Keeping Soviet citizens in place

Press, 24 June 1986, Page 20

Keeping Soviet citizens in place

From ‘The Economist,’ London

Once the scale of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl was known, the evacuation of the surrounding towns ought to have gone like clockwork. It didn’t.

Reports of panic by local officials have since found their way into the Soviet press. And on June 11 it was announced that two elderly ladies from the town of Pripyat, right by the stricken reactor, locked themselves indoors and avoided evacuation for a month.

Those who were successfully bused away to safety will have caused just as big a headache to the authorities. Moving was

never meant to be easy in the Soviet Union.

Every Soviet citizen aged 16 years and over is obliged to carry an internal passport. Not so much an identity card, more a logbook of life, the document records not only name, date of birth and nationality, but also marriage, divorce, dependent children, military service and place of residence. It helps the local police to keep frack of who lives where, and must be produced at almost any encounter with officialdom: when applying for a job, changing address, registering at a hotel, collecting a pension or

picking up mail at the local post office.

The system of internal passports was re-established in 1932 (a similar system had existed in Tsarist days) and was designed to stop an uncontrolled migration of people from the countryside to the cities during Stalin’s collectivisation campaign. Indeed, collective farmers were not even allowed to possess such an internal passport until 1974, so that officially they were unable to move at all. Even today, permission to live in some cities, including Moscow and Leningrad, but also the capitals of the 14 non-Russian republics, is strictly controlled.

The result is a bewildering and often vicious circle. Officially

nobody can move to a new town to find work without a residence permit stamped in his or her passport. These can be had only by people who already have accommodation in the area.

But it is impossible to get on to a local housing list without a residence permit. Factories that want to attract new workers therefore first have to help find accommodation for them.

The only other way to get the right legally to reside in cities such as Moscow is to marry somebody who already lives there (and money has been known to change hands in return for that privilege). Being caught without proper papers can mean a fine, and imprisonment for

persistent offenders. From time to time there has been talk of scrapping the system, or else amending it. Some people question why a person’s nationality has to be stamped in the passport, when, 70 years after the revolution, everybody ought to be a Soviet citizen. Such questions do not go down well among the smaller nationalities, which are trying to defend their customs against Russification.

Although officially nationality is traced through the mother in the Soviet Union, people with parents of different nationalities can choose at the age of 16 which one they want to put in their passports. The passport system is not there just to keep bureaucrats happy. According to some reports, an unpublished decree last year has given the authorities the right to forbid anybody with a prison record from even visiting Moscow. That may help to keep the capital’s streets safe from former burglars and rapists. It could also be a way of keeping former political prisoners out of the capital, where they can make contact with foreign journalists and diplomats. Even for those Soviet citizens who keep their noses clean, another result of all the red tape is that people who already have the much-prized permission to reside in Moscow are reluctant to leave.

This may cause some problems for Mr Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic programme. Attempts to streamline the central ministerial bureaucracy in Moscow were supposed to release talented officials who could then be redeployed out in the republics, where more of the economic decisions are to be taken. It is a committed Moscow bureaucrat who volunteers to have Baku or Tashkent stamped in his passport.

Copyright — The Economist.