When were passports introduced in the USSR. Passport system in pre-revolutionary Russia

On December 27, 1932, in Moscow, the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR M.I. Kalinin, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR V.M. Molotov and the Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR A.S. registration of passports.
The time was not chosen by chance: the rural population was uprooted from its native soil and scattered throughout the country. Millions of “dispossessed” people who fled in fear from the countryside from “collectivization” and unbearable grain procurements of people had to be identified, taken into account, distributed into streams depending on their “social status” and assigned to state work. It was necessary to skillfully use the fruits of the “victory” achieved during the “radical change”, to consolidate this new state - the dispersion of people, not to allow them to return to their native places, to end the forced division of Russian society into “clean” and “impure”. Now every person had to be under the watchful eye of the OGPU.
The regulation on passports established that “all citizens of the USSR aged 16 and over, permanently residing in cities, workers' settlements, working in transport, in state farms and in new buildings, are required to have passports.” From now on, the entire territory of the country and its population were divided into two unequal parts: the one where the passport system was introduced, and the one where it did not exist. In passportized areas, the passport was the only document "identifying the owner." All previous certificates that previously served as a residence permit were cancelled. Mandatory registration of passports with the police was introduced “no later than 24 hours upon arrival at a new place of residence”. An extract also became obligatory - for everyone who left “outside the boundaries of a given settlement completely or for a period of more than two months”; for everyone leaving their former place of residence, exchanging passports; prisoners; arrested, held in custody for more than two months.
In addition to brief information about the owner (name, patronymic, surname, time and place of birth, nationality), the passport indicated: social status (instead of ranks and titles Russian Empire Soviet newspeak established the following social labels for people: “worker”, “collective farmer”, “peasant-individualist”, “employee”, “student”, “writer”, “artist”, “artist”, “sculptor”, “handicraftsman” , “pensioner”, “dependent”, “no specific occupation”), permanent residence and place of work, compulsory military service and a list of documents on the basis of which a passport was issued. Enterprises and institutions were to require passports (or temporary certificates) from those hired, indicating in them the time of enrollment in the state. The Main Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Militia under the OGPU of the USSR was instructed to submit to the Council of People's Commissars an instruction on the "implementation of the resolution" within ten days. Minimum term The preparation of the instruction referred to in the resolution indicates that it was drawn up and agreed upon in all levels of the highest party and state apparatus of the Soviet government long before December 1932.
Most of the legislative documents of the Soviet era, which regulated the main issues of people's lives, were never fully made public. Numerous decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the corresponding acts of the Union republics, resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the party, circulars, directives, orders of people's commissariats (ministries), including the most important ones - internal affairs, justice, finance, procurement - were marked “Not for publication ”, “Do not publish”, “Not subject to disclosure”, “Secret”, “Top secret”, etc. Legislation had, as it were, two sides: one, in which openly and publicly - “for the people” - the legal norm was determined. And the second, secret, which was the main one, because in it everyone government bodies it was prescribed how the law should be understood and how it should be practically implemented. Often the law deliberately, as in the resolution we cited of December 27, 1932, contained only general provisions, and its implementation, that is, the practice of application, was revealed in secret by-laws, instructions, circulars issued by the department concerned. Therefore, the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 43 of January 14, 1933 approved the "Instruction on the issuance of passports", which had two sections - general and secret.
Initially, it was prescribed to carry out passportization with mandatory registration in Moscow, Leningrad (including a hundred-kilometer strip around them), Kharkov (including a fifty-kilometer strip) during January - June 1933. In the same year, it was supposed to complete work in other regions of the country that were subject to passportization. The territories of the three above-mentioned cities with a hundred-fifty-kilometer bands around were declared regime. Later, by the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933 “On the Issuance of Passports to Citizens of the USSR on the Territory of the USSR”, the cities of Kyiv, Odessa, Minsk, Rostov-on-Don, Stalingrad, Stalingrad, Baku, Gorky, Sormovo, Magnitogorsk were classified as regime , Chelyabinsk, Grozny, Sevastopol, Stalino, Perm, Dnepropetrovsk, Sverdlovsk, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Nikolsko-Ussuriysk, Spassk, Blagoveshchensk, Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Prokopievsk, Leninsk, as well as settlements within the hundred-kilometer-long Western European border strip of the USSR. It was forbidden to issue passports and reside in these areas to persons in whom the Soviet authorities saw a direct or indirect threat to their existence. These people, under the control of the militia, were subject to deportation to other parts of the country within ten days, where they were granted the “right of unhindered residence” with the issuance of a passport.
The secret section of the above-mentioned instruction of 1933 established restrictions on the issuance of passports and registration in sensitive areas for the following groups of citizens: “not engaged in socially useful work” at work, in institutions, schools (with the exception of the disabled and pensioners); “kulaks” and “dispossessed” who fled the villages (“escaped”, in Soviet terminology), even if they “worked at enterprises or were in the service of Soviet institutions”; “defectors from abroad”, that is, those who arbitrarily crossed the border of the USSR (except for political emigrants who have a relevant certificate from the Central Committee of the MOPR); those who arrived from other cities and villages of the country after January 1, 1931 “without an invitation to work by an institution or enterprise, if they do not currently have certain occupations, or although they work in institutions or enterprises, they are obvious flyers (this was the name of those who often changed their place work in search of a better life. V.P.), or were fired for the disorganization of production”, that is, again, those who fled the village before the start of the deployment of “complete collectivization”; "disenfranchised" - people deprived of voting rights by Soviet law - the same "kulaks", "using hired labor", private merchants, clergymen; former prisoners and exiles, including those convicted even for minor crimes (the decree of January 14, 1933 provided a “not subject to disclosure” special list of these persons); family members of all the above groups of citizens.
Since the Soviet national economy could not do without specialists, exceptions were made for the latter: they were issued passports if they could present "certificate of their useful work from these enterprises and institutions." The same exceptions were made for “disenfranchised” if they were dependent on their relatives who served in the Red Army (the Soviet authorities already considered these old men and women not dangerous; in addition, they were hostages in case of “disloyal behavior” of military personnel), as well as for the clergy, “performing the functions of servicing the existing temples,” in other words, who are under the full control of the OGPU.
Initially, exceptions were also allowed in relation to those people who were not engaged in “socially useful work” and were deprived of voting rights, who were natives of sensitive areas and permanently lived there. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 440 dated March 16, 1935 canceled such a temporary “concession” (we will discuss this in more detail below).
For registration, new arrivals in sensitive areas had to submit, in addition to a passport, a certificate of the availability of housing and documents certifying the purpose of the visit (an invitation to work, a recruitment agreement, a certificate from the collective farm management about leave “to waste”, etc.). If the size of the area for which the visitor was going to register was less than the established sanitary norm (in Moscow, for example, the sanitary norm was 4-6 sq. m in hostels and 9 sq. m in state houses), then he was denied registration.
So, initially there were few sensitive areas - it was a new thing, the OGPU did not have enough hands for everything at once. Yes, and it was necessary to let people get used to an unfamiliar serf binding, to direct spontaneous migration in the right direction for the authorities.
By 1953, the regime had already spread to 340 cities, localities and railway junctions, to the border zone along the entire border of the country with a width of 15 to 200 kilometers, and in the Far East - up to 500 kilometers. At the same time, the Transcarpathian, Kaliningrad, Sakhalin regions, Primorsky and Khabarovsk territories, including Kamchatka, were fully declared regime areas. The faster the city grew and the more industrial facilities that were part of the military-industrial complex were built in it, the sooner it was transferred to a “regime” one. Thus, from the point of view of the freedom to choose one's place of residence in one's own country, industrialization led to a rapid forced division of the entire territory into large and small "zones". Regime towns, “cleansed” by the Soviet authorities of all undesirable “elements”, gave their residents a guaranteed income, but in return they demanded “hard work” and complete ideological and behavioral obedience. Thus, a special type of “urban man” and “urban culture” was developed, weakly connected with its historical past.
This terrible misfortune was deeply understood and truthfully described back in 1922 - ten years before the introduction of the passport system! - Russian poet Sergei Yesenin: “City, city, you are in a fierce fight / You christened us like carrion and scum. / The field freezes in anguish longing, / Choking on telegraph poles. / The sinewy muscle at the devil's neck, / And the cast-iron path is light for her. / Well, so what? After all, this is not the first time for us / And to loosen and disappear. The poet gave a historically accurate, extremely truthful and religiously meaningful picture of the ruin of the Russian land, although most people today, reading these poems, are not inclined to attach serious importance to prophetic foresight - they consider the words of the poet as a lyrical longing for the “leaving village”.
... For the same purpose, “passportization on railway transport” was carried out, which was carried out in three stages - from August 1933 to February 1934. Initially, passportization was carried out on the October, Murmansk, Western, South-Western, Catherine, Southern, Ussuri and Transbaikal railways. Then on the Transcaucasian, North Caucasian, South-Eastern, Perm, Samara-Zlatoust and Ryazan-Urals, last but not least - on the Central Asian, Turkestan-Siberian, Tomsk, Omsk, Moscow-Kazan, Northern and Moscow-Kursk roads. A series of secret orders of the OGPU set the main task in issuing passports to workers and employees of the railway transport "carefully identifying and accurately establishing their social status." To do this, it was proposed to use not only materials of operational records that were kept on all overt and covert "enemies of the Soviet regime" in the OGPU and the police, but also data received from voluntary assistants - political departments, trade unions, party organizations and "individuals", that is secret informers (colloquially - informers). As a result of the measures taken, the transport authorities of the OGPU identified and “weeded out” (the term used by the police) those whose position was determined by the Soviet authorities as socially alien and hostile. This action consolidated the division of the country's territory into "zones".
The next stage of passportization turned the territory “near the railways” into a restricted one. By order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 001519 of December 27, 1939, executing another secret decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, all heads of the road transport departments of this people's commissariat were instructed to "immediately begin preparations for the removal of anti-Soviet and criminal elements living in temporary residential buildings near the railways." From all these buildings (dugouts, “Shanghai”, “Chinese”, as they were designated in the order) in a strip of two kilometers from the railways, people were evicted, and the buildings themselves were demolished. On thirty-eight railways of the USSR (excluding the roads of Western Ukraine and Belarus), including 64 railway and 111 defense and economic hubs, work began to boil. The “operation” - that is how this action was called in the order - was carried out according to a worked out scenario: lists were drawn up “for the entire identified anti-Soviet and criminal element” (using investigative and archival materials and covert interrogations) and people who had previously been expelled from their homes, but those who survived during the “building of the foundations of socialism” were forcibly sent, according to the decisions of the Special Conferences, to “remote areas” and “corrective labor camps”. Both the buildings of the railway workers and those that belonged to people who did not work in transport were demolished. According to the USSR Prosecutor V. Bochkov, “in Chelyabinsk, many working-class families live in the open air, in sheds, hallways. Due to the lack of a fixed place of residence, children remain out of schools. Among them, diseases begin. Some of the homeless workers apply to the management of their enterprises for dismissal in order to find a job with housing. Their petitions remain in most cases unsatisfied.” In order to stop the spontaneous flight of people, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR sent a circular to the allied Councils of People's Commissars, obliging the city and district Soviets, together with the directors of enterprises, "to immediately provide housing for workers and employees evicted from temporary housing." However, these instructions remained, as a rule, on paper, and the Soviets did not have the necessary housing stock in reserve ...

