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?’
I strained to catch his voice. It came tiny, self-satisfied. ‘My passport.’
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
Yet possession of the document also acted as a powerful force of social and cultural unification, as a token of citizenship in a positive sense – a resonance that became particularly significant in the post-Stalin era, as the numbers of those entitled to passports broadened, and its repressive function was to a large extent eroded by a constructive one. For Stepan, his passport was not just essential for proving he had the right to leave his village. Nomadic groups registered as members of reindeer, horse-raising or camel-breeding collectives were, like the Russian rural population, migrationally disenfranchised under Stalin. For them, the possession of a passport became an important sign of state favour, a recognition of equality attained. Similarly, it was vital, in the post-war years, for Kalmyk ‘special settlers’ (the population displaced in 1943 as a punishment for alleged large-scale collaboration with the Nazi invaders) both to obtain passports (which signified the right to move about as opposed to the duty to sign on with the local military commandant, as before), and to contest any restrictions that were imposed upon these.7 ‘Opting out’ of the passport system was the last thing the socially disenfranchised wished to do.8 The writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous dictum, ‘Remove the document – and you remove the man’, was an acknowledgement not only of the impotence of the individual unsanctioned by a stamped piece of paper, but of the personhood that could be derived from a document.
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.
In other countries too, the national passport can and has easily become the object of sentimental fixation and symbolic resonance. From its inception in 1923, the Irish Free State passport was emblazoned in green, and carried a bilingual text (Pás – Passport, Saorstát Eireann – Irish Free State) and the image of a harp. More recently, the ‘dark blue’ (supposedly)10 cover of the British passport prior to 1988 (when dark red, machine readable passports were introduced) has become a symbol of ‘sovereignty’ in its own right, leading to the post-Brexit introduction of a cover whose hue does not resemble the shade of the original, and which is constructed to different dimensions – as well as being designed in France and manufactured in Poland. In the USSR, such patriotic associations were tied less directly to the colour of the cover (which changed at different points and only in the country’s final decade approximately echoed the scarlet of the Soviet flag), than to the emblem of hammer and sickle and the word паспорт itself, alongside, of course, the abbreviation of the country’s title, CCCP. The first Soviet passports included the word ‘passport’ not just in Russian, but in the languages of the different Soviet republics (a multilingual style also employed for cardinal numbers – one, two, three, five, etc. – on the obverse of rouble notes). The final, 1974, version of the passport was bilingual (Russian plus the official language of the given republic). Yet if this practice acknowledged linguistic and cultural difference, Baiburin also shows how the pasport was, among other things, a conduit of russification, both because of the pressures on holders to assimilate to Russian as the most ‘convenient’ ethnic group, and because they were required to supply a patronymic even when the particular republic or ethnic community was historically devoid of this linguistic and cultural tradition.
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
Notes
