The passport system of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an organisational framework of the single national civil registration system based upon identification documents, and managed in accordance with the laws by ministries and other governmental bodies authorised by the Constitution of the USSR in the sphere of internal affairs.
The foundations of the passport system of the Russian Empire, inherited by the Russian Republic in March 1917 for eight months, were thrown into confusion by the October Revolution, which dismantled all the state apparatus, including the police as one of the key elements of this system. An official passport system did not exist in the early RSFSR nor in the USSR (established 29 December 1922 [1] ). Pre-revolutionary passports continued to be used as identification, but large sections of the adult population had no passports at all: many peasants, soldiers and officers, prisoners, etc.
"Metrika" (Russian : метрика), an excerpt from the birth registration books (Russian : Метрическая книга), was a kind of identity document available to everybody.
On 18 December 1917 the Sovnarkom issued the decree [2] which laid the legal and institutional framework for the organisation of registration and statistics of the three major type of life events: birth, marriage/divorce, and death. Once run by the church, all this paperwork was transferred to the state authorities.
As it was before the revolution, the "metriks" records (both in the books and in the excerpts given to the parents) contained such critical identification information as: date and place of birth, name and sex of a child, full names of his parents (if known). By default, a child inherited a surname of his or her father (if known), mother (if single); however both parents were not limited in their choice. Unlike the pre-revolutionary "metriks", civilian documents of new Soviet authorities said nothing of parents' religion. Also, due to the non-clerical status of the birth registration, information about "vospriemniki" (godfather and godmother) also disappeared from this document.
The system originates in the Decree of the VTsIK and RSFSR Sovnarkom About Personal Identity Cards issued on 20 June 1923, which abolished all previously existing travel and residence permit documents (but allowed various documents for personal identification). Urban population had to obtain ID cards at the local militsiya departments; rural residents were serviced by volost ispolkoms (executive governmental offices). The ID cards were valid for three years and could have a photo pasted on. Neither photos nor ID cards were obligatory. The system of residential registration existed, but any personal documents were valid for this purpose and the registration, although known as "propiska" was not associated with the residential permit of the later propiska system.
The Small Soviet Encyclopedia released in May 1930 seems to be the last encyclopedical source which fixed the early post-revolutionary treatment of the passport system as a tool of the so-called "police state" where it provides "police supervision and taxation system". Stating that the whole concept of the "passport system" is unknown to the Soviet system of rights, the author insists that the passport system is also burdensome to the contemporary bourgeois (i.e. non-socialist) states which tend to simplify or even abolish this system. [3]
Soviet passports did not identify gender, although patronymics are gendered. In the early days they recorded "social origin" and "social position". They recorded nationality, which might include what in other contexts would be regarded as ethnicity, such as Jewish or Crimean Tatar. If both parents had the same this was that of the children. If it differed the child could choose which nationality to adopt at the age of 16. Children were normally listed in the passport of their mother. Men's passport might include liability for child support. [4]
On 27 December 1932 the USSR Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom issued the decree About establishment of the Unified Passport System within the USSR and the Obligatory Propiska of Passports. [5] The declared purposes were the improvement of population bookkeeping in various urban settlements and "the removal of persons not engaged in industrial or other socially-useful work from towns and the cleansing of towns from hiding kulaks , criminals and other antisocial elements".
Passports were introduced for urban residents, sovkhozniks and workers of novostroykas. [notes 1] According to the 1926 Soviet Census 82% of the population in the Soviet Union lived in rural areas. Kolkhozniks and individual peasants did not have passports and could not move into towns without permission. Permissions were controlled by chairpersons of collective farms or by rural councils. Repeated violations of the passport régime counted as a criminal offence. Passports were issued by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Soviet law-enforcement) and until the 1970s had a green cover.
The implementation of the passport system was based on the USSR Sovnarkom decree dated April 22, 1933 About the Issue of Passports to the USSR Citizens in the territory of the USSR. The document declared that all citizens at least sixteen years old residing in cities, towns, and urban workers' settlements, as well as those residing within one hundred kilometres (62 miles) of Moscow or Leningrad, within fifty kilometres (31 miles) of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Minsk, Rostov-on-Don, or Vladivostok or within the hundred-kilometre zone along the western border of the USSR were required to have a passport with propiska. Within these areas passports were the only valid personal identification document. From 1937 onwards, all passports had a photo headshot of the bearer. Historian Stephen Kotkin argues that the sealing of the Ukrainian borders (caused by the internal passport system)aimed to prevent the spread of famine-related diseases. [6]
On 10 September 1940 the USSR Sovnarkom decreed the Passport Statute (Russian : Положение о паспортах, romanized: Polozhenye o pasportakh). It enabled special regulations concerning the propiska in the capital cities of the different republics, krais , and oblasts, in state border areas, and at important railroad junctions.
On 21 October 1953 the USSR Council of Ministers decreed a new Passport Statute. It made passports obligatory for all citizens older than sixteen years in all non-rural settlements. Rural residents could not leave their place of residence for more than thirty days, and even for this leave a permit from a selsoviet was required. The notion of "temporary propiska" was introduced, in addition to the regular or "permanent" one. A temporary propiska was issued for work-related reasons and for study away from home.
After the First Congress of Collective Farm Workers in the summer of 1969, the Council of Ministers of the USSR relieved rural residents from procedural difficulties in obtaining a Soviet passport.
On 28 August 1974 the USSR Council of Ministers issued a new Statute of the Passport System in the USSR and new rules of propiska. [7] The latter rules remained in effect until 23 October 1995. However "blanket passportisation" started only in 1976 and had finished by 1981.
The Soviet calendar was a modified Gregorian calendar that was used in Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1940. Several variations were used during that time.
The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as the Volga German ASSR, was an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR. Its capital city was Engels located on the Volga River. As a result of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the republic was abolished and Volga Germans were exiled.
An internal or domestic passport is a type of identity document issued in a passport-like booklet format. Internal passports may have a variety of uses including:
A propiska was both a written residency permit and a migration-recording tool, used in the Russian Empire before 1917 and in the Soviet Union from the 1930s.
Within the administration of the Soviet Union, the Special Council of the USSR NKVD was created by the same decree of Sovnarkom of July 10, 1934 that introduced the NKVD itself. The decree endowed the Special Council with the right to apply punishments "by administrative means", i.e., without trial. In other words, the term "by administrative means" actually refers to extrajudicial punishment.
The Law of Spikelets or Law of Three Spikelets was a decree in the Soviet Union to protect state property of kolkhozes —especially the grain they produced—from theft, largely by desperate peasants during the Soviet famine of 1932–33. The decree was also known as the "Seven Eighths Law", because the date in Russian is filled into forms as 7/8/1932. The law provided a severe punishment for stolen collective and cooperative property: "execution with confiscation of all property and replacement in mitigating circumstances with imprisonment for at least 10 years with confiscation of all property." Amnesty was prohibited in these cases.
The Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation No. 81 was issued jointly by the Sovnarkom and Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on November 17, 1938.
Special settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous peasants and entire populations by ethnicity was a method of political repression in the Soviet Union, although separate from the Gulag system of penal labor. Involuntary settlement played a role in the colonization of virgin lands of the Soviet Union. This role was specifically mentioned in the first Soviet decrees about involuntary labor camps. Compared to the Gulag labor camps, the involuntary settlements had the appearance of "normal" settlements: people lived in families, and there was slightly more freedom of movement; however, that was permitted only within a small specified area. All settlers were overseen by the NKVD; once a month a person had to register at a local law enforcement office at a selsoviet in rural areas or at a militsiya department in urban settlements. As second-class citizens, deported peoples designated as "special settlers" were prohibited from holding a variety of jobs, returning to their region of origin, attending prestigious schools, and even joining the cosmonaut program. Due to this special settlements have been called by J. Otto Pohl a type of apartheid.
The Soviet passport was an identity document issued pursuant to the laws of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) for citizens of the USSR. For the general purposes of identity certification, Soviet passports contained such data as name, date of birth, gender, place of birth, ethnicity, and citizenship, as well as a photo of the passport holder. At different stages of development of the Soviet passport system, they could also contain information on place of work, social status, and other supporting information needed for those agencies and organizations to which the Soviet citizens used to appeal.
Decree time refers to the changes introduced to the Soviet Union time system by a Sovnarkom decree of 16 June 1930. By this decree, all clocks in the Soviet Union were permanently shifted one hour ahead at 00:00 on 21 June 1930 everywhere in the Soviet Union. Applicability of this decree was further extended by two other decrees in 1930 and 1931. The practice was further extended, and its legal basis was amended, in 1980.
The Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees was an NKVD department in charge of handling of foreign civilian internees and prisoners of war (POWs) in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II (1939–1953).
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An employment record book is an official personal document recording the employment status of its owner over time. Some European countries issue such documents, others did earlier. The first employment record books are said to have been issued in German Reich in 1892 in the mining industry.
Registration in the Russian Federation is the system that records the residence and internal migration of Russian citizens. The present system was introduced on October 1, 1993, and replaced the prior repressive mandatory Soviet system of propiska. The word "propiska" is still widely used colloquially to refer to the registration program.
The Internal Russian passport is a mandatory identity document for all Russian citizens residing in Russia who are aged 14 or over. The Internal Russian passport is an internal passport used for travel and identification purposes in Russia, which is distinct from the International Russian passport used by Russian citizens to travel in and out of Russian borders.
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In the law of the Soviet Union, katorga labor was a severe category of penal labor. It was introduced during World War II by the April 22, 1943 decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union "О мерах наказания изменникам Родине и предателям и о введении для этих лиц, как меры наказания, каторжных работ".. By this decree, katorga units were established in Vorkutlag and Sevvostlag. Katorga labor was characterized by the longer workday and hard workplace conditions, such as underground coal mining, gold and tin mining.
The visa history of Russia deals with the requirements, in different historical epochs, that a foreign national had to meet in order to obtain a visa or entry permit, to enter and stay in the country.
The Ministry of the Maritime Fleet was a government ministry in the Soviet Union.
The Gromyko Commission, officially titled the State Commission for Consideration of Issues Raised in Applications of Citizens of the USSR from Among the Crimean Tatars was the first state commission on the subject of addressing what the dubbed "the Tatar problem". Formed in July 1987 and led by Andrey Gromyko, it issued a conclusion in June 1988 rejecting all major demands of Crimean Tatar civil rights activists ranging from right of return to restoration of the Crimean ASSR.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Паспортная система была важнейшим орудием полицейского воздействия и податной политики в т.н. «полицейском государстве»… Особо тягостная для трудовых масс, паспортная система стеснительна и для гражданского общества буржуазного гос-ва, к-рое упраздняет или ослабляет её. Советское право не знает паспортной системы.
There is a story about how Stalin blocked peasants' movement from the regions of starvation to the areas where there might have been more food. [...] The regime's motivation for this was to prevent the spread of disease that accompanied the famine that the regime caused, however unintentionally.