The villagers were subjected to especially humiliating enslavement, since, according to the above-mentioned resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 57/1917 of December 27, 1932 and No. 861 of April 28, 1933, in rural areas, passports were issued only in state farms and in territories declared “regime”. The rest of the villagers did not receive passports. Both regulations established a long, arduous procedure for obtaining passports for those seeking to leave the village. Formally, the law determined that “in cases where persons living in rural areas leave for a long-term or permanent residence in an area where the passport system has been introduced, they receive passports in the district or city departments of the workers' and peasants' militia at the place of their former residence for a period of for one year. After a one-year period, persons who have arrived for permanent residence receive passports at their new place of residence on a general basis” (paragraph 3 of the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933). In fact, everything was different. On March 17, 1933, the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On the procedure for otkhodnichestvo from collective farms” obliged the boards of collective farms “to exclude from the collective farm those collective farmers who arbitrarily, without an agreement registered with the collective farm board with economic agencies (that was the name of representatives of the administration who, on behalf of Soviet enterprises, traveled to villages and concluded agreements with collective farmers. V.P.) are abandoning their collective farms.” The need to have a contract in hand before leaving the village is the first serious barrier for otkhodniks. The exclusion from the collective farm could not greatly frighten or stop the peasants, who had time to learn the hardship of collective farm work, grain procurement, wages on workdays, hunger in their own skin. The obstacle lay elsewhere. On September 19, 1934, a closed resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 2193 “On registration of passports of otkhodnik collective farmers entering enterprises without contracts with economic agencies” was adopted. The traditional term “otkhodniks” camouflaged the mass exodus of peasants from collective farm “reservations”.
The Decree of September 19, 1934 determined that in passportized areas, enterprises could hire collective farmers who had gone into retirement without an agreement with economic agencies registered with the collective farm board, “only if these collective farmers had passports obtained at their former place of residence, and a certificate from the collective farm board about his consent to the withdrawal of the collective farmer. Dozens of years passed, instructions and regulations on passport work changed, people's commissars, and then ministers of internal affairs, dictators, bureaucrats, but this decision - the basis for attaching peasants to collective farm work - retained its practical force.
Although the October 1953 Passport Regulations legitimized the issuance of short-term passports to “otkhodniks” for the “term of the contract”, the collective farmers were well aware of the relative value of these documents, viewing them as a formal permit for seasonal work. In order not to contact the police, they took information from the board of collective farms and village councils. But even five years after the introduction of the so-called short-term passports for collective farmers, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs noted in 1958 numerous facts “when citizens recruited in rural non-passportized areas for seasonal work are not provided with short-term passports.”
As the peasants found the smallest loopholes in the passport legislation and tried to use them to escape from the countryside, the government tightened the law. Circular of the Main Police Department of the NKVD of the USSR No. 37 of March 16, 1935, adopted in accordance with the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 302 of February 27, 1935, prescribed: “Persons living in a rural unpassported area, regardless of where they go (even if they go to an unpassported rural area), they are required to obtain passports before leaving, at their place of residence for a period of one year.” The authorities, of course, understood that the peasants roamed from village to village in search of a place where it was easier to escape to the city. For example, people learned that a large tractor plant was being built in Chelyabinsk and, consequently, an increased organizational recruitment would be carried out in the surrounding villages and districts. And many flocked to the countryside closer to this city to try their luck.
True, Chelyabinsk, like another city in this region - Magnitogorsk - was among the "regime" and people with a "socially alien" origin of the Soviet regime had almost no chance to register there. Such people should have looked for a quieter place, gone to a place where no one knew them, and there they tried to get new documents to hide the past. In any case, moving to permanent residence from one rural area to another until March 1935 was, as it were, a “legal” way of escaping, not prohibited by law.
But after the adoption of the aforementioned circular, the local authorities were obliged to remove the migrants who did not have passports from the village. The circular did not explain where exactly the unpassported fugitives should be sent, that is, it provided complete freedom of action for the arbitrariness of local authorities.
Imagine the psychological state of a person who was subject to “removal”. Returning to your native village means not only once again pulling the hateful collective farm strap, but also depriving yourself of any, even illusory, hopes for a peaceful life. After all, the very fact of fleeing from the collective farm could hardly have gone unnoticed by the village authorities. So, there was only one way out: to run further, to where, as it seemed, the mousetrap had not yet slammed shut, where even the slightest hope loomed. Therefore, the true meaning of the circular was to secure for the runaway peasants who did not have passports their “illegal position” anywhere in the USSR, to turn them into unwitting criminals!
In the villages and villages there remained those who staked on the Soviet government, who decided to faithfully serve it, set out to make a career on the humiliation and enslavement of their fellow villagers, who wanted to build themselves better life through the exploitation of ordinary collective farmers. There were those who were fooled by the regime and those who, due to age, family circumstances or physical injury, could not escape. Finally, there were those who understood already in 1935 that there was nowhere to hide from the Soviet regime.
True to the unwritten rule of concealing the most essential from the people, the government did not publish the new decree in the press. The police circular suggested that the changes in the passport law be “widely announced to the rural population” “through the local press, through announcements, through village councils, district inspectors, etc.”
The peasants, who decided to leave the village in compliance with the passport laws, which they knew from hearsay, faced an intractable task: they had to have an agreement with the enterprise - only then could they get a passport from the police and leave. If there was no contract, I had to bow to the chairman of the collective farm and ask for a certificate of “departure”. But the collective farm system was not created for rural slaves to be allowed to “roam” freely around the country. The collective farm chairman understood this "political moment" well and his task - "to hold on and not let go." We have already pointed out that the formal rights to obtain a passport were also reserved for residents of “non-passportized areas” - this is how the government decree of April 28, 1933 defined it. When reading this document, a normal person could get the impression that getting a passport at a district (or city) police station is easier than a steamed turnip. But only inexperienced village simpletons could think so. In the very instructions for passport work, put into effect on February 14, 1935 by order No. 0069 of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR G.G. local kings (from the chairman of the collective farm or the village council to the head of the district police department) the opportunity for unlimited arbitrariness in relation to the ordinary collective farmer. The only “limitation” to their omnipotence that could arise was that “supreme interest” when the industrial Moloch once again opened its insatiable mouth wide, demanding new victims. Only then did they have to let the peasants go to the city according to the so-called “organizational recruitment”. And they doomedly fell under the next cog of the machine for stamping a “Soviet man” from Orthodox Russian people.
Paragraph 22 of the instructions for passport work in 1935 listed the following documents required to obtain a passport: 1) a certificate from the house administration or village council from the place of permanent residence (in form No. 1); 2) certificate of the enterprise or institution on work or service with obligatory indication, “since what time and in what capacity has he been working at this enterprise (institution)”; 3) a document on the attitude to military service “for all those who are required to have one by law”; 4) any document certifying the place and time of birth (metric statement, registry office certificate, etc.). Paragraph 24 of the same instruction indicated that “collective farmers, individual peasants and non-cooperative handicraftsmen living in rural areas do not submit any certificates of work.” It would seem that this paragraph gives the collective farmer the right not to submit to the police a certificate from the collective farm board about permission to go into “retreat”, otherwise why include a special paragraph about this in the instructions? But that was a false appearance. In articles 46, 47, in various forms, to make it clearer, it was emphasized that all peasants (collective farmers and individual farmers) obliged to leave the village for a period of more than five days, to have a certificate from the local authorities, which was practically the main document for obtaining a passport.
The peasants did not know any of this, because the instruction on passport work was an appendix to the order of the NKVD of the USSR, which had the heading “Owls. secret." Therefore, the well-known legal norm sounded especially cynical to people when they encountered it: ignorance of the law does not exempt from punishment under it.
Let's try to imagine the ordeal of a peasant in order to obtain “freedom” ... As a rule, there is no contract in hand, since the state carefully controlled and regulated the “orgnabor” in the countryside. Depending on the situation with personnel in a particular industry, construction site, factory, mine, it then allowed state recruiters to recruit labor from villages (based on the state plan, which took into account not only industries in need of “personnel”, but also indicated their a specific number for each department or construction site, as well as those rural areas where recruitment was allowed), then closed this loophole. So, first of all, the peasant should go for a certificate to the chairman of the collective farm. He refuses directly or pulls, offers to wait with the departure until the completion of agricultural work. Having achieved nothing on the collective farm, the peasant tries to start from the other end - first to secure consent in the village council. The chairman of the village council is the same "trembling creature" as the chairman of the collective farm, a dependent being who values ​​his place as "chief" more than anything else. Naturally, he asks the peasant if he has a certificate from the board, asks to show it. If there is no certificate, the conversation is over, the circle is closed. All that remains is the opportunity to bribe rural officials or forge the necessary certificate. But that's what the police are for, to check all the documents to the point, and if necessary, request the authority that issued the certificate. Thus, the soil is created for the coalescence of the local top of power - the collective farm, the Soviet, the police - the top, which becomes the undivided master of the village. It robs, corrupts, humiliates the people, it was created for this very purpose, and the passport system provides unlimited possibilities here.
The writer V. Belov testifies about the state of mind of a Russian person who was forcibly turned into a "collective farmer": V.P.) such a concept as “copy” or “copy from a copy” was very characteristic. Paper or its absence could be sent to Solovki, killed, starved to death. And we children already knew this harsh truth. It was not in vain that we were taught to draw up documents in the classroom ... In the seventh or sixth grade, I remember, we learned by heart Nekrasov's poem “Reflections at the front entrance”: “Here is the front entrance. On solemn days, possessed by a servile illness, the whole city with some kind of fright drives up to the cherished doors. N. A. Nekrasov called ordinary sycophancy a servile disease. But is it possible to call the fear of a country boy without a passport standing in front of an all-powerful official a servile illness? Twice, in 1946 and 1947, I tried to go to school. In Riga, in Vologda, in Ustyug. Every time I got turned around. I received a passport only in 1949, when I fled from the collective farm to the FZO. But there were even more officials outside the village outskirts...”
... According to the instructions for passport work in 1935, in addition to passport books for a period of three years and one-year passports, there were temporary certificates for up to three months. They were issued “in non-regime areas in the absence of the documents necessary to obtain a passport” (paragraph 21 of the instruction). In other words, it was mainly about rural residents who traveled to the “passportized area” for temporary (seasonal) work. With the help of this measure, the state tried to regulate migration flows and meet the needs of the national economy in the labor force, while not losing a single person from the police's field of vision for a minute.
Often they ran away from the village without any documents at all. The following excerpt from the circular of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR No. 563/3 dated March 17, 1934 testifies to the fact that such phenomena were widespread: “Despite the explanatory campaign conducted by the police, this requirement is not being met: there is a mass arrival of citizens from rural areas to cities without passports, which causes police measures to detain and remove visitors.” There were frequent attempts to register with forged and forged certificates of otkhodnichestvo. But, of course, this "handicraft" could not seriously resist the mechanism of the totalitarian machine, the passport noose thrown around the people's neck.
The legal status of the peasant in the collective farm era made him an outcast in his native country. And not only he, but also his children had to live under such psychological pressure. According to the current exemplary charter of the agricultural artel (1935), membership in the collective farm was formalized by submitting an application, followed by a decision on admission at the general meeting of the artel. In practice, this rule was not observed in relation to the children of collective farmers, who, upon reaching the age of sixteen, were mechanically entered by the board into the lists of members of the artel without their application for admission. It turned out that the rural youth could not control their own destiny: after the age of sixteen they could not, of their own free will, receive a passport from the regional police department and freely leave for the city to work or study. Adult young people automatically became collective farmers and, consequently, only as such they could seek passports. What most of these attempts ended in, we have already written. Formally, this practice was not legally enshrined in the charter of the agricultural artel. In fact, the collective farmers became a forced class "from generation to generation."
... The flight to the cities created the appearance of gaining freedom. Life drove rural fugitives from the Russian regions proper to the outskirts.
By 1939, the share of Russians in the following national regions increased sharply (compared to the 1926 census): in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR from 1.2 - 2.9 to 28.8 percent, in the North Ossetian ASSR from 6.6 to 37 .2 percent, in the Yakut ASSR from 10.4 to 35.5 percent, in the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR from 52.7 to 72.1 percent, in the Kirghiz SSR from 11.7 to 20.8 percent. In the future, “industrialization” only intensified this centrifugal process.

