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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2019
In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Russian Empire, a new set of state-sponsored provincial newspapers began to include notices seeking fugitives and trying to identify arrested vagrants and found dead bodies. The notices were part of a larger effort to match individuals with specific legal identities based in social estate (soslovie). In principle, every individual subject of the Russian Empire belonged to a specific owner (in the case of serfs) or to a specific soslovie society (in the case of nearly everyone else). The notices were an effort to link people who had left their proper place to their “real” identity. To accomplish this, the notices also made use of a kind of simple biometrics or anthropometrics in order to move beyond an individual's telling of his or her own identity. By listing height, hair and eye color, the shape of nose, mouth, and chin, and other identifying features, the notices were intended to allow for more exact identification. This version of identification developed out of previous practices grounded in the documentary requirements of the tsarist state, and they were slightly ahead of their time in the context of nineteenth-century developments in the sphere of identification practices. They were also distinct from other kinds of anthropometric practices of classification developed at the same time or soon thereafter—where many sought to use physical measurements to classify people by race or by inclination to criminality, the Russian system had no such goals.
1 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (20 July 1840): 226–28.
2 Franklin, John Hope and Schweninger, Loren, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Windley, Lathan Algerna, A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 to 1787 (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar. There are a number of document collections of runaway slave advertisements, including Smith, Billy G. and Wojtowicz, Richard, Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hodges, Graham Russell and Brown, Alan Edward, eds., “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar; Parker, Freddie L., ed., Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1791–1840 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar; and Bly, Antonio T., ed., Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England, 1700–1789 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012)Google Scholar.
3 Waldstreicher, David, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, 2 (1999): 243–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bly, Antonio T., “Pretends He Can Read”: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730–1776,” Early American Studies 6, 2 (2008): 261–94Google Scholar; Cutter, Martha J., “‘As White as Most White Women’: Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term,” American Studies 54, 4 (2016): 73–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 150. On the scale of effort slave owners put into recapturing runaways, see also Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 107Google Scholar.
5 There were such advertisements in the American press, as described in Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (p. 178), but they play a smaller role, at least in the historiography. Similarly, in earlier periods there were owner-placed advertisements of runaway serfs in Russian newspapers, for example a notice in Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti (2 Sept. 1796).
6 E. V. Anisimov, “The Struggle with Fugitives during the Reform Period,” Soviet Studies in History 28, 1 (1989): 59–77.
7 Simon Franklin, “Printing and Social Control in Russia 1: Passports,” Russian History 37 (2010): 208–37, 214.
8 T. S. Mamsik, Pobegi kak sotsial'noe iavlenie: Pripisnaia derevnia Zapadnoi Sibiri v 40–90-e gody XVIII v. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1978); N. V. Kozlova, Pobegi krest'ian v Rossii v pervoi treti XVIII veka (iz istoriia sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi zhizni strany) (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1983); V. G. Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii, 1719–1917 gg. (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2007); Alison K. Smith, “‘The Freedom to Choose a Way of Life’: Fugitives, Borders, and Imperial Amnesties in Russia,” Journal of Modern History 83, 2 (2011): 247–49.
9 For work on this subject, see Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (London: Macmillan, 2003); Gérard Noiriel, ed., L'identification: Genèse d'un travail d’État (Paris: Belin, 2007); Valentine Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, Mark Kyburz and John Peck, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Vincent Denis, Une histoire de l'identité: France, 1715–1815 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008); Craig Robertson, “Four Documents, a Non-Citizen, and a Diplomatic Controversy: The Documentation of Identity in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Historical Sociology 22, 4 (2009): 476–96; and Jean-Pierre Gutton, Établir l'identité: L'identification des français du moyen âge à nos jours (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010). Nearly all of these works start with the story of Martin Guerre as interpreted by Natalie Zemon Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
10 The quote is from Gerard Noiriel, “Introduction,” in L'identification, 8–10. On registry and soslovie, see Alison K. Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estate in Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17–18, 192–93.
11 Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
12 Histories of journalism in Russia usually date its first newspaper to 1702, when Peter I established an official St. Petersburg News (Vedomosti) to disseminate information about foreign affairs and domestic issues. See B. I. Esin and I. V. Kuznetsov, Trista let otechestvennoi zhurnalistiki (1702–2002) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 2002); P. N. Berkov, Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952); L. P. Gromova, ed., Istoriia russkoi zhunalistiki XVIII–XIX vekov (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2003).
