foreign passports was thought out and developed in our country almost 350 years ago. As for internal passports, their need was not felt for almost a whole century.
Under Peter I, the state's strict control over the movement of the population led to the creation of a passport system, i.e. as soon as they cut through the port window to Europe, they introduced passports in the meaning of documents for the right to pass through the gate, outpost, port (port).
Since 1719, by decree of Peter I, in connection with the introduction of recruitment duty and poll tax, the so-called "traveling letters" became mandatory, which since the beginning of the 17th century. used for domestic travel.
In 1724, in order to prevent peasants from evading the poll tax, special rules were established for them when they were absent from their place of residence (in fact, such special rules were in effect for peasants in Russia until the mid-1970s). It turned out to be a very revealing curiosity: the first passports in Russia were issued to the most disenfranchised members of society - serfs. In 1724, the tsar's "Poster on Poll and Protchem Collection" came out, which ordered everyone who wanted to leave their native village to work to receive a "feeding letter". It is no coincidence that this decree was issued at the very end of the reign of Peter I: the great reforms that affected society to the very bottom led to a sharp increase in mobility - the construction of factories, the growth of domestic trade required workers.
The passport system was supposed to ensure order and tranquility in the state, guarantee control over the payment of taxes, the fulfillment of military duty and, above all, over the movement of the population. Along with the police and tax functions, the passport from 1763 until the end of the 19th century. also had fiscal significance, i.e. was a means of collecting passport fees.
From the end of the 19th century Until 1917, the passport system in Russia was regulated by the law of 1897, according to which a passport was not required at the place of permanent residence. However, there were exceptions: for example, it was required to have passports in the capitals and border towns, in a number of areas workers of factories and plants were required to have passports. It was not necessary to have a passport when absent from the place of permanent residence within the county and beyond for no more than 50 miles and no more than 6 months, as well as for persons employed in rural work. A wife was recorded in a man's passport, and married women could receive separate passports only with the consent of their husbands. Unseparated members of peasant families, including adults, were issued a passport only with the consent of the owner of the peasant household.
As for the situation with foreign passports before 1917, the police kept it under constant control. So, in the first half of the XIX century. it was difficult to go abroad. Nevertheless, the nobles were allowed to leave for several years, representatives of other classes - for shorter periods. Foreign passports were expensive. An announcement about each person leaving was published three times in official newspapers, passports were issued only to those who had no "claims" from private individuals and official bodies.
Passport book 1902
After the victory of the Soviet power, the passport system was abolished, but the first attempt to restore it was soon made. In June 1919, mandatory "work books" were introduced, which, without being called that, were in fact passports. Metrics and various "mandates" were also used as identification documents:
The Far Eastern Republic (1920-1922) issued its own passports. For example, this passport is issued for only one year:
An identity card issued in Moscow in 1925, a place for a photograph is already provided, but it is not yet mandatory, which is expressly indicated:
The certificate is valid for only three years:
as can be seen from the number of stamps and records in those days, personal documents were treated more simply. Here is the "registration certificate" at the place of residence and the mark "sent to work", about retraining, etc.:
Passport issued in 1941, valid for 5 years
A real uniform passport system was introduced in the USSR by a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars on December 27, 1932, since industrialization required administrative accounting, control and regulation of the movement of the country's population from rural to industrial areas and back (the villagers did not have passports !). In addition, the introduction of the passport system was directly conditioned by the intensification of the class struggle, the need to protect large industrial and political centers, including socialist new buildings, from criminal elements. It should be noted that the famous "Poems about the Soviet Passport" by V. Mayakovsky, written in 1929, are dedicated to the international passport and have nothing to do with the passport system established in the early 1930s.
Photocards appeared in passports, more precisely, a place was provided for them, but in reality, photographs were pasted only if technically possible.
Passport 1940s pay attention to the entry in the column "social status" at the top right - "Slave":
Since that time, all citizens who have reached the age of 16 and permanently reside in cities, workers' settlements, urban-type settlements, new buildings, state farms, locations of machine and tractor stations (MTS), in certain areas of the Leningrad Region, throughout the Moscow area and other specially designated areas. Passports were issued with a mandatory registration at the place of residence (when changing the place of residence, it was necessary to obtain a temporary residence permit within 24 hours). In addition to registration, the social status of a citizen and his place of work were recorded in passports.
An indefinite passport of 1947 issued by L.I. Brezhnev:
Passport 1950s in the column of social status - "dependent" there was such an official term:
Here it should be specially noted that initially "prescribe", i.e. to register, it was the passport itself that had to be registered, and only then did the people's everyday sense of justice connect the concept of propiska exclusively with the personality of a person, although the "propiska" as before was carried out in the passport and, according to the law, belonged exclusively to this document, and the primary right to use housing was established by another document - warrant.
Military personnel did not receive passports (for them, these functions were performed at different times by Red Army books, military tickets, identity cards), as well as collective farmers, who were registered according to settled lists (for them, the functions of a passport were performed by one-time certificates signed by the chairman of the village council, collective farm, indicating the reasons and directions of movement - almost an exact copy of the ancient road charter). There were also numerous categories of "disenfranchised": exiled and "unreliable" and, as they said then, "disenfranchised" people. For various reasons, many were denied registration in "regime" and border towns.
An example of a certificate from the village council - "collective farmer's passport" 1944
Collective farmers began to slowly receive passports only during the "thaw", in the late 1950s. This process was completed only after the approval of the new "Regulations on the Passport" in 1972. At the same time, passports, whose alphanumeric codes meant that a person was in camps or was in captivity, in occupation, also became a thing of the past. Thus, in the mid-1970s, there was a complete equalization of the passport rights of all residents of the country. It was then that everyone, without exception, was allowed to have exactly the same passports.