Passportization of the population contributed to total control over citizens. Secret surveillance has acquired a scale unprecedented in world history. In the regional police departments, passport departments arose, in city and district departments (departments) - passport offices. Address bureaus were created in settlements where more than 100,000 “passportized people” lived. In addition to them, but with other goals - not for registration of the population and the issuance of passports, but for “improving the search for hiding and fleeing criminals” - by order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 0102 of September 10, 1936 in all major cities of the country (over 20 thousand inhabitants) cluster address bureaus were organized. The Central Address Bureau (TsAB) operated in Moscow. If in 1936 cluster bureaus existed in 359 cities of the USSR, then in 1937 - in 413. The rest of the cities and regions of the country were each attached to a specific cluster address bureau. Thus, the entire territory of the USSR was covered by a detective. It was disguised as "accounting for the movement of the population."
The regulation on cluster address bureaus, approved by order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 077 of August 16, 1937, established that “the main registration, accounting and reference document is the arrival sheet, which is filled out when re-registering the entire population and for each citizen arriving in this locality.” The arrival and departure sheets had the same name - “address sheet”. Accounting for the movement of the population was a secondary task. All address sheets, before being placed in a card index for arriving persons, were checked in the bush bureaus according to the passport search book, because many lived on someone else's or fake passports. At the same time, the arrival sheets were checked against the so-called watchlists (search cards), which were filled out for “wanted criminals” declared on the allied or local wanted list, and kept in the cluster address bureaus in special file cabinets. When a wanted person was found, this was immediately reported to the “NKVD apparatus that announced the search”, but the cards continued to be stored “as compromising material until instructions were given to seize and destroy them.”
On January 1, 1939, a new, more advanced form of address sheets was introduced, which was not accidental. On January 17, an all-Union population census was to be held. The previous census was taken just two years before. Consequently, the state did not so much need accurate information about the population as it needed to establish the place of residence of each person. Indeed, in 1937-1938, a mass purge (“rotation”) of the Soviet bureaucratic stratum was carried out in the country. In an atmosphere of terror and general fear, the former leading cadres tried to change their place of residence, to obtain new documents in any way. People saw a direct threat to their lives in the forthcoming census and tried to hide in advance. Therefore, the regime considered it necessary to tighten control over the “population movement” in order to be able to arrest anyone at the right time. Individuals (summer residents, vacationers in sanatoriums, rest homes, coming on vacation, on vacation, sightseers, tourists arriving at meetings, congresses and leaving back) were temporarily registered on address sheets without tear-off coupons. For everyone else, registration and extract were recorded on address sheets with tear-off coupons, and then these data were sent to the department, and from there to the Central Department of Economic Accounting of the State Planning Committee of the USSR (TsUNKhU). The address sheet remained with the police. In sensitive areas, such sheets were filled out in two copies: one remained at the address bureau, and the other at the police station “to control the departure of the registered person on time.” For the “socially alien” and “criminal element”, additional sheets of arrival (or departure) were filled out, which were sent for centralized accounting to cluster address bureaus. Thus, there was a double accounting of “population movement” in the country. The most important - in the police, secondary - in the State Planning Commission. Instructions for passport work in 1935 determined the priority in the tasks of address bureaus as follows: “a) assisting administrative bodies in searching for the persons they need; b) issuance of certificates on the place of residence of citizens to institutions and individuals; c) keeping records of the movement of the population. Contrary to traditional ideas, the passport apparatus in the USSR existed not so much for the needs of the population, but to search for the recalcitrant.
Order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 230 of December 16, 1938 on the work of cluster address bureaus directly indicated that they were created to “improve the work of the police in searching for criminals”, and not to take into account the movement of the population. To solve the latter problem, the order said, there are address bureaus. In the bush bureaus, leaflets on new arrivals were checked for the presence of “compromising information” in the person’s biography, after which, depending on the nature of the “compromising evidence”, this was reported to the head of the enterprise at the person’s place of work or “immediately to the criminal investigation department”.
Instructions on passport work in 1935 determined the following as the main tasks of the police in “maintaining the passport regime” in the USSR: preventing residence without a passport and without a residence permit; preventing employment or service without passports; cleaning sensitive areas from “criminal, kulak and other antisocial elements, as well as from persons not connected with production and work”; taking in non-regime areas of all "kulak, criminal and other anti-social elements" on a special account.
The practical work of the grassroots police apparatus to conduct “special records” was built as follows: in the certificate of the house administration or the village council from the place of permanent residence (form No. 1), which was mandatory presented to the police upon receipt of a passport, in the column “For special marks of the police ” all “compromising data” about the recipient of the passport were entered. Starting in 1936, a special mark began to be made in the passports of former prisoners and exiles, disenfranchised and "defectors". Certificates in form No. 1 were kept in the general card index of the police passport apparatus; people taken on a special account were entered in the lists using a special form. “Industrialization” was expanding, “complete collectivization” was ending, cities were growing, political processes were fabricated, terror became more and more ferocious, the number of “criminals”, “flyers” and other “anti-social elements” increased. Accordingly, the investigation was improved, the card indexes of the Central and cluster address bureaus increased.
To improve the identification of a citizen of the USSR, since October 1937, a photographic card began to be pasted into passports, the second copy of which was kept by the police at the place of issue of the document. In order to avoid forgeries, the Main Police Department introduced special ink for filling out passport forms and special mastic for seals, stamps for attaching photographs, and sent out operational and methodological "guidelines" to all police departments on how to recognize fake documents. In those cases when birth certificates from other regions and republics were presented upon receipt of passports, the police were obliged to first request certificate issuance points so that the latter would confirm the authenticity of the documents. To tighten measures to “maintain the passport regime”, the police, in addition to their own forces, attracted janitors, watchmen, brigadiers, “village performers” and other “trusted persons” (as they were called in police jargon).
The following fact testifies to the scale of surveillance of the population. According to the Main Directorate of Militia, at the beginning of 1946, in the districts of the Moscow Region, the “intelligence apparatus” consisted of 396 residents (including 49 paid ones), 1142 agents, 24 route agents and 7876 informers. At the same time, the head of the department, Lieutenant General Leontiev, noted that "the intelligence and information network in the region is large, but qualitatively still weak." The dictionary of foreign words gives several interpretations of the concept of "resident", but it always refers to a person who performs diplomatic, intelligence or administrative functions in a foreign, foreign state. Apparently, the communist government had enough reason to consider Russia a foreign country for itself.
... In 1940, passports were exchanged in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv and other “regime” cities. As in 1936, the NKVD of the USSR demanded that the exchange be carried out “in the order of current planned work, without giving it the character of a mass campaign and without creating a special apparatus for this purpose.” The measures to enslave the bulk of the population were completed in the country, and the authorities did not need extra hype about this. By the end of the 30s, the Soviet leadership could rightfully declare to the whole world about “building the foundations of socialism in the USSR”. The final formation of the passport regime served as the most convincing argument for this.

In order to correctly assess the nature of the changes in the legal status of the Russian people, we will briefly consider the main provisions of the passport system of tsarist Russia. The main document was the Charter on Passports, published in 1903. According to it, everyone living at the place of permanent residence was not obliged to have passports. Under the permanent place of residence was understood: for nobles, merchants, officials, honorary citizens and commoners - a place where they had real estate or home furnishings or were employed in the service; for philistines and artisans - the city or town where they were assigned to a philistine or artisan society; for peasants - the rural society or volost to which they were assigned. In factories, factories, manufactories and mining, which were subject to the rules on supervision of establishments of the factory industry, all workers were required to have passports, even in cases where the enterprise was located in the place of permanent residence of these workers.
It was not required to obtain a passport in cases where people were absent from permanent place residence within or outside one's own county, but not further than 50 versts and not more than six months. It was possible to be hired for rural work without limiting the period of absence and without obtaining a passport, if you had to work in volosts neighboring the county.
In other cases, when changing the place of permanent residence, passports were issued: indefinite - to non-serving nobles, reserve officers dismissed from public service, honorary citizens, merchants and raznochintsy, five-year ones - to petty bourgeois, artisans and rural inhabitants. If the latter included arrears in public, state, zemstvo or secular fees, passports were issued only with the consent of the societies to which they were assigned, for a period of up to one year.
Male persons under the age of seventeen who were not in the public service, and females under the age of 21, could obtain individual passports only with the consent of their parents and guardians, in whose passports they were entered. Married women received passports with the consent of their husbands (exceptions were made for those whose husbands were in an unknown absence, in places of detention, exile or suffered from insanity).
Members of peasant families, including adults, were issued passports with the consent of the owner of the peasant household. Without this, documents could be issued only by order of the Zemstvo or peasant chief or other responsible persons.
Those who served their sentences in correctional-detention units, prisons and fortresses in accordance with the Code of Punishments (in some cases, by decision of Special Meetings under the Minister of the Interior) were under special police supervision. Passports were issued to these persons only with the permission of the police, and a note was made on the holder's criminal record and a record was made limiting the place of residence. The passport regime that existed in the Russian Empire allowed even revolutionaries, after serving their sentences for especially dangerous crimes, not only not to feel like outcasts in society, but also to live in tolerable, human conditions, change their place of residence, continue to engage in revolutionary affairs and go abroad. Many abuses were then associated precisely with the excessive liberalization of the passport regime.
In 1900, a foreign passport was issued, for example, to V. Ulyanov, the brother of an executed terrorist, an active supporter of the overthrow of the monarchy, who advocated his ideas. It is even ridiculous to imagine the possibility of something like this in the USSR after the introduction of the passport system.
Among the similar features of the passport systems of Russia and the USSR, which, at first glance, have some similarities, are the restrictions imposed on rural residents. However, even here it is easy to see the various goals that were pursued during the introduction of passport norms. In pre-revolutionary Russia, with a clear predominance of the rural population over the urban population, “otkhodnichestvo” served not only as a way to smooth out the seasonality of rural labor, but also as an additional income for the peasants, which allowed them to pay taxes and arrears. With regard to legal restrictions, even Soviet historians are forced to admit that the tsarist decree of October 5, 1906 provided the peasants with “the same rights in relation to public service” with other estates and “freedom to choose a place of permanent residence”, without which it was impossible to carry out the Stolypin reform.
The purpose of the Soviet passport system was to attach people to collective farm work, and the traditional term “otkhodnichestvo” masked the flight of people from the horrors of collectivization.
Before the revolution, the dictates of the head of the peasant household regarding permission to issue passports to members of his family, firstly, relied on economic and religious traditions developed over the centuries and determined by the way of farming, and secondly, could not be compared with arbitrariness and mockery of the Soviet authorities when issuing passports to collective farmers.