13 Valerie Kivelson, “Merciful Father, Impersonal State: Russian Autocracy in Comparative Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1997): 635–63, 649.
14 E. V. Anisimov, Podatnaia reforma Petra I: vvedenie podushnoi podati v Rossii, 1719–1728 gg. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982). Neither of these duties applied to nobles. Later other privileged groups, like merchants, were excluded from the soul tax-paying population.
15 The decrees instituting the first census are in Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, 45 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830) (henceforth PSZ) vol. 5, no. 3245 (26 Nov. 1718); no. 3287 (22 Jan. 1719); no. 3474 (21 Dec. 1719); and vol. 7, no. 4343 (5 Nov. 1723).
16 PSZ vol. 15, no. 11364 (28 Nov. 1761).
17 PSZ vol. 22, no. 16188 (21 Apr. 1785), section 56. Benefits of town status might include access to education or the freedom to engage in sorts of trade prohibited to peasants. Catherine released a parallel charter to the nobility on the same day, and it, too, stated that those not listed in the heraldry books of a given province did not enjoy the “privileges” of noble status in that province. PSZ vol. 22, no. 16187 (21 Apr. 1785), section 69.
18 PSZ vol. 21, no. 15853 (20 Oct. 1783).
19 PSZ, vol. 7, no. 4533 (26 June 1724). He made these rules not in a decree (ukase), but in a broadsheet (plakat) and as a result the documents came to be known as plakatnye passports.
20 PSZ vol. 7, no. 4624 (n.d., 1724), section 39.
21 An incomplete list includes PSZ vol. 7, no. 4742 (30 June 1725); no. 4931 (15 July 1726); vol. 8, no. 5333 (12 Sept. 1728), section 47; vol. 9, no. 6696 (26 Feb. 1735); vol. 11, no. 8706 (17 Feb. 1743); vol. 12, no. 8954 (31 May 1744); vol. 14, no. 10450 (21 Aug. 1755); vol. 18, no. 12968 (22 Aug. 1767); and vol. 21, no. 15226 (15 Sept. 1781).
22 PSZ vol. 7, no. 4827 (1 Feb. 1726). Similar prohibitions continued into the nineteenth century, as found in PSZ vol. 27, no. 20595 (20 Jan. 1803). On the printed blanks, see Franklin, “Printing and Social Control,” esp. 223.
23 PSZ vol. 12, no. 9076 (28 Nov. 1744).
24 Clothing and beards (or their lack) marked individuals as part of larger social groups; Christine Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700–1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Brands or other disfigurations marked them as criminals; Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). Paper seemed the only way to identify individuals as individuals. For a case that highlights the great difficulties that faced authorities in determining whether papers were trustworthy, see Alison K. Smith, “False Passports, Undocumented Workers, and Public (Dis)Order in Late-Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Journal of Social History, forthcoming.
25 PSZ vol. 17, no. 12506 (9 Nov. 1765).
26 PSZ vol. 28, no. 21939 (23 Oct. 1805).
27 PSZ vol. 31, no. 24516 (9 Feb. 1811); vol. 32, no. 25516 (14 Jan. 1814); no. 25746 (10 Dec. 1814); and vol. 38, no. 29328 (23 Feb. 1823), sections 12, 20; Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, 2d collection, 55 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830–1885) (henceforth PSZ 2), vol. 3, no. 1893, pp. 14, 15 (22 Mar. 1828).
28 PSZ 2 vol. 5, no. 4036 (27 Oct. 1830); PSZ 2 vol. 12, no. 10304 (3 June 1837).
29 PSZ 2 vol. 5, no. 4036, section 12. The 1837 decree put the list slightly differently: “Notices of fugitives, when those notices come from the government; notices of arrested vagrants, with a description of their features, notices of found corpses, also with a description of their features”; PSZ 2 vol. 12, no. 10304, section 88.
30 Susan Smith-Peter has discussed the ways that practices varied in the unofficial sections of the Vedomosti, which covered a far wider range of topics, in “The Russian Provincial Newspaper and Its Public, 1788–1864,” Carl Beck Papers 1908 (2008): 8–12. These variations, however, appear in the official sections, which suggests there was a greater degree of local variation in even supposedly uniform “official” discourse.