During the period 1973-75. For the first time, passports were issued to all citizens of the country.
From 1997 to 2003, Russia carried out a general exchange of Soviet passports of the 1974 model for new, Russian ones. The passport is the main document proving the identity of a citizen on the territory of the Russian Federation, and is issued by the internal affairs authorities at the place of residence. Today, all citizens of Russia are required to have passports from the age of 14, when a citizen reaches 20 and 45 years old, the passport must be replaced. (The previous, Soviet, passport, as already mentioned, was issued at the age of 16 and was indefinite: new photographs of the passport holder were pasted into it when they reached 25 and 45 years old). Information about the identity of a citizen is entered in the passport: last name, first name, patronymic, gender, date and place of birth; notes are made on registration at the place of residence, relation to military service, on registration and divorce, on children, on the issuance of a foreign passport (general civil, diplomatic, service or sailor's passport), as well as on blood type and Rh factor (optional) . It should be noted that in the Russian passport there is no column "nationality", which was in the passport of a citizen of the USSR. Passports are made and issued according to a single model for the whole country in Russian. At the same time, the republics that are part of the Russian Federation may produce inserts for the passport with the text in the state languages of these republics.
Here, out of necessity, I found a birth certificate for my parents and noticed that they were issued passports (based on church records) in 1933, despite the age difference of three years, that is, the issuance of a passport was not tied to age. Why?!
The issue of passports arose in 1932 not by chance. After the complete collectivization of agriculture, a mass exodus of peasants to the cities began, which aggravated the food difficulties that were growing from year to year. And it was precisely to clear the cities, primarily Moscow and Leningrad, of this alien element that the new passport system was intended. A single identity document was introduced in cities declared sensitive, and passportization served at the same time as a way to clear them of fugitive peasants. Passports, however, were not issued not only to them, but also to enemies of the Soviet regime, disenfranchised, repeatedly convicted criminals, as well as to all suspicious and socially alien elements. Refusal to issue a passport meant automatic eviction from a sensitive city, and for the first four months of 1933 when the passportization of the two capitals took place, in Moscow, the population decline was 214,700 people, and in Leningrad, 476,182.
During the campaign, as usual, there were numerous mistakes and excesses. Thus, the Politburo pointed out to the police that old people whose children received passports should also be given them, even though they belonged to the propertied and ruling classes before the revolution. And to support anti-religious work, they were allowed to passport former clergymen who voluntarily renounced their rank.
In the three largest cities of the country, including the then capital of Ukraine Kharkov, after passportization, not only the criminal situation improved, but there were also fewer eaters. And the supply of the passportized population, albeit not too significantly, has improved. What the heads of other large cities of the country, as well as the regions and districts surrounding them, could not help but pay attention to. Following Moscow passportization was carried out in a hundred-verst zone around the capital. And already in February 1933 to the list of cities, where priority certification was carried out, included, for example, the Magnitogorsk.
As the list of regime towns and localities expanded, so did the opposition of the population. Citizens of the USSR, left without passports, acquired fake certificates, changed their biographies and surnames, and moved to places where passportization was just ahead and they could try their luck again. And many came to regime cities, lived there illegally and earned their livelihood by working at home on orders from various artels. So even after the end of passportization, the cleaning of sensitive cities did not stop. In 1935, the head of the NKVD Genrikh Yagoda and the USSR prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky reported to the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars on the creation of extrajudicial "troikas" for violators of the passport regime:
"In order to quickly clear the cities that fall under Article 10 of the law on passports from criminal and declassed elements, as well as malicious violators of the Regulations on Passports, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR Union on January 10, 1935 ordered the formation of special troikas on the ground for resolution of cases of this category. This measure was dictated by the fact that the number of detainees in these cases was very significant, and the consideration of these cases in Moscow at the Special Conference led to an excessive delay in the consideration of these cases and to an overload of places of pre-trial detention.
On the document, Stalin wrote a resolution: "The 'quickest' purge is dangerous. It must be purged gradually and thoroughly, without jolts and excessive administrative enthusiasm. It would be necessary to set a one-year deadline for the end of the purges."
By 1937, the NKVD considered the comprehensive cleansing of cities completed and reported to the Council of People's Commissars:
"1. In the USSR, passports were issued to the population of cities, workers' settlements, district centers, new buildings, MTS locations, as well as all settlements within a 100-kilometer strip around the cities of Moscow, Leningrad, a 50-kilometer strip around Kyiv and Kharkov; 100 -kilometer West European, Eastern (East. Siberia) and Far Eastern border strip, esplanade zone of the Far East and Sakhalin Island and workers and employees (with families) of water and railway transport.
2. In other rural non-certified areas, passports are issued only to the population leaving for otkhodnichestvo, for study, for treatment, and for other reasons.
Actually, this was the second in order, but the main purpose of certification. The rural population, left without documents, could not leave their native places, since violators of the passport regime were expected by "troikas" and imprisonment. And it was absolutely impossible to get a certificate to leave for work in the city without the consent of the collective farm board. So the peasants, as in the days of serfdom, were tightly tied to their homes and had to fill the bins of their homeland for the miserable distribution of grain for workdays or even for free, since they simply had no other choice left.
Passports were given only to peasants in the border forbidden zones (these peasants in 1937 included collective farmers from the Transcaucasian and Central Asian republics), as well as to residents of rural areas of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia annexed to the USSR.
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