The Second World War demonstrated the new possibilities of the totalitarian passport system. In 1939, the USSR returned the territories that had been stupidly lost during the military campaign nineteen years before. The population of these places was subjected to forced sovietization. On January 21, 1940, a temporary instruction was put into effect on the implementation of the passport system in the western regions, which was no different from the one in force in the Soviet Union.
... In the same year, by decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 1667 of September 10, a new regulation on passports and a new instruction of the NKVD of the USSR on its application began to be implemented. The new document had one significant difference from the December resolution of 1932: it expanded the territory of passportization at the expense of regional centers and settlements where MTS were located. The cherished line, beyond which life with a passport began, seemed to be approaching. The authorities, as it were, were making an inviting gesture to the villagers; rural migration intensified. But, having settled down to work in a new place at enterprises, the former villagers immediately fell under the decree of June 26, 1940. According to it, under pain of criminal punishment, the unauthorized departure of workers and employees from enterprises was prohibited. The fictitious “liberalization” of the passport system has in fact backfired on those who bought into it. The expansion of the passportized territory testified to the continuing advance of the city on the village, because in the regional centers an urban atmosphere was created with all the charms of the Soviet reservation.
In addition to this innovation, the regulation on passports took into account the changes that had taken place after 1932. The boundaries of regime areas were specified in connection with the territorial seizures of the USSR in 1939-1940; the extension of the passport system to the inhabitants of the new lands was legally formalized; the procedure for issuing passports to nomadic gypsies and persons admitted to the citizenship of the USSR was determined, the practice of withdrawing passports from workers and employees of the defense and coal industries, railway transport and issuing special certificates instead of them was fixed for an indefinite period. Order-bearers, persons who have reached the age of fifty-five, the disabled and pensioners were now to receive indefinite passports; five-year-olds were issued to citizens from 16 to 55 years old. The practice of issuing temporary certificates to “citizens leaving from areas where the passport system has not been introduced” continued.
Back in May 1940, the NKVD of the USSR ordered coal industry workers to issue special certificates instead of passports. Passports were kept in the personnel departments of enterprises and were handed out in exceptional cases (for example, to present a document at the registry office when changing a surname, marriage or divorce). This order was canceled only in May 1948, when the passports were returned to their owners. As in the coal industry, a similar situation in 1940-1944 extended to those sectors of the national economy whose enterprises were distinguished by particularly difficult working conditions and experienced constant difficulties with workers (mainly unskilled) - ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, the chemical industry, heavy industry, shipbuilding. The issuance of certificates instead of passports existed in railway, sea and river transport, in the system of the Main Directorate of Labor Reserves.
In June 1940, the unauthorized departure of workers and employees from enterprises and institutions was prohibited, and in December 1941, criminal liability was established for all workers in the military industry, including those industries that worked for defense “on the principle of cooperation” - those who left without permission were declared deserters and were subject to trial by military tribunals. By additional decrees, this provision was extended in 1942 to workers and employees of the coal and oil industries, transport, as well as workers and employees of individual enterprises (for example, Magnitostroy). So, in necessary cases, the passport system was supplemented by changes in labor legislation.
The Patriotic War of 1941-1945 required additional efforts from the Soviet militia to maintain the passport regime in the country. The secret circular of the NKVD of the USSR No. 171 of July 17, 1941 ordered the people's commissars of internal affairs of the republics and the heads of the NKVD departments of the territories and regions the following procedure for "documenting citizens arriving without a passport in the rear in connection with military events". Initially, it was necessary to check everyone who ended up in the rear without passports: to interrogate in detail about the circumstances of the loss of documents, establish the place where they were received, send a request and a photograph of the applicant there. Only after the answer, “confirming the issuance of the passport and the identity of the photograph”, was the issuance of the passport allowed. If, due to the German occupation, it was impossible to conduct a check, and people had other documents confirming their identity, they received temporary certificates. In the event of the loss of all documents after a thorough personal interrogation, re-checking these data, non-passport holders were issued a certificate that could not serve as an identity card for the owner, but facilitated his temporary registration and employment.
This additional touch to the characterization of the Soviet passport system, which at first glance seems superfluous, actually captures its essence. It is hard to imagine that German agents infiltrated our territory without personal documents corresponding to the operational legend. This was well understood in the NKVD. Without any apparent purpose, in wartime conditions, the efforts of this huge state apparatus were spent on endless (and mostly meaningless) checks, interrogations, rechecks to clarify the obvious. Namely, that such and such a name, fleeing from death and not wanting to remain in occupation, fled to the rear and at the same time lost or destroyed (under the threat of captivity) his documents. He got to his own, escaped death, for him this is joy, he has the right to expect participation in his fate. Instead, the authorities put him on the right. The authorities have a clue, “compromising data” about a person’s stay in the temporarily occupied territory. And for the rest of his life he is obliged to indicate this fact in all questionnaires. This small, one typewritten page circular had a decisive influence on the fate of hundreds of thousands of people and was canceled only in 1949.

Least of all in the USSR were prisoners treated with ceremony. On December 19, 1933, the secret circular of the OGPU No. 124 informed all subordinate bodies of the procedure for release from the “OGPU corrective labor camps, in connection with the establishment of the passport regime.” Those released from the camps were ordered to apply a “differentiated approach”.
Convicted for the following crimes did not receive passports and were not registered in sensitive areas: counter-revolutionary activities (exceptions were made for persons “attached by OGPU resolutions to certain enterprises for work” and amnestied by special government decrees, that is, highly qualified specialists, without whom no one could work one proceeding), banditry, riots, draft evasion “with aggravating signs”, counterfeiting and forgery of documents, smuggling, travel abroad and entry into the USSR “without permission”, violation of the monopoly of foreign trade and the rules on foreign exchange transactions, malicious non-payment of taxes and refusal to perform duties, escape of those arrested, moonshine, violent resistance to government officials, violence against social activists, embezzlement, bribery and bribery, embezzlement of state and public property, illegal abortions, child molestation, rape, pandering, repeated theft, robbery, fraud, arson, espionage. It can be seen from the above list that not only criminals and political opponents of the regime fell into the category of criminals, but also that many millions of the population who fell victim to various “experiments” of the Soviet government in building a socialist society. Many were convicted without any fault on their part, since, according to the commentary to the criminal code in the edition of 1926, a “criminal act” was understood as “an attempt on the main gains of the proletarian revolution; therefore, the completed composition of the criminal act will already be from the moment of the attempt; there may or may not be actual harmful effects.”
Everyone who has served “urgent (for any period. - V.P.) deprivation of liberty, exile or expulsion on the basis of effective judgments of the courts and the collegium of the OGPU” for the crimes listed above were included in a special list of persons who were not issued passports in sensitive areas. The action of government decree No. 43 of January 14, 1933, containing the named list, extended to all those convicted of these crimes after November 7, 1927, that is, five years before the adoption of the state law on the passport system!
... Among the citizens rejected by the Soviet regime, at the very bottom were peasants. Circular No. 13 of the Main Police Department of the NKVD of the USSR of February 3, 1935 was based on the decision of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of January 25 of the same year, which stated that “the restoration of the civil rights of the exiled kulaks does not give them the right to leave the place of settlement.” According to this circular, passports were issued to all exiled “kulaks restored in their civil rights” “exclusively at the location of the labor settlement” on the basis of lists submitted by district commandant's offices. It was necessary to indicate in the passport that it was issued “on the basis of a list of such and such a commandant's office of a labor settlement, such and such a district, the number and date of the list.” Paragraph 3 obliged: “Persons with the indicated entry in their passports should not be registered for residence anywhere except in places of settlement. If these persons are found in other areas, detain them as fugitives and send them in stages to the place of settlement.
Since 1933, secretly (in special police records), and since August 8, 1936, both secretly and explicitly (in the records of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and in the passport), a mark was made on a person’s criminal record. In the passports of former prisoners, “disenfranchised” and “defectors” (who crossed the border of the USSR “arbitrarily”), the following entry was made: “Issued on the basis of clause 11 of the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933.” After the adoption in 1940 of a new regulation on passports and instructions for its application, the entry took on the following form: “Issued on the basis of Art. 38 (39) Regulations on Passports”. This postscript was also made in the passports of nomadic gypsies.
Finding a decent job for a person whom the Soviet government referred to as a “socially alien element” or itself forcibly turned into a “criminal element” was almost impossible.
For millions of people who had a criminal record, the way home, to families and relatives, was, in fact, closed forever. They were doomed to wander around their native country, every day they could be fired from their jobs without any explanation. It was life under a raised sword that could fall on their heads at any moment. Many former prisoners did not even try to return to their former lives, as they understood the futility of their efforts. Others settled near the camps from which they left, or recruited in remote areas of the country. Quite often, in order to plug personnel “holes” at enterprises with hard labor conditions, the government used a method of a kind of “mass recruitment”. “In pursuance of the order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR and the Prosecutor General of the USSR No. 0039/3 of January 13, 1947,” it was indicated in the circular of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 155 of March 19 of the same year, “mines and other enterprises of the Ministry of the Coal Industry of the Eastern Regions are sent to 70,000 people released early from places of detention and camps.” It turns out that people were released ahead of schedule in order to replace one penal servitude with another, using “early release” as a bait. Since in 1947 the procedure was still in force according to which workers and employees of the coal industry were issued special certificates instead of passports, the circular ordered the ministers of internal affairs of the republics and the heads of departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the territories and regions to ensure the legalized passport norm.
Sometimes, for educational purposes, the Soviet government showed "humanism" in relation to former prisoners. In 1945, by a joint order of the NKVD of the USSR, the NKGB of the USSR, the People's Commissariat of Justice of the USSR and the Prosecutor of the USSR No. 0192/069/042/149 “On the procedure for implementing the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of July 7, 1945 on amnesty, in connection with the victory over Nazi Germany” , the relevant authorities were allowed to send to sensitive areas and register in these areas minors, pregnant women and women with young children, the elderly and the disabled, who are subject to amnesty, who “followed to their former place of residence, to relatives or close relatives”. By the end of November 1945, 620.8 thousand people sentenced to various terms and 841.1 thousand people sentenced to corrective labor were completely released. 212.9 thousand people sentenced to more than three years had their remaining sentences reduced. Nevertheless, since October 1945 - after the end of the amnesty - there has been an increase in the flow of convicts to the camps. In just four months (October 1945 - January 1946), the number of prisoners in the country increased by 110 thousand, and the monthly flow of people to the camps exceeded the loss of them by 25 - 30 thousand people. In practice, the amnesty was not an act of mercy to the victorious people, but was a way to replace and renew the labor force of the camps.