31 The discussion below is based on an examination of all notices that include physical descriptions published in January and July of 1840 across the five provinces, and in the January and July issues of the Kostroma newspaper from 1838 (the year it began) to 1855 (the year Nicholas I died, which is often viewed as the start of the era of the Great Reforms).
32 “O bezhavshem krest'ianine Artamonove,” KostromaGV, Pribavlenie (4 Mar. 1844): 34.
33 These are the cases of Ivan Mikhailov, a vagrant “not knowing his descent” captured in Viatka province, reported in Kievskie GV (12 Jan. 1840): 48–49; and Kostromskie GV (20 Jan. 1840): 269–28; and of Abdul Altigramov, Fedor Pavlov, and Ivan Iakovlev, vagrants captured in Nizhnii Novgorod, reported in Kievskie GV (7 July 1840): 1085–86; and Kostromskie GV (20 July 1840): 226–28.
34 Both newspapers also cited their sources. They regularly reported that the notices they were reprinting came from other provincial newspapers.
35 On examples in Russia, see Smith, “‘The Freedom to Choose,’” 265–68; on the “accident of location” as a reason for running away in the antebellum United States, see Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 25.
36 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Tverskie GV (27 Jan. 1840): 23–24; “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (6 July 1840): 214–15; (13 Jan. 1840): 16–17, 16; “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (5 July 1840): 1085–86.
37 “O naidennom mertvom tele,” Kievskie GV (19 July 1840): 1150; “O mertvom tele,” Iaroslavskie GV (5 Jan. 1840): 5.
38 “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (12 Jan. 1840): 49; “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (6 Jan. 1840): 6.
39 “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (12 Jan. 1840): 49; “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (13 Jan. 1840): 16–17; “Gubernskie pravleniia v vedomostiakh svoikh publikuiut, poimany za ne imenie pis'mennykh vidov brodiagi,” Viatskie GV (20 Jan. 1840): 17–19.
40 “Ob otyskanii raznykh lits,” Kievskie GV (19 Jan. 1840): 91–92, 92.
41 This followed general patterns at the time; family names were universally used by the nobility, but rarely by peasants and only sometimes by townspeople. For a discussion of naming practices in Russia at that time, see Alexander M. Martin, Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 244–48. On names and the question of identification more generally, see Jane Caplan, “‘This or that Particular Person’: Protocols of Identification in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 49–66.
42 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (20 July 1840): 226–28; (25 July 1842): 231–34; (30 July 1843): 287–88.
43 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostroma GV (26 July 1841): 219.
44 Ibid. (13 Jan. 1840), 16–17; (20 Jan. 1840), 26–28; (27 Jan. 1840), 35–36; (24 Jan. 1842), 28.
45 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Tverskie GV (27 July 1840): 198.
46 “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (26 July 1840): 1194; (5 July 1840): 1085; “O poimannyikh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (10 Jan. 1842): 10–14.
47 “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (12 Jan. 12, 1840): 49–50.
48 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (3 Jan. 1842): 5–6.
49 Ibid. (5 July 1841), 193–95.
50 Ibid. (1 Jan. 1843), 7–8.
51 Ibid. (10 Jan. 1842), 10–14.
52 “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (5 July 1840): 1085.
53 Ibid. (26 July 1840), 194. He also went by two names: Maksim Lavrenenko and Mikhail Shkorovarov.
54 Ibid. (19 Jan. 1840), 93.
55 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (27 Jan. 1840): 35–36.
56 Ibid. (25 July 1842), 233.
57 The words used varied: nazyvavshiisia, pokazavshiisia, skazyvaiushchii, pokazal sebia, nazval sebia, imenuiushchiisia.
58 Both in “O poimanykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (11 July 1842): 216–18.
59 Ibid. (15 Jan. 1844), 26.
60 Ibid. (17 Jan. 1842), 21–22.
61 “O brodiagakh,” Kievskie GV (5 July 1840): 1084–85.
62 “O poimannykh brodiagakh,” Kostromskie GV (20 Jan. 1840): 26–28.
63 Ibid. (25 July 1842), 231–34.
64 Ibid. (4 July 1842), 231–34.
65 Ibid. (30 July 1843), 287–88.
66 For example, a series of reports from Minsk province, re-reported in the Kostroma newspaper, in ibid. (30 July 1838), 269–70.
