Albert Baiburin's The Soviet Passport was originally published in Russian in 2017 and has recently been translated into English. The book is a remarkably detailed history of the Soviet Union's internal passport, the country's main identity document, presented as a “technology of governance” of the modern state (64). As Baiburin explains, the modern state uses passports to create order—indeed, to exert control over its citizens and even to shape their self-definitions. After the revolution, the Soviet state abolished the tsarist passport; in 1932, it introduced its own. Baiburin argues that the Communist Party did not use passports primarily to modernize. Rather, the Party employed these identity documents to overcome “systemic crisis,” defined by famine-induced revolt, mass migration, and general dissatisfaction (58).
In the hands of the Soviet state, the passport thus became a “social filter”; authorities issued passports only to citizens deemed to be “clean” (59). One's “cleanliness” depended on one's “social status,” “nationality” (or natsional΄nost΄, translated as “ethnicity” in the book), criminal record, and so on, as ultimately defined by personnel divisions of local civil police departments (or the militsiia, translated as “militia”). Cleanliness was relative, however; the state established a number of passport regimes, into which citizens who received passports were categorized. The passport thus became a “super-document” (66). Individuals without one—“former people” and those with criminal records, for example—could not find jobs or housing. Individuals with passports, but of less desirable regime, could work and live only in certain places. Baiburin details how categories such as social status and nationality, and the way in which they were determined, changed over time. The state, he shows, periodically adjusted its social filter. In a key development, the significance of social status decreased over the course of the Soviet era, whereas the importance of nationality increased.
In the book, the filtering-state is not an impersonal entity; Baiburin pays due attention to the individuals who staffed the militsiia personnel departments, for example, and how they worked. The legal framework that structured these officials' activities consisted of two parts: public decrees and resolutions, on the one hand, and secret instructions, orders, and directives, on the other. Together, the public and secret components hardly added up to a clear set of guidelines. The result was a good deal of informal decision-making, arbitrariness, and abuse.
Baiburin, a historical anthropologist, is particularly interested in how Soviet citizens themselves interacted with the passport system, thereby helping to make it. Together with officials working without clear rules, ordinary citizens created what Baiburin calls “Legal System-2” (an informal extension of “Legal System-1,” constituted by official guidelines). Citizens were forced to improvise not only because many rules were secret, but also because some rules—governing the look of photographs, for example—did not exist. It was the space for maneuver afforded by an ill-defined system that, paradoxically, made the system work. Moreover, the identity document produced by this system became meaningful. The Soviet passport became “inextricably linked with the understanding of what it is to be ‘a citizen of the USSR’” (2). In treating this understanding, Baiburin prefers to write not of “identity” but, relying on Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, of “‘identification,’ which refers specifically to a process” (2).
Many of the general conclusions about the Soviet state, legal system, and citizen-state relations in The Soviet Passport will be familiar to scholars of Soviet history. The book's strength is the painstaking detail with which the author has analyzed the passport system and the passport itself. Baiburin does not presume to have written an exhaustive history of the passport, but, in the Russian tradition of topic-based study, he appears to believe this is possible (xvi, 19). This approach, however, often leaves the author with insufficient room for analysis—both for interrogating his conclusions and for productively extending his investigation. Baiburin writes, for example, that citizens without passports were “unclean,” but this seems unnuanced, since collective farmers, the largest cohort of passportless citizens, were a celebrated “class.” Also, many readers may wish to have learned more about how Soviet identity documents relate to those elsewhere. The author gestures to the wider European context (15, 24, 36–37, 59) but does not include a sustained discussion. Indeed, no mention is made of the use of identity documents in other totalitarian states or in the colonial world.
A virtue of the book is the author's use of a non-narrative bureaucratic document to analyze self-perception, the starting point for which is the concept of identification. However, for Brubaker and Cooper, identification does not encompass the individual's sense of oneself. For this, they propose the term “self-understanding.” Baiburin's own approach to the subjective side of things is a bit opaque. In his introduction, he bundles the different approaches of Jochen Hellbeck and Oleg Kharkhordin without comment (14–15). Still, the book remains a valuable step toward further study of how identity documents shaped the Soviet self. How did these documents—not only passports but also employment books (trudovye knizhki) and other texts—influence the self-perceptions of Soviet citizens? Can connections be drawn between the authorial self as constructed in these documents and as fashioned in “freer” forms such as diaries and memoirs (beyond the faint echo or tight embrace of social and national categories)? And what of the work of history, written even in the post-Soviet period? Might a relationship exist between a modern state's effort to comprehensively categorize its population and a scholar's effort to exhaustively chronicle his topic? As we move further along the path that Baiburin has helped to identify—in fact, as we write histories of any kind—this question, it seems to me, deserves consideration.