On March 3, 1949, the Bureau of the Council of Ministers of the USSR considered the issue of introducing a new passport and a draft of a new regulation on the passport system in the USSR. The development was carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on the personal instructions and initiative of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks L.P. Beria. The proposal was motivated by the fact that “during the war, a significant part of the forms of valid passports and instructions for applying the provision on passports fell into the hands of the enemy and the criminal element, which largely deciphered the technique of passport work in the USSR.” The most important difference of the proposed project was that this provision on the passport system provided for “issuance of passports not only to the urban, but also to the rural population”.
This attempt should not be regarded as a real liberalization of the Soviet regime. The passportization of the entire population of the country aged 16 years and older in those conditions meant total control over the life of everyone, because the possession of a passport created only the appearance of human rights - a citizen of the USSR, since “compromising data” would still remain the main thing in determining his fate, stored in the Central and cluster address bureaus. The transition to a complete passportization of the country's population promised considerable benefits to the Ministry of the Interior and personally to its curator Beria, because the importance of this ministry would increase, there would be additional chances in the struggle for power. From the point of view of the state - complete control over the life of every member of society - there were every reason to accept the offer. But it was rejected with the following wording, which did not explain the reasons for the refusal: “It was proposed that the Ministry of Internal Affairs be finalized based on the opinions of the Bureau.” The issue of granting passports to the entire rural population (including collective farmers) was not revisited until 1974, although after Stalin's death a new regulation on passports was adopted in October 1953.
... True, what Beria managed to achieve during the peak of his career, when in March 1953 he was appointed First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and regained the post of Minister of the Interior, was to have time to push the draft resolution “On reduction of regime areas and passport restrictions”. A report addressed to the new chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, Malenkov, signed by Beria, was sent on May 13, 1953. Corresponding copies of the report were sent to all members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU - V. M. Molotov, K. E. Voroshilov, N. S. Khrushchev, N. A. Bulganin, L. M. Kaganovich, A. I. Mikoyan, M. Z. Saburov, M. G. Pervukhin. On May 21, 1953, this project was approved as a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 1305-515. The main changes were to exclude about one hundred and fifty cities and localities, all railway junctions and stations from the list of regime restrictions (regime restrictions remained in Moscow and in twenty-four districts of the Moscow region, in Leningrad and five districts of the Leningrad region, in Vladivostok, Sevastopol and Kronstadt); reducing the size of the forbidden border strip (with the exception of the strip on the border with Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, on the Karelian Isthmus); reduction of the list of crimes, a conviction for which entailed a ban on living in sensitive areas (all “counter-revolutionary crimes”, banditry, hooliganism, premeditated murder, repeated thefts and robbery remained). But the reform of the passport system conceived by Beria, as noted, had a deeper meaning. This is confirmed by numerous reference materials (including those on the passport system of the Russian Empire) prepared by the apparatus of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in April 1953.
The order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs No. 00375 dated June 16, 1953, signed by Beria, issued in development of the government decree, which abolished passport restrictions, breathes downright paternal concern for the needs of former prisoners and their families: “Under the current situation, citizens who have served their sentences in places of detention or exile, and thus atoning for their guilt before society, continue to experience deprivation ... The presence in the country of wide passport restrictions creates difficulties in the device not only for citizens who have served their sentences, but also for members of their families, who also, in this regard, are in a difficult position." It was further noted that “the regime and passport restrictions imposed in these areas (a regime zone that extends hundreds of kilometers inland. - V.P.) hinder their economic development.” Having in his hands the most complete sources of information, Beria was the first of the communist leaders to understand that the Gulag system in the post-war period was no longer profitable and did not meet the necessary conditions for the technocratic and economic development of a totalitarian society.
However, the Soviet government continued to keep its main enemy - the Russian peasant - on the passport “hook”. And according to the regulations on passports of October 21, 1953, residents of rural areas (with the exception of sensitive ones) continued to live without passports. If they were temporarily involved - for a period of not more than one month - for agricultural work, logging, peat extraction within their region, territory, republic, they were issued a certificate from the village council proving their identity and the purpose of departure. The same order was maintained for rural residents of non-certified areas, if they went to rest homes, to meetings, on business trips. If they went outside their region to other areas of the country for a period of more than thirty days, they were obliged, first of all, to obtain a passport from the police at their place of residence, which was unrealistic.
... After Stalin's death, the peasant's life seemed to become easier: in 1953 they changed the procedure for imposing agricultural tax on peasant farms, from 1958 they abolished the mandatory supply of all agricultural products from the farms of collective farmers; the March (1953) amnesty terminated the execution of all sentences, without exception, according to which collective farmers were sentenced to corrective labor for failure to comply with the mandatory minimum of workdays. For those who constantly worked on the collective farm, the amnesty made life much easier. People who went into “withdrawal” without the permission of the boards of collective farms, in connection with the amnesty, felt free. But this was self-deception, since there were no significant changes in the legal status of the collective farmer: the exemplary charter of the agricultural artel continued to operate, and in the annual report of the collective farm, “otkhodniks” continued to be counted by the state as a labor force registered with the collective farms. Consequently, all those who arbitrarily went into the “withdrawal” could at any moment be forcibly returned to the collective farms by the government. The sword was still raised above their heads, only it was as if “forgotten” to lower it. Restrictions on the passport rights of the villagers continued to be deliberately maintained by the authorities. So, in secret circular No. 4 2 dated February 27, 1958, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR N. P. Dudorov, addressed to the leaders of this department in the union republics, stated: which does not have a regional division) for seasonal work on the certificates of village councils or collective farms, ensuring the issuance of short-term passports for this category of citizens for the duration of the contracts they have concluded. Thus, legally, passport restrictions for collective farmers of the 1950s differed little from those in the 1930s.
Order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 0300 of October 31, 1953, declaring for guidance and execution the above-mentioned government decree No. 2666-1124 of October 21, 1953 and a new regulation on passports, established: former place of residence in rural areas, the permanent residents of which, in accordance with paragraph "d" of Article 2 and Article 3 of the provision on passports, are not required to have passports.
It turns out that in the main thing - in relation to the Russian peasantry - this legislation of the era of the "thaw" has become even more sophisticated than before. Such a special clause was absent in Yagodin's instruction on passport work in 1935 and Beria's regulations on passports in 1940. In their times, all prisoners after their release received a certificate (or certificate), and upon arrival at their place of permanent residence in a non-regime area - a passport. Moreover, the order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR G. G. Yagoda No. 84 dated April 14, 1935 condemned those police bodies that refused to issue passports to former prisoners and exiles. “Such a soulless bureaucratic attitude towards persons who have served the measure of social protection established for them,” the order said, “pushes them back to the criminal road.” The order obligated the police to issue all former prisoners and exiles “passports in non-regime areas unconditionally, upon presentation of a certificate from the ITU (corrective labor institution. - V.P.) about the departure of the measure of social protection”.
Of course, Yagoda was a hypocrite, but how much more cynical is the order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of 1953! It was by no means professional thieves and recidivists who returned to the countryside after camps and prisons, but peasants who, having survived all the Soviet “experiments” to build a socialist society, went home to live out their lives. It was they - convicted of "spikelets" and similar "theft of state and public property" in the hungry pre-war, war and post-war times - that made up the bulk of the prisoners. The police order clearly marked their place in the pyramid of Soviet society: below the freed professional thieves returning to the cities, on a par with prisoners and special settlers. This point should have been taken especially mockingly during the period of mass rehabilitation of former “statesmen” (Soviet officials of all ranks), who, with their policies, drove the peasants into camps.
... In September 1956, an amnesty was announced for Soviet soldiers convicted of surrendering "captured to the enemy during the Patriotic War." The police were instructed to “exchange previously issued passports (with restrictions) to citizens from whom, on the basis of the announced decision (Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 20, 1956. - V.P.) a criminal record and loss of rights are removed.” This meant that from now on these people could go for permanent residence in any part of the country, including privileged regime. In January 1957, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachais, Chechens, Ingush and members of their families were allowed to live and register in the areas from which they had previously been evicted. The rehabilitation campaign was gaining momentum.
And only the Russian peasants continued to be outcasts in their own country. According to the current situation, those convicted under articles 2 and 4 of the decree of June 4, 1947 “On criminal liability for theft of state and public property” could not return home to their former place of residence if their village or village was in a restricted area. In 1950 alone, 82.3 thousand people were convicted in the RSFSR under Articles 2 and 4 of the said decree (a quarter of them were women). This decree was introduced by the government at a time when many villagers had to steal grain from collective farm fields and currents in order not to die of hunger.
... Since October 1953, passports have been issued: indefinite - to persons who have reached the age of forty, ten-year - to persons aged 20 to 40 years, five-year - to persons aged 16 to 20 years. Another type of passport was issued - a short-term one (for a period of not more than six months) - in cases where people could not submit all the documents necessary for obtaining a passport, in case of loss of passports, and also to those leaving the countryside for seasonal work (to “departure”) . The latter, as already noted, received short-term passports “for the duration of the contracts” and could exchange them “only if they renew their contracts.”

It is widely believed that passports began to be issued to all citizens of the USSR who have reached the age of sixteen, even during the reign of N. S. Khrushchev. Even those who left the countryside in the 1950s believe that, among other reforms, Khrushchev was able to carry out the passport reform as well. So great is the power of public delusion, implicated in "thaw" prejudices and ignorance of the facts of recent national history. There is also a psychological connotation: for those who managed to escape from the village to the city in the Khrushchev era and get a passport, this issue lost its sharpness and was no longer perceived as one of the main ones in rural life.
In reality, only on August 28, 1974, by a resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR “On measures to further improve the passport system in the USSR”, a decision was made to introduce a new passport of a citizen of the USSR from 1976. This provision on the passport system established that "all Soviet citizens who have reached the age of 16 are required to have a passport of a citizen of the USSR." The issuance and exchange of new documents were to be carried out from 1976 to 1981.
Why were peasants equalized in rights with the rest of the country's citizens more than forty years after the introduction of the passport system in the USSR? Because such a period was needed to remake the Russian people into the Soviet one. This historical fact and was recorded in the preamble to the Constitution of the USSR (adopted on October 7, 1977): “A developed socialist society has been built in the USSR ... This is a society of mature socialist social relations, in which, on the basis of the rapprochement of all classes and social strata, the legal and actual equality of all nations and nationalities, their fraternal cooperation, a new historical community has developed - the Soviet people.
While the villages and villages of Russia were destroyed, the cities were swollen and industrialized without any regard for their cultural traditions and environmental conservation. The Soviet ideology formed a truly new person, devoid of historical national roots. God was taken away from him and put into his hands "the code of the builder of communism."

In the last twenty years, the tale of poor collective farmers, turned into serfs by the bloody Stalinist regime, has set the teeth on edge. Imposed in the teeth and a cartoon about the good Khrushchev, who allowed the peasants to issue passports. Allegedly, Stalin forbade the peasants to leave the villages for the cities without issuing them an identity card. The talkers spreading this schizophrenic nonsense not only cannot show any legal or normative act confirming their point of view, but they refuse to explain why the Soviet government, which was desperately in need of workers at the great construction sites, should punish itself. (During the years of Soviet power, 1,300 cities were formed, that is, 200% of the pre-revolutionary number; meanwhile, over the same period, approximately 75 years, before the revolution, the increase was only 10%. The scale of urbanization amounted to 60% of the total; to at the time of the revolution, 20% lived in cities, 80% in the countryside, and by 1991 80% in cities, 20% in the countryside.) How and when did 60% of the population of the whole country move from village to city, if they were not allowed, schizophrenics leave unanswered. Well, let's help them figure it out.

Council of People's Commissars of the USSR

On the Issuance of Passports to Citizens of the USSR on the Territory of the USSR

On the basis of Article 3 of the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of December 27, 1932 on the establishment of a unified passport system for the USSR and the mandatory registration of passports (S.Z. USSR, 1932, No. 84, art. 516), the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR decides :

1. To introduce the passport system for the entire population of cities, workers' settlements, settlements that are regional centers, as well as at all new buildings, industrial enterprises, transport, state farms, in settlements where MTS are located, and in settlements within 100-kilometer Western European border strip of the USSR.