67 See the website “Documenting Runaway Slaves,” at http://aquila.usm.edu/drs/ (accessed 25 Aug. 2014). Even the one advertisement placed by a serf-owner trying to recover his fugitive serf adds almost no details about the man, stating simply that he was literate and that he had stolen from his owner upon his flight. “O bezhavshem.”
68 These resemble slightly earlier descriptions in the British press; see Mark S. Dawson, “First Impressions: Newspaper Advertisements and Early Modern English Body Imaging, 1651–1750,” Journal of British Studies 50, 2 (2011): 277–306.
69 “Ob otyskanii begletsov i prestupnikov,” Iaroslavskie GV (26 Jan. 1840): 38–42.
70 PSZ, vol. 7, no. 4533, section 16.
71 PSZ vol. 8, no. 6210 (4 Oct. 1732). Later decrees that reiterated the need to include such descriptions in passports and other documents include PSZ vol. 11, no. 8443 (14 Sept. 1741); and no. 8655 (1 Nov. 1742). This places the introduction of such practices slightly before similar descriptions became widely used in French passports. Vincent Denis, “Individual Identity and Identification in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Ilsen About, James Brown, and Gayle Lonergan, eds., Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–30, 26.
72 PSZ vol. 28, no. 21939 (23 Oct. 1805).
73 Tsentralnyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy (henceforth TsIAM) f. 397, op. 1, d. 121.
74 TsIAM f. 2, op. 1, d. 87, ll. 1–1ob.
75 TsIAM f. 2, op. 1, d. 1625, l. 18ob (1824).
76 TsIAM f. 2, op. 1, d. 1709, ll. 9, 14 (1825).
77 Ivan Morkov, Vseobshchii striapchii, ili ruchnoi sudoobriadnik, soderzhashchii v sebe: formy, primery i obriady kak i na kakoi bumage pishutsia, ili sleduet pisat', a potom v kakie imenno iz Prisutstvennykh Mest po ustanovlennomu zakonam poriadku pred'iavliat' i podavat' (St. Petersburg: Ivan Glazunov, 1815), II, 250–51.
78 TsIAM f. 32, op. 9, d. 17, l. 4 (1813).
79 TsIAM f. 32, op. 9, d. 6, l. 2a (1812); d. 9, l. 2 (1805); d. 138, l. 2 (1813); d. 145, l. 2 (1812).
80 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv f. 491, op. 1, 2, d, l. 3 (1784); the same file contains a notice given to a soldier's wife allowing her to live and work in St. Petersburg, which includes her physical description.
81 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Iaroslavskoi Oblasti f. 79, op. 2, d. 149, l. 1.
82 Materialy dlia istorii krepostnogo prava v Rossii (Berlin: Behr, 1872), 41–42.
83 Jordan, White over Black, 108.
84 Simon A. Cole, “Twins, Twain, Galton, and Gilman: Fingerprinting, Individualization, Brotherhood, and Race in Pudd'nhead Wilson,” Configurations 15, 3 (Fall 2007): 232–33; Jean-Lucien Sanchez, “Alphonse Bertillon et la méthode anthropométrique,” Sens-dessous 1, 10 (2012): 64–74; Roxanne Panchasi, “Graphology and the Science of Individual Identity in Modern France,” Configurations 4, 1 (1996): 1–31.
85 Greggor Mattson, “Nation-State Science: Lappology and Sweden's Ethnoracial Purity,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, 2 (2014): 320–50.
86 On the urge to classify, see Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
87 Mordini and Massari, “Body, Biometrics and Identity,” 490.
88 Ibid.,” 495.
89 Lyon, David, “Biometrics, Identification and Surveillance,” Bioethics 22, 9 (2008): 500CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
90 Ilsen About, James R. Brown, and Gayle Lonergan, “Introduction,” in Ilsen About, Brown, James, and Lonergan, Gayle, eds., Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–13Google Scholar, 1–2.
91 This reflects an idea that the act of registration can be empowering and not just subjugating. See Szreter, Simon and Breckinridge, Keith, “Recognition and Registration: The Infrastructure of Personhood in World History,” Proceedings of the British Royal Academy 182 (2012): 21–24Google Scholar.