hereby be known that should someone be apprehended whereso’er they be, be they on foot or on horseback, should they have neither pashport or letter giving them right to travel: such persons shall be taken for criminals or thieves. And it is ordered that they shall be sought, so that no more shall they without letters of travel wander from town to town or village to village, neither on foot nor on horseback; but that each should have from his commander a pashport or letter of permission …17
The role of documents confirming identity rose sharply at the start of the eighteenth century, not only because of the creation of a standing army, but also because of the tax reform: an individual, personal, tax was introduced in place of many private taxes.18 The Decree of 26 June 1724, known as the Plakat, now referred to the whole tax-paying population of Russia.19 All those who were obliged to pay the poll tax could now absent themselves from their place of residence only with permission from those responsible for collecting the taxes – the commissar of the zemstvo [rural district in pre-revolutionary Russia – Tr.] or the commander of a military unit based in a particular locality.20 Such documents came to be known as letters of passage [Russ: propuskniye pis’ma].21 Letters of passage, which could be issued for up to three years’ duration, were obliged to contain identifying features, ‘of the one who may be allowed out’.
The passport was issued by the zemstvo commissar and stamped with the seal of the regiment to which the recipient of the passport paid his poll tax. The passport had to include the following details: name, title or rank, identifying features, term of absence, point of departure and destination. Any unauthorized migration by the dependant population was severely stamped on. The order was designed to catch anyone on the run (the pashportless ones) and sentence them to penal servitude. The punishment for forging letters for travelling was to have your nostrils split open and be sentenced to penal servitude. By such measures, the authorities tried to guarantee the reliability of identity documents.
However, ‘thieves’ letters’ (forgeries) were widespread. Because of this, just eighteen months after the Plakat was passed, a Decree of Empress Catherine I (Peter the Great’s widow, who ruled from his death in 1725 until she died in 1727) dated 1 February 1726, first raised the issue of a printed form of the passport.22 It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of the change from handwritten passports to printed ones. This was not only because the printed one was far more difficult to forge, but also because the surviving examples of letters of passage show the beginnings of a tendency to make the internal passport uniform in design.23 Furthermore, printing gave the passport a significantly different status as a document: now it became ‘a state paper’, and it was regarded in a completely different way to the handwritten document.
The passport was the principal instrument used to carry out the most important reforms of the time (those of the tax system and the army) and effectively to build the state. The passport became the main method for the state to exercise control over the population, as it encompassed the prohibition on unauthorized travel, and permission to travel for law-abiding subjects. In the future, all significant reforms carried out at state level depended one way or another on the passport system. The introduction of passports, which was one of the steps that Peter I took towards the creation of a European-style bureaucracy, was the new technology for running the country. The passport was meant to become the most important instrument for ruling the Russian population; and this, indeed, is what it became.
We can probably talk about a ‘passport system’ (as opposed to the issuing of travel documents) only once the system of control and registration of such documents and their owners was in place. Peter is responsible also for the creation of the police force, which was the body given (as Valentina Chernukha puts it), ‘the task of investigating the availability of a passport, handling its registration, checking it and catching those without passports. The passport provided the police with a very simple and convenient document with which to check whether citizens were abiding by the law.’24
Which details did the authorities consider essential to describe a person in documents? Above all, the first name was legally considered the basic identifying factor for a person. This is still the case. And a Russian historical peculiarity was that it had become normal for a person to have not one name, but at least two. For centuries people had used the Christian name they were given at baptism and a secular (or folk) one. The secular name could come from a number of sources. Frequently it was a nickname which played on a person’s character.25 A person was given a second name not straight after birth, but rather later, when certain characteristics became clear. For example, this may be when they had their hair cut for the first time. And it was not only parents who could give the second name, but even ‘the community’. Alternatively, a person’s ‘calendar name’ – taken from the Church calendar – might be used. Examples of this can be found even much later, notably among the Old Believer community: ‘According to his passport, Alexander, but christened Sofrony; Valentina by passport, but Vasilisa by baptism’.26 In any case, the secular name was not chosen merely by chance. It was inspired, as a rule, either by family tradition (such as the name of a grandfather or grandmother), or, if it was a nickname, by some kind of personal characteristic.
Historical anthroponymical research consistently reveals that ‘community’ names were so widespread (up to the end of the nineteenth century) that, ‘even formal documents at the end of the nineteenth century were obliged to use them, otherwise it would have been impossible to determine who was being referred to. It was frequently the case that no-one knew the Christian name given at baptism, because in daily life and even in all documentation the person was known only by their other name.’27 The use of double names persisted not only because of tradition, but also because the name given in baptism and the secular name performed different functions. The Christian name united the bearer with all those who had this name; whilst the secular name was more distinctive, if only because such names were varied; in principle there was an endless list of them. In any case, a person was generally known by only one name, and that was usually the secular one.
For centuries, only the Church could bestow upon someone their official name. The name was determined by the Church calendar. Boys were given the name of the saint whose feast day fell on the eighth day after they were born; girls, the name of the saint whose feast day fell eight days before the day on which they were born. This archaic practice (which is still held by some groups of Old Believers) was replaced by the habit of giving a child the name of the saint on whose feast day they were either born or were christened, or often whose feast day fell between those two days. One way or another, the name was not chosen, but was determined by the calendar, which placed the saints in order by where they came in the prayers for the dead. Such a principle for choosing names ruled out any idea that they were chosen by fate or any other reason. But this process was not governed by Canon Law, and therefore, contrary to popular opinion, was not actually obligatory. Nevertheless, it was followed almost without question by representatives of the lower and middle levels of society (note, for example, the way in which the choice is made of the unusual name ‘Akaky Akakievich’ in Nikolai Gogol’s story, The Overcoat).
The Church waged a battle against folk names for hundreds of years. Formally, it maintained its position over them, because when the first registers of births were introduced in the eighteenth century, under the control of the Church, only names given by the Church were considered official and ‘correct’. The Church had assumed the right to take control over the giving of names (by registering the name and entering it into the birth register). However, it was only in the official sphere that a closed list of names (the names of the saints) was maintained and attempts were made to change the naming process from nicknames to symbolical saints’ names. In practice, both systems existed side-by-side.
The increased use of documents and, consequently, the appearance of the name in the passport marked a fundamental change in the relationship to names. The passport name became the only name by which the person was known in their relations with officialdom. In fact, it is only when the name appeared in documents that it became