2. Citizens permanently residing in rural areas (except for those provided for in Article 1 of this Decree and the established zone around Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov) do not receive passports. The registration of the population in these areas is carried out according to the settled lists by the village and settlement councils under the supervision of the district departments of the workers' and peasants' militia.

3. In cases where persons living in rural areas leave for a long-term or permanent residence in an area where the passport system has been introduced, they receive passports at the district or city departments of the workers' and peasants' militia at the place of their former residence for a period of 1 year.

After the expiration of a year, persons who have arrived for permanent residence receive passports at their new place of residence on a general basis.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR
V. MOLOTOV (SCRYABIN)
Manager of Affairs of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR
I.MIROSHNIKOV

The above document regulates the receipt of a passport by a resident of a rural area when moving to a city. No obstacles are listed. According to paragraph 3, villagers who decide to move to the city simply receive passports for their new place of residence. There is also another document introducing criminal liability for leaders who prevent peasants from leaving for cities for temporary work.

Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of March 16, 1930 on the removal of obstacles to the free departure of peasants for seasonal work and seasonal work

206. About elimination of obstacles to free departure of peasants on seasonal trades and seasonal works.

In some areas of the USSR, local authorities, as well as collective-farm organizations, prevent the peasants, especially collective farmers, from leaving freely for seasonal work and seasonal work.

Such unauthorized actions, disrupting the fulfillment of the most important economic plans (construction, logging, etc.), cause great harm to the national economy of the USSR.

The Council of People's Commissars of the USSR decides:

1. Resolutely forbid local authorities and collective-farm organizations in any way to prevent the departure of peasants, including collective farmers, to seasonal work and seasonal work (construction work, logging, fishing, etc.).

2. District and district executive committees, under the personal responsibility of their chairmen, are obliged to immediately establish strict supervision over the implementation of this resolution, bringing its violators to criminal liability.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR A. I. Rykov.

Manager of Affairs of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and STO N. Gorbunov.

It should be noted that the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated March 17, 1933 “On the procedure for otkhodnichestvo from collective farms” established that a collective farmer, arbitrarily, without an agreement registered with the collective farm board with a “hozorgan” - an enterprise where he got a job, who left the collective farm, be expelled from the collective farm. That is, no one forcibly kept him on the collective farm, just as no one kept him in the village. It is obvious that the passport system was considered by the Soviet authorities as a burden. The Soviet government wanted to get away from it, so it freed the bulk of the passports - the peasants. Not issuing them passports was a privilege, not a disadvantage.
Collective farmers did not need a passport for registration. Moreover, peasants had the right to live without registration in cases where other categories of citizens were required to register. For example, Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated September 10, 1940 No. 1667 “On Approving the Regulations on Passports” established that collective farmers, individual farmers and other persons living in rural areas where the passport system has not been introduced, arriving in the cities of their region for up to 5 days, live without registration (other citizens, except for military personnel who also did not have passports, were required to register within 24 hours). The same decree exempted collective farmers and individual farmers temporarily working during the sowing or harvesting campaign in state farms and MTS within their district, even if the passport system was introduced there, from the obligation to reside with a passport.
The rate of migration of the population of the USSR from rural areas to cities.
Population census of the USSR Total urban rural population moved to the city
mln mln % mln % mln %
1926
147 26,3 18 120,7 82
1939
70,5 56,1 33 114,4 67 30 17,3
1959
208,8 100 48 108,8 52 44 21
1970
241,7 136 56 106 44 36 15
1979
262,4 163,5 62 99 38 27,5 10,5

That's how another vile bourgeois slander of Soviet society, in contact with the facts, fell apart like a rotten stump.
Polivanov O.I.
06/9/2014
Links:
http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Resolution_of_SNK_USSR_dated_28.04.1933_№_861

http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Resolution_of_SNK_USSR_dated_10.09.1940_№_1667
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_census_USSR_(1926)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_census_USSR_(1939)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_census_USSR_(1959)
http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/ussr_nac_70.php USSR (1970)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_census_USSR_(1979)

December 27, 1932 in Moscow, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR M.I. Kalinin, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR V.M. Molotov, Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR A.S. Yenukidze signed Decree No. 57/1917 "On the establishment of a unified passport system for the USSR and the mandatory registration of passports." The time was not chosen by chance - the rural population was uprooted from their native soil and scattered throughout the country.

The millions of “dispossessed kulaks” who fled in fear from the countryside from “collectivization”1 and unbearable grain procurements had to be identified, taken into account, distributed into streams depending on their “social status” and assigned to state work. It was necessary to skillfully use the fruits of the “victory” achieved during the “radical change”, to consolidate the forced division of Russian society into “clean” and “sinners”.

Now everyone had to be under the watchful eye of the OGPU. The regulation on passports established that "All citizens of the USSR aged 16 and over, permanently residing in cities, workers' settlements, working in transport, in state farms and in new buildings, are required to have passports." From now on, the entire territory of the country was divided into two unequal parts - the one where the passport system was introduced, and the one where it was not.

In passportized areas, the passport was the only document "identifying the owner." All previous documents that previously served as a residence permit2 were canceled, and the obligatory registration of passports with the police was introduced “no later than 24 hours upon arrival at a new place of residence”. An extract also became mandatory: for everyone who left “out of the boundaries of the given settlement completely or for a period of more than two months”; for everyone changing their place of residence, exchanging passports; prisoners; arrested, held in custody for more than two months; dead.

In addition to brief information about the owner (first name, patronymic, surname, time and place of birth, nationality), the passport must indicate: social status (instead of the ranks and titles of the Russian Empire, Soviet newspeak established the following social labels for people - “worker”, “ collective farmer", "peasant-sole proprietor", "employee", "student", "writer", "artist", "artist", "sculptor", etc., "handicraftsman", "pensioner", "dependent", “without certain occupations), permanent residence and place of work, compulsory military service and a list of documents on the basis of which a passport was issued.

Enterprises and institutions were required to require passports (or temporary certificates) from all recruits and note in them the time of entry to work. The resolution instructed the Main Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Militia under the OGPU of the USSR to submit instructions to the Council of People's Commissars on the "implementation of the resolution" within ten days. The minimum period for preparing the instruction, which is mentioned in the resolution, indicates that it was drawn up and agreed upon in all levels of the highest party and state apparatus of the Soviet government long before December 1932.

An analysis of the legislative documents of the Soviet era shows that most of them that regulated the main issues of the life of the people have never been fully published in the open press. Numerous decrees of the USSR and the corresponding acts of the union republics, resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the party, circulars, directives, orders of people's commissariats (ministries), including the most important ones - internal affairs, justice, finance, procurement, were marked "not for publication", "not publish", "not subject to disclosure", "secret", "top secret" and so on.

Legislation had, as it were, two sides: one, in which openly and publicly - "for the people" - the legal norm was determined. And the second, secret, which was the main one, because it prescribed to all state bodies how the law should be understood and how it should be practically implemented. That is why the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 43 of January 14, 1933 approved the "Instruction on the issuance of passports", which had two sections - general and secret.

Initially, it was prescribed to carry out passportization with a mandatory residence permit in Moscow, Leningrad (including a 100-kilometer strip around them). Kharkov (including a 50-kilometer strip around the city) for January-June 1933. Further, during the same year, it was supposed to complete work in the rest of the country, subject to passportization. The territories of the three above-mentioned cities with 100-50-kilometer strips around them were declared regime. Later, by the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933 No.

“On the Issuance of Passports to Citizens of the USSR on the Territory of the USSR” the following cities were classified as: Kyiv, Odessa, Minsk, Rostov-on-Don, Stalingrad, Stalinsk, Baku, Gorky, Sormovo. Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, Grozny. Sevastopol, Stalino, Perm, Dnepropetrovsk, Sverdlovsk, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Nikolsko-Ussuriysk, Spassk, Blagoveshchensk, Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Prokopievsk, Leninsk, as well as settlements within the 100-kilometer Western European border strip of the USSR. It was forbidden to issue passports and reside in these sensitive areas to all persons in whom the Soviet authorities saw a direct or indirect threat to their existence. These people, under the control of the militia, were subject to deportation to other parts of the country within a period of not more than 10 days, where they were granted the “right of unhindered residence” and issued passports.

The secret section of the instruction on the issuance of passports of 1933 established restrictions on the issuance of passports and residence permits in sensitive areas for the following groups of the population: “not engaged in socially useful work” at work, in institutions, schools (with the exception of the disabled and pensioners); fled from the villages (“escaped”, in Soviet terminology) “kulaks” and “dispossessed”, even if they “worked at enterprises or were in the service of Soviet institutions”; "defectors from abroad", i.e. arbitrarily crossed the border of the USSR (except for political emigrants who have a relevant certificate from the Central Committee of the MOPR); arrived from other cities and villages of the country after January 1, 1931 “without an invitation to work by an institution or enterprise, if they do not currently have certain occupations, or although they work in institutions or enterprises, they are obvious flyers ( so the Soviet authorities called those who often changed jobs in search of a better life. - V.P.), or were fired for the disorganization of production”, i.e. again, those who ran away from the village before the start of the deployment of "complete collectivization"; "disenfranchised", i.e. deprived of voting rights by Soviet law - the same "kulaks", people "using hired labor", private merchants, clergymen; former prisoners and exiles, including those convicted even for minor crimes (in the decree of January 14, 1933, a special list of these persons “not subject to disclosure” was given): family members of all of the above groups4.

Since the Soviet national economy could not do without the labor of specialists, "exceptions from the law" were made for the latter and they were issued passports if they could present "certificate of their useful work from these enterprises and institutions." The same exceptions were made for those deprived of voting rights if they were dependent on their relatives who served in the Red Army (the Soviet authorities already considered these old men and women not dangerous; in addition, they were hostages in case of "disloyal behavior" of military personnel ), as well as for the clergy "performing the functions of servicing existing temples" - in other words, under the full control of the OGPU.

Initially, exceptions were also made for those who were not engaged in "socially useful work" and were deprived of voting rights, if they were natives of sensitive areas and permanently resided in them. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 440 of March 16, 1935 canceled this temporary "concession". Below we will dwell on this issue in more detail.

For registration, new arrivals in sensitive areas were required to submit, in addition to their passport, a certificate of the availability of housing and documents certifying the purpose of their arrival (an invitation to work, a recruitment agreement, a certificate from the collective farm management on leave “to waste”, etc.). If the size of the living space for which the visitor was going to register turned out to be less than the established sanitary norm (in Moscow, for example, the sanitary norm was 4-6 m2 in hostels and 9 m2 in state houses), then he was denied registration.

As we have shown, initially the number of regime areas was small - it was a new business, the OGPU did not have enough hands to do everything at once. In addition, it was necessary to give people the opportunity to get used to it, so as not to provoke mass popular unrest, to direct spontaneous migration in the direction necessary for the regime. By 1953, the regime was extended to 340 cities, localities and railway junctions, to the border zone along the entire border of the country with a width of 15 to 200 km, and in the Far East up to 500 km.

