Читать книгу The Soviet Passport - Albert Baiburin - Страница 30

1 1. Vladimir Lenin, ‘To the Rural Poor’, from Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 6, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964. This quotation accessed via https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/rp/5.htm#v06zz99h-398, 5 April 2020.

2 2. [According to the Julian Calendar by which Russia was still operating. This was 24 November by the Gregorian Calendar, to which Russia switched on 14 February 1918. – Tr.]

3 3. https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/revolution/documents/1917/11/10.htm, accessed 5 April 2020.

4 4. Albert Baiburin, ‘Iz predystorii sovietskogo pasporta…’.

5 5. Sobraniye Uzakonenii raboche-krest’yanskogo pravitel’stva…, p. 78. The resolution itself, called ‘The need for visas in passports for entry into Russia’, was signed on 2 December 1917 by Leon Trotsky.

6 6. [At this point the NKVD RSFSR was responsible for policing, but not the secret police, which was under the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VeCheKa, often abridged to Cheka). The NKVD RSFSR was disbanded in 1930. In 1934 the USSR NKVD was formed and became the new name for the secret police. – Tr.]

7 7. Sobraniye Uzakonenii raboche-krest’yanskogo pravitel’stva…, p. 89. Resolution of 5 December 1917, signed by Grigory Petrovsky.

8 8. Yury Felshtinsky, K istorii nashey zakrytosti…, p. 7.

9 9. [The VeCheKa (often abridged to Cheka) was the first secret police service of the Soviet period, on a number of occasions renamed, most notably as the NKVD and from 1953 the KGB. – Tr.]

10 10. State Archive of the Russian Federation (henceforth GARF) Fond 393, Opis’ 15, Delo 1A, List 38.

11 11. Sobraniye Uzakonenii i rasporyazhenii raboche-krest’yanskogo pravitel’stva RSFSR (henceforth SU RSFSR), No. 73, Article 792, pp. 893–4.

12 12. English translations from the 1918 Constitution to be found at https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/, accessed 5 April 2020.

13 13. Ibid., p. 893.

14 14. Ibid.

15 15. The role of ration cards in the history of the Soviet state is a separate and very interesting subject. They continued to be used even after the introduction of the passport in 1932. And it was only in the late Soviet period that ration cards and passports changed places. In 1990 citizens started to receive both foodstuffs and non-food products only by showing their passport. ‘On 10 January 1990, new trading rules came into force in Leningrad, under which certain goods could be purchased only on production of the passport. Among these goods were meat and meat products; tobacco goods; animal fats; cheese; and citrus fruits. On the list of non-food products there were eighteen different items.’ Sergei Karnaukhov, ‘Pokhorony yedy…’, p. 639.

16 16. SU RSFSR, No. 73, Article 792, p. 894.

17 17. Ibid.

18 18. Kodeks zakonov o trudye…, p. 34.

19 19. Ibid., Appendix to Article 80.

20 20. Dekret VTsIK, ‘O vvedenii trudovykh knizhek v g.g. Moskve i Petrograde’ (‘Decree on the Introduction of Employment Books in Moscow and Petrograd’), SU RSFSR, No. 28, p. 315.

21 21. Ibid.

22 22. Devyaty s”yezd RKPb, ‘Protokoly’, March–April 1920, Moscow, 1960, p. 48.

23 23. In 1924 ‘employment cards’ appeared, and in 1926 ‘employment lists’ were introduced. Instead of employment books, workers were given certificates. Finally, on 15 January 1939, identical employment books were introduced for workers and those employed in all state and cooperative establishments (by way of the Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR passed on 20 December 1938, ‘On the Introduction of Employment Books’). These documents are still used today with no significant changes. However, until 1955 it was obligatory to show in Soviet passports the place of work, job title and wages received; in other words, to a certain extent the passport duplicated the employment book. And in reality, this is exactly what it was from 1932 to 1938. For more on the history of employment books, see Yu.V. Tsarenko, ‘Trudoviye knizhki…’; Alexandr Malakhov, ‘Knizhka bytiya…’.

24 24. [Article 65 listed in detail who this referred to: (a) Persons who employ hired labour in order to obtain from it an increase in profits; (b) Persons who have an income without doing any work, such as interest from capital, receipts from property, etc.; (c) Private merchants, trade and commercial brokers; (d) Monks and clergy of all denominations; (e) Employees and agents of the former police, the gendarme corps, and the Okhrana (Tsar’s secret service), also members of the former reigning dynasty; (f) Persons who have in legal form been declared demented or mentally deficient, and also persons under guardianship; (g) Persons who have been deprived by a soviet of their rights of citizenship because of selfish or dishonourable offences, for the period fixed by the sentence. https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/index.htm, accessed 5 April 2020. – Tr.]

25 25. An example of such a passport, issued to Zinaida Mikhailovna Bishkina, can be seen at http://hisdoc.ru/passports/20071/, accessed 20 October 2020.

26 26. ‘Zapiska A G Beloborodova v Politburo…’, p. 102. [The ‘Turk-Republic’ Beloborodov refers to was at the time the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. It was created in 1918 with Tashkent as its capital. It formed the basis for the Union Republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, founded in 1924–5. – Tr.]

27 27. Despite this, attempts to establish control over the movement of the population did not stop. On 13 July 1922 the statute ‘On address bureaux’ was published. Address bureaux were set up to register the comings and goings of all citizens, and the housing directorate was obliged to hand the local militia lists of everyone who had entered and left their buildings. These lists were kept for two years. The text of the statute was published in the book, Militsiya Rossii…, p. 140. In 1926 a new statute on address bureaux was published, in which it was stated: ‘For the full and exact registration of the population there must be address lists which include the names of all citizens over the age of sixteen years’ (NKVD Bulletin for 1926, No. 28).

28 28. ‘On personal certification’ (‘Ob udostoverenii lichnosti’), Decree of the VTsIK and SNK RSFSR, 20 June 1923. See SU RSFSR, 1923, No. 61, Art. 570.

29 29. Later, and in line with the resolution of 18 July 1927, an identity document could be issued on the strength of a trade union membership card or a card issued by an educational institution. See SU RSFSR, 1927, No. 75, Art. 514.

30 30. [Private traders who took advantage of the possibilities presented by the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which allowed a certain amount of private business. Many believed that this was against the spirit of socialism, hence the inclusion of the NEPmen on this list. – Tr.]

31 31. A few months earlier a certificate had been introduced for ‘officials’ (Decree of the SNK RSFSR of 19 December 1922). The first point of the Decree stated: ‘All institutions are to produce a single type of permanent personal certificate for their officials. On the one side this is to show in the appropriate manner verified details of the position held, with the name, patronymic and surname of the official. On the other side, it must show references to or extracts from the articles of the law or resolution about the organization which has set the rights and obligations by which the said official is in post. The list of responsibilities which give the holder the right to have such a certificate must be drawn up by the leader of the institution’ (Khronologicheskoye sobraniye zakonov…, pp. 64–7). These instructions were for ‘middle management’. ‘Senior management’ was covered by a Decree of 13 February 1924; Khronologicheskoye sobraniye zakonov…, p. 83.

32 32. Sistematichesky sbornik deystvuyushchikh rasporyazhenii…, p. 294. [The reason the title might be ‘frightening’ is that the word propiska became hugely significant in Soviet times. Without the necessary propiska, a citizen could not move to a particular city or town. See below. – Tr.] Also in 1925 the Presidium of the TsIK USSR confirmed the ‘Situation on Entry to and Exit from the USSR’. Apart from the orders issued by Trotsky and Petrovsky (see above, this chapter, nn. 5 and 7), this was the first legal act concerning the question of entry to and exit from the USSR. The NKVD was given responsibility for the issuing of foreign travel passports to Soviet citizens and issuing entry visas to foreigners; the NKID, for diplomatic and official passports and visas for foreign travel.

33 33. Bearing this in mind, the official article about the passport in the sixth volume of the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia, published in 1930, is especially significant. It states: ‘PASSPORT – a particular document to confirm the identity and rights of its bearer when absent from their place of permanent residence. The passport system was an important weapon of police activity and tax policy in a so-called “police state”. The passport system operated in pre-revolutionary Russia, too. The passport system was especially burdensome for the working masses, and inconvenient for the civil workings of the bourgeois state, which at times abolished or weakened it. Soviet law does not recognize a passport system.’ The article was very quickly out-of-date. Within two years a passport system was introduced.

34 34. Dmitry Khmelnitsky, ‘Neskuchnaya istoricheskaya epokha’, http://www.port-folio.org/2005/part211.htm, accessed 17 April 2017.

35 35. In the article, ‘The passport system’ in the 1939 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the return of the system is explained thus: ‘The Soviet legal system, in contrast to the bourgeois one, never drew a veil over the class nature of its passport system, using it in conjunction with the conditions of the class struggle and the tasks of the dictatorship of the working class at different stages of the building of socialism.’ Bol’shaya Sovietskaya entsiklopediya, Vol. 44, 1939, p. 11).

36 36. [Curiously the original surname entered was ‘Vasilyeva’ but this has been changed by a different hand to ‘Savelyeva’. – Tr.]