Vorovskie pasporta (Russia)
| Vorovskie pasporta đ·đș | ||
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| Location: Russia | ||
| Definition: Counterfeit passports | ||
| Keywords: Russia â FSU â Peasants â Information â Migration â Employment â Work â Data | ||
| Author: Andrey V. Gornostaev | ||
| Affiliation: Center for Imperial History, NRU Higher School of Economics, Russia | ||
| Website: https://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/401776642 | ||
By Andrey V. Gornostaev, Center for Imperial History, NRU Higher School of Economics, Russia
| Several early modern states invented documents to control and regulate the movement of persons both within official borders and outside around 16-17th centuries. The emergence of identity documents was linked with the statesâ aspirations to improve their capacity to extract resources from their populations in the form of taxes, military conscripts, and labour. At the same time, identity documents facilitated the policies of exclusion, containment, and surveillance of various undesirables on the grounds of race, religion, age and other socioeconomic factors. Information on places of origin and residence, included in passports, has become a valuable tool to distinguish subjects from foreigners or citizens from non-citizens, and, as such, enabled the emergence of nation-states (Torpey 2000: 1-7). |
According to the 1649 Law Code, there were three types of travel documents, called proezzhie gramoty: those permitting Russians to travel abroad, those granting foreigners right to travel to and within Russia, and those enabling to move within Russia for work or business (Franklin 2010: 212-213). While the first two pertained only to a small fraction of official travelers and merchants, the latter affected peasants and townspeople who constituted much of the population and who were also permanently confined to their places of residence by the Code of 1649 (see also Mertvye Dushi (Russia)). According to the household census of 1678, 436,000 peasant households ended up in the hands of nobles, 148,000 belonged to the church establishment, 140,000 were owned by the court, and 61,000 were independent taxpaying peasant households residing in the north (Hellie 1990: 308-9). Regardless to which category a person belonged, carrying such travel documents became the only way to prove the legality of their departures. However, local authorities rarely enforced this requirement, and thousands of people roamed around the country without any papers.
The institutionalization of the internal passport regime occurred during the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725) when the imperial state was looking for better ways to collect accurate information about its population and improve the mechanisms of exploitation and mobility control. Between 1719 and 1724, the government carried out a series of measures in this direction: the first population census, the poll tax, and, finally, internal passports (Anisimov 1982). Not only did these measures bring the necessary information to the governmentâs disposal, but they also forced tsarâs subjects to comply with the new passport regime.
In 1724, the government drew an official line between those who traveled within their districts â not further than approximately 30 kilometers â and those who searched for jobs outside. For the former, a written permit was sufficient on the condition that it was signed by a landlord, estate manager, or a village elder, and specified travel for work as its bearerâs objective. The peasants and townsmen intending to work outside of their districts had to obtain formal passports issued on special blanks, signed and sealed by government officials and containing descriptions of their holdersâ physical features, such as height, hair and beard color, as well as distinctive marks. Only men could apply for such passports, which could be valid for up to three years (PSZ, vol. 7, no. 4533). The passport holders had to present them to employers and local authorities in any place where they stayed or sought work.
The introduction of such restrictions led to the problem of passport forgery. Numerous reports about counterfeit passports (vorovskie pasporta) prompted the 1726 decree that all passports had to be printed rather than written. Despite this regulation, local authorities struggled with its enforcement because of a shortage of printed blanks. To meet the demand from many itinerant workers who performed seasonal or temporary labor, officials were forced to continue issuing handwritten passports. Such documents were simple to forge as testified by archival records. Counterfeit passports were available virtually everywhere: in taverns, on bazaars and fairs, on barges, and along the roads. In the town of Viazniki in 1727, for instance, Dmitrii Khabarov produced several false passports for his fellow townsmen in his own house that he signed and sealed himself (Kosheleva 2016, 330). In 1743, the fugitive peasant Semen Akhreianov encountered a barge hauler somewhere near Nizhnii Novgorod who asked whether Akhreianov owned a passport. After hearing a negative response, the barge hauler brought him to a riverboat and wrote him a passport, which included the fugitiveâs real name, physical features, and place of residence. The barge hauler then authenticated the passport by sealing and signing it for Vologda district officials. (RGADA, f. 439, op. 1, d. 10, ll. 19-20).
In order to tackle the issue of forgery, Empress Elizabeth restated in 1743 that only passports on official printed blanks were valid (PSZ vol. 11, no. 8,706). The report from the Don region in 1744, however, demonstrated that forgers had already adjusted the process of production, seeking for different ways to imitate printed letters. A barge hauler under the name of Mikhail Ivanov was found to own a printed passport. Although he insisted that the passport was authentic, the investigation deemed it suspicious. The accusedâs further torture revealed that his passport was made by a certain Osip, whom Ivanov encountered in a cossack village. Osip âput a copy of an official printed passport over a blank piece of paper and used a small tool to engrave the words on the form. Then he took a quill, transcribed the words, wrote his [Ivanovâs] name, and signed the passportâ (RGADA f. 248, op. 6, kn. 346: 129-130).
Some employers were also not that interested in looking closely whether the personâs passport was authentic or could even facilitate his acquisition of a fake one. The serf Averian Sokolov bought a passport from a scribe at a local bazaar in Simbirsk in 1741. While trying to get hired to work on a ship, Sokolov showed his passport to the manager who immediately identified it as fake yet also reassured Sokolov that it made no actual difference: âWhat is important is not that this passport is counterfeit, but that it is printedâ (Gornostaev 2020, 263).
The problem of forgery persisted well into the late eighteenth century. In 1798, the Gatchina authorities uncovered a wide network of people with counterfeit papers who resided in the town. The investigation that began with the discovery of the two main forgers, Aleksei Zmievatskii and Prokhor Popov, brought for questioning over a hundred people of dubious status. Most men claimed to have left their places of residence with proper documents. But after their passports expired, they had to choose whether to live without official papers, acquire counterfeit ones, or travel home to renew passports (Smith 2020). Although proper, the latter option was time-consuming and difficult as many workers resided far from Gatchina and would have to leave their current employment, losing time, money, and opportunities. For them, falling into illegality with counterfeit papers or without papers at all was the only viable choice.
Even during the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the transition from handwritten to printed passports was far from complete, and cases