At the same time, Transcarpathian, Kaliningrad. Sakhalin Region, Primorsky and Khabarovsk Territories, including Kamchatka, were fully declared regime areas and5. The faster the city grew and the more industrial facilities were built in it, a large number which was part of the military-industrial complex, the sooner it was transferred to the "regime area". Thus, from the point of view of the freedom to choose one's place of residence in one's own country, industrialization led to a rapid forced division of the country's territory into large and small "zones".

Regime cities, "cleansed" by the Soviet government of all undesirable "elements", gave their residents guaranteed earnings and housing, but in return they demanded "shock work" and complete obedience to the new - "socialist" ideology. Thus, a special type of "urban man" and "urban culture" was developed, weakly connected with its historical past.

This misfortune was understood and truthfully described back in 1922 - ten years before the introduction of the passport system! - Sergey Yesenin:

"City, city! you are in a fierce fight
He baptized us as carrion and scum.
The field freezes in melancholy.
Marveling at telegraph poles.
Stringy muscle at the devil's neck,
And the cast-iron duct is easy for her.
Well, so what?
It's not the first time for us
And shatter and disappear."

The poet gave a historically accurate and Christian meaningful picture of the ruin of the Russian land. He showed that a creature with a "devil's neck" rules in the country, that he turned the earth into an industrial swamp, along which a "cast-iron path" was laid. And the main thing is captured: all of Russia - construction site, sucking in people who are only "carrion" and "scum" for the new owners of the country. Hence the end result is guessed - the people will have to "loose and disappear." The majority even today, reading these verses, are not inclined to attach serious importance to prophetic foresight, considering the verses as a lyrical longing for the “leaving village”.

The rural population was subjected to especially humiliating enslavement. according to the above-mentioned resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 57/1917 of December 27, 1932 and No. 861 of April 28, 1933, in rural areas, passports were issued only at state farms and in territories declared "regime". The rest of the citizens of the great country, living in the countryside, did not receive passports. Both ordinances established a long, arduous procedure for villagers to obtain passports if they wanted to leave the village.

Formally, the law determined that “in cases where persons living in rural areas leave for long-term or permanent residence in an area where the passport system has been introduced, they receive passports in district or city departments of work peasant militia at the place of their former residence for a period of one year. After a one-year period, persons who have arrived for permanent residence receive passports at their new place of residence on a general basis ”(paragraph 3 of the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933). In fact, everything was different from the beginning. On March 17, 1933, the resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On the procedure for otkhodnichestvo from collective farms" obliged the boards of collective farms "to exclude from the collective farm those collective farmers who arbitrarily, without a registered on the board of the collective farm, agreements with economic agencies (that was the name of the representatives of the administration who, on behalf of Soviet enterprises, traveled around the villages and concluded agreements with collective farmers. - V.P.) abandon their collective farms”6.

The need to have a contract in hand before leaving the village is the first serious barrier for collective farmers. The exclusion from the collective farm could not greatly frighten or stop people who, in their own skin, managed to experience the burden of collective farm work, grain procurement, wages for workdays, hunger. The obstacle lay elsewhere. On September 19, 1934, a closed resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 2193 "On the registration of passports of otkhodnik collective farmers entering enterprises without contracts with economic agencies" was adopted. The traditional term "otkhodniks" was supposed to veil the mass exodus of peasants from the countryside before those who enforced the secret decree and before future historians, so that less attention was paid to the most essential.

The Decree of September 19, 1934 determined that in passportized areas, enterprises could employ collective farmers who had gone into retirement without an agreement with economic agencies, “only if these collective farmers had passports obtained at their former place of residence and a certificate from the collective farm board on his consent to departure of the collective farmer (highlighted by me - V.P.)”. Decades passed. instructions and regulations on passport work, people's commissars and ministers of internal affairs, leaders of the country changed, but this decision - the basis for attaching peasants to collective farm work - retained its practical force7.

As the peasants found the smallest loopholes in the passport legislation and tried to use them to escape from the countryside, the government tightened the law. Circular of the Main Police Department of the NKVD of the USSR No. 37 of March 16, 1935, adopted in accordance with the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. travel (even if they travel to an unpassported rural area) - are required to obtain passports before leaving, at their place of residence for a period of one year”8.

Prior to this, the law obligated villagers to obtain passports only when leaving for a “passportized area”. Of course, even then the authorities understood that the peasants were moving from village to village in search of a place where it would be easier to escape to the city. For example, people learned that a large tractor plant was being built in Chelyabinsk and, consequently, an increased organizational recruitment would be carried out in the surrounding villages and districts.

Therefore, they sought to move to the countryside closer to this city to try their luck. True, Chelyabinsk, like another city in this region - Magnitogorsk, was among the "regime" and people with a "socially alien" origin of the Soviet regime had almost no chance of registering in it. Such people had to look for a quieter place, go to a place where no one knew them, and try to get new documents to hide the past. In any case, moving for permanent residence from one rural area to another was in 1933-March 1935, as it were, a "legal" way of escaping, which the law did not prohibit.

After the adoption of the resolution in February 1935, those who had no hope of a tolerable life in their native village - almost all the peasants who suffered from "collectivization" and did not reconcile with the collective farms - were forced to flee from their native places as before. Why? According to the above police circular, the local Soviet authorities, including the informant network in the village. they were obliged to take under supervision all newcomers to the countryside after April 15, 1935 and to remove from it those who arrived without passports.

The circular did not explain how the undocumented fugitives were to be removed, i.e. left full freedom of action to the arbitrariness of local authorities. Imagine the psychological state of a person who was subject to "removal". To return to one's native village means not only to drag out the tired collective farm again, but also to deprive oneself of any, even illusory hopes for a peaceful existence. After all, "collectivization" with its forced eviction of "kulaks", brutal grain procurements, famine, lawlessness of local authorities fully showed the peasant his collective farm future. The fact of flight from the collective farm could hardly have gone unnoticed by the village authorities, because directly testified to "unreliability".

There was only one way out - to run further, to where, according to people's ideas, the enslavement of the village had not yet reached its maximum, where even the slightest hope loomed. Therefore, the true meaning of the amendment to the passport law (Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 302 of February 27, 1935) was to secure for the runaway peasants who did not have passports their “illegal position” anywhere in the USSR, to turn them into unwitting criminals .

In the villages and villages there were those who staked on the Soviet power, who decided to serve it faithfully, set out to make a career on the humiliation and enslavement of their fellow villagers, to build a better life for themselves by exploiting ordinary collective farmers. There were those who were fooled by the regime, who pecked at generous promises, who did not find the courage to go against them; there were people who, due to age, family circumstances, or physical injury, could not escape, and, finally, those who, back in 1935, understood that you could not run far from Soviet power.

True to its written rule (everything that really relates directly to the life of the people - conceal from it), the government did not publish a new decree. The police circular suggested "widely announcing to the rural population" changes in the passport law "through the local press, through announcements, through village councils, district inspectors, etc."

The peasants, who decided to leave the village in compliance with the passport laws, which they knew from hearsay, faced an intractable task - they had to have an agreement with the enterprise, and then they could get a passport from the police and leave. If there was no contract, you had to bow to the chairman of the collective farm and ask for a certificate of “departure”. But the collective-farm system was not created for this, so that the collective farmers could, of their own free will, quit their jobs and “roam” freely around the country. The collective farm chairman understood this "political moment" well and his task - "to hold on and not let go."

We have already pointed out that the formal rights to obtain a passport were also reserved for residents of "non-passportized areas". This was the definition of the government decree of April 28, 1933. When reading this document, an ordinary person could get the impression that obtaining a passport at a district (or city) police station was the most common thing, but only peasants who were uninitiated in all the subtleties of the matter could think like that.

In the very instructions for passport work, put into effect on February 14, 1935 by order No. 0069 of her People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR G. Yagoda, there were a lot of legal hacks, outwardly (in form) contradictory, but deliberately included in the document with that. to give representatives of local authorities (from the chairman of the collective farm or the village council to the head of the district police department) full opportunity for unlimited arbitrariness in relation to the ordinary collective farmer.

The only "restriction" that could arise was that "supreme interest" when the Industrial Moloch again opened its insatiable mouth wide, demanding new victims - then the local Soviet "prince" was obliged for a while to forget about tyranny and not interfere with the peasants leaving for the city on the so-called "organizational recruitment", i.e. fall under the next prong of the ruthless Machine for stamping the "Soviet man" from the Orthodox Russian people.

Let us give a small example already from the times of the “thaw”. According to the secret decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 959-566 ss dated May 18, 1955, citizens of military age were called up to work at enterprises and construction sites of the USSR Ministry of Construction on the territory of the RSFSR (with the exception of the northern regions). In order not to disrupt the state event, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs instructed subordinate bodies to “unhindered issuance of passports to persons of this category (conscripts. - V.P.). living in a non-certified area, sent to work at these enterprises and construction sites”9.

Paragraph 22 of the instructions for passport work in 1935 listed the following documents required to obtain a passport: 1) a certificate from the house administration or the village council from the place of permanent residence (in form No. 1); 2) a certificate of the enterprise or institution on work or service with the obligatory indication “since what time and in what capacity has he been working at this enterprise (institution)”; 3) a document on the attitude to military service "for all those who are required to have one by law"; 4) any document certifying the place and time of birth (metric statement, registry office certificate, etc.)10.

Paragraph 24 of the same instruction indicated that "collective farmers, individual peasants and non-cooperative handicraftsmen living in rural areas do not submit any certificates of work." It would seem that this clause gives the collective farmer the right not to submit to the police a certificate from the collective farm board about permission to go into “retreat”, otherwise why include a special clause about this in the instructions? But it was an appearance.

In the instructions in the section “Issuance of passports to persons leaving rural areas”, paragraph 46 prescribed: “Persons permanently residing in rural areas where passportization is not carried out, and traveling for more than five days in an area where passportization has been carried out, or entering work in industrial enterprises, new buildings, transport, state farms are required to obtain passports at their place of residence before leaving (before starting work). And further article 47: “The persons indicated in article 46 are obliged to submit to the police all the documents (that means including a certificate from the place of work, i.e. permission from the collective farm board to “departure.” - V.P.) necessary to obtain a passport (see Article 22), as well as a certificate from the board of the collective farm (and individual farmers - a certificate from the village council) on leave to waste”11.

Twice in different forms, so that it is clear to everyone without exception, in one sentence it is emphasized that all peasants (collective farmers and individual farmers) are obliged to have a certificate from local authorities in order to leave the village for a period of more than five days, which practically was the main document of the day of obtaining a passport.

The peasants did not know any of this, because the instruction on passport work was an appendix to the order of the NKVD of the USSR, which had the heading “owls. secret." Therefore, when they encountered it, the ancient legal norm sounded especially cynical to people: ignorance of the law does not exempt from punishment under it.

(To be continued)

Vasily Popov, Candidate of Historical Sciences

NOTES

2 In the country, since 1919, the document proving the identity of a citizen of the RSFSR was labor

books Since 1924, identity cards were issued for a period of three years. Since 1927, the legal force of identity cards extended to such documents as birth or marriage certificates, certificates from house administrations or village councils about residence, service certificates, trade union, military, student cards, documents on graduation from universities. See: Shumilin B.T. Hammered. sickle... M.. 1979.

3 GARF. F. 9401. He. 12. D. 137. L. 54-138.

4 Ibid. L. 59-60. According to police reports, by April 20, 1933, 6.6 million passports had been issued in Moscow and ten more capital and large cities of the country and 265 thousand people were denied documents. Among the outcasts, the police identified 67.8 thousand "runaway kulaks and dispossessed." 21.9 thousand "disenfranchised". 34.8 thousand "not engaged in socially useful work." See: GARF. F. 5446. Op. 14a. D. 740. L. 71-81.

5 GARF. F. 9401. Op. 12. D. 233. T. 3. B.n.

6 Collection of laws and orders of the Workers 'and Peasants' Government of the USSR. No. 21. Art. 116.
7 GARF. F. 5446. Op. I. D. 91. L. 149. Despite that. that the October 1953 regulation on passports
legitimized the issuance of short-term passports to “otkhodniks” for the “term of the contract”, collective farmers
were well aware of the relative value of these documents and regarded them as formal
seasonal work permit. Therefore, they followed the well-established practice of twenty years and.
so as not to contact the police once again, they took certificates from the boards of collective farms and village councils.More
five years after the introduction of the so-called short-term passports for collective farmers, in 1958
The USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted numerous facts “when citizens recruited in rural non-pa-
sports area for seasonal work, are not provided with short-term passports, but
exported outside the regions, territories and republics ... on the basis of certificates from rural Soviets or collective farms.
See: GARF. F. 9401. Op. 12. D. 233. T. 2. B.N.

8 GARF. F. 9401. Op. 12. D. 137. L. 237-237v.

9 GARF. F. 9415. He. 3. D. 1447. L. 99.

10 GARF. F. 9401. Op. 12. D. 137. L. 80-81.

SOVIET PASSPORT SYSTEM BEFORE 1932

A few days after the October coup, the passport system of the Russian Empire was, in fact, declared invalid. On November 11 (24), 1917, the Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) and the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) "On the destruction of estates and civil ranks" was promulgated:

"St. 1. All estates and class divisions of citizens that existed in Russia until now, class privileges and restrictions, class organizations and institutions, as well as all civil ranks, are abolished.

Art. 2. All titles (nobleman, merchant, tradesman, peasant, etc.), titles (princely, county, etc.) and names of civil ranks (secret, state and other advisers) are destroyed, and one common for the entire population of Russia is established , name of citizens of the Russian Republic”.

Since the passport system was based on class division (for different classes there were different accounting rules and different “residence permits”), the decree that abolished him practically destroyed the previous passport system. Moreover, its destruction occurred precisely when the dynamics of population movements (due to war and revolutionary upheavals) was the highest, that is, when the second principle (a person’s attachment to a certain place) stopped working. As a result, the former passport system (that is, the system of accounting and control of the population of the empire) collapsed. Having successfully destroyed the internal passport system, the new government first of all took care of erecting barriers between Soviet Russia and the rest of the world. Already on December 2, 1917, Trotsky issued an order to "visa passports" at the entrance to the RSFSR. From now on, entry into the borders of Soviet Russia was allowed only to persons who had passports certified by the only Soviet representative abroad in those days, Vaclav Vorovsky, who was in Stockholm. Three days later, "until further orders," the People's Commissar of the NKVD, Grigory Petrovsky, ordered that citizens of states that were at war with Russia not leave the RSFSR without the permission of local councils.

With the end of the civil war, the fight against "labour desertion" somewhat subsided. The transition to the NEP required a different strategy in relation to the "labor reserves". The principle of rigid attachment of the labor force to enterprises became a brake on the implementation of plans for economic recovery. This, apparently, can explain the sharp change in the attitude of the authorities towards the system of control and registration of the population (and, above all, the working-age population). The law of January 24, 1922 granted all citizens the right to free movement throughout the entire territory of the RSFSR. This right was also confirmed in Article 5 of the Civil Code of the RSFSR. Moreover, the Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR of July 20, 1923, "On Identification", which was issued soon, opened with a unique article:

“Government bodies are prohibited from demanding from citizens R.S.F.S.R. obligatory presentation of passports and other residence permits that restrict their right to move and settle in the territory of the R.S.F.S.R. […]

A short and completely unique in modern Russian history so-called legitimation period began, when, in fact, people were spared both the need to have a passport and from being tied to a place of residence. This order corresponded to the principles of the new economic policy, providing freedom for the development of market relations. In the legitimation system, a passport becomes a mandatory document only when a citizen travels abroad.

The years 1928-1929 turned out to be a turning point. At this time, the NEP was put an end to and a course towards industrialization and complete collectivization was announced. The country was plunged into a severe food crisis. Hunger has begun. Huge masses of rural residents sought salvation from starvation in the cities. Only a new enslavement of the rural population could stop this movement. It was introduced in 1932 in the form of the Soviet passport system. Of course, its introduction was not dictated solely by the fact that in the famine of 1931-1932, the authorities sought to cut off the rural population from the cities. The transition to a planned economy presupposed the existence of a well-established system of accounting and control of the labor force. And of course, passportization has become the most important tool for “cleansing” the population of large cities and, more broadly, “regime zones”.

A.K. Baiburin. To the prehistory of the Soviet passport (1917--1932)

INTRODUCTION OF PASSPORTS

In order to better account for the population of cities, workers' settlements and new buildings and unload these populated areas from persons not associated with production and work in institutions or schools and not engaged in socially useful work (with the exception of disabled people and pensioners), as well as in order to clean up these populated areas from hiding kulak, criminal and other antisocial elements, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR decide:

1. Establish a unified passport system for the USSR on the basis of the Regulations on Passports.

2. Introduce a unified passport system with mandatory registration throughout the USSR during 1933, covering primarily the population of Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kyiv, Odessa, Minsk, Rostov-on-Don and Vladivostok.

3. To instruct the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR to establish the dates and sequence for the introduction of the passport system in all other regions of the USSR.

4. Instruct the governments of the Union republics to bring their legislation into line with this Decree and the Regulations on Passports.

Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR

M. KALININ

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR

V. MOLOTOV (SCRYABIN)

Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR

A. ENUKIDZE

Decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of December 27, 1932 "On the establishment of a unified passport system for the USSR and the mandatory registration of passports"

LOOK POET

as if

twisted

mister.

mister official

red passport.

like a bomb

like a razor

double-edged

like an explosive

two meters tall.

meaningfully

bearer eye,

at least things

will take it down for you.

inquiringly

looks at the detective

to the gendarme.

With what pleasure

gendarme caste

whipped and crucified

what is in my hands

hammerhead,

sickle

Soviet passport.

I would be a wolf

bureaucracy.

To mandates

there is no respect.

to hell with mothers

any piece of paper.

from wide trousers

duplicate

priceless cargo.

envy

citizen

Soviet Union.

V.V. Mayakovsky. Poems about the Soviet passport.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOVIET PASSPORT

Introduced in 1932, the unified passport system was changed and improved in subsequent years in the interests of strengthening the state and improving public services.

A notable stage in the history of the formation and activities of the passport and visa service was the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of October 4, 1935 "On the transfer of foreign departments and tables of executive committees to the jurisdiction of the NKVD and its local bodies", which until that time were subordinate to the OGPU.

On the basis of the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of October 4, 1935, departments, departments and groups of visas and registration of foreigners (OViR) were created in the Main Police Department, the police departments of the republics, territories and regions.

These structures worked independently during the 30s and 40s. In the future, they were repeatedly merged with the passport apparatus of the police into single structural units and separated from them.

To improve the identification of a citizen of the USSR, since October 1937, a photographic card began to be pasted into passports, the second copy of which was kept by the police at the place of issue of the document.

In order to avoid fakes, GUM has introduced special ink for filling out passport forms and special documents. mastic for seals, stamps for fastening photographs.

In addition, it periodically sent out operational and methodological orientations to all police departments on how to recognize fake documents.

In cases where birth certificates from other regions and republics were presented upon receipt of passports, the police were obliged to first request certificate issuance points so that the latter would confirm the authenticity of the documents.

From August 8, 1936, in the passports of former prisoners "disenfranchised" and "defectors" (who crossed the border of the USSR "arbitrarily"), the following note was made: "Issued on the basis of paragraph 11 of the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933".

By a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of June 27, 1936, as one of the measures to combat the frivolous attitude to the family and family responsibilities, it was established that upon marriage and divorce, a corresponding mark was made in the passports by the registry office.

By 1937, the passportization of the population in certain localities was completed everywhere by the government, 'passport machines completed the tasks that were assigned to them.

In December 1936, the passport department of the Main Directorate of the RKM of the NKVD of the USSR was transferred to the external service department. In July 1937, local passport machines also became part of the departments and departments of the worker-peasant police departments. Their employees were charged with the daily maintenance of the passport regime.

At the end of the 1930s, significant changes were made to the passport system. The administrative and criminal liability for violation of the rules of the passport regime became tougher.

On September 1, 1939, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted the Law "On universal military duty", and on June 5, 1940, by order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR, guidelines were announced that determined the tasks of the police in the field of military registration ...

In the military registration tables of police departments (in rural areas and towns in the relevant executive committees of the Soviets), primary records were kept of all those liable for military service and conscripts, personal (qualitative) records of ordinary and junior commanding staff of the reserve.

Military accounting tables carried out their work in close contact with the district military commissariats. This work continued until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (June 22, 1941).

The development of the passport system in the context of strengthening the administrative-command system in the USSR and during the period of perestroika in Russia

“NEW SELF-HOUSE” IN THE VILLAGE

The villagers were subjected to especially humiliating enslavement, since, according to the above-mentioned resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 57/1917 of December 27, 1932 and No. 861 of April 28, 1933, in rural areas, passports were issued only in state farms and in territories declared “regime”. The rest of the villagers did not receive passports. Both regulations established a long, arduous procedure for obtaining passports for those seeking to leave the village. Formally, the law determined that “in cases where persons living in rural areas leave for a long-term or permanent residence in an area where the passport system has been introduced, they receive passports in the district or city departments of the workers' and peasants' militia at the place of their former residence for a period of for one year. After a one-year period, persons who have arrived for permanent residence receive passports at their new place of residence on a general basis” (paragraph 3 of the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 861 of April 28, 1933). In fact, everything was different. On March 17, 1933, the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On the procedure for otkhodnichestvo from collective farms” obliged the boards of collective farms “to exclude from the collective farm those collective farmers who arbitrarily, without an agreement registered with the collective farm board with economic agencies (that was the name of representatives of the administration who, on behalf of Soviet enterprises, traveled to villages and concluded agreements with collective farmers - V.P.) are abandoning their collective farms” 10 . The need to have a contract in hand before leaving the village is the first serious barrier for otkhodniks. The exclusion from the collective farm could not greatly frighten or stop the peasants, who had time to learn the hardship of collective farm work, grain procurement, wages on workdays, hunger in their own skin. The obstacle lay elsewhere. On September 19, 1934, a closed resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 2193 “On registration of passports of otkhodnik collective farmers entering enterprises without contracts with economic agencies” was adopted. The traditional term “otkhodniks” camouflaged the mass exodus of peasants from collective farm “reservations”.

The Decree of September 19, 1934 determined that in passportized areas, enterprises could hire collective farmers who had gone into retirement without an agreement with economic agencies registered with the collective farm board, “only if these collective farmers had passports obtained at their former place of residence, and a certificate from the collective farm board about his consent to the withdrawal of the collective farmer. Dozens of years passed, instructions and regulations on passport work changed, people's commissars, and then ministers of internal affairs, dictators, bureaucrats, but this decision - the basis for attaching peasants to collective farm work - retained its practical force.

V. Popov. The passport system of the Soviet serfdom

One of the means to monitor 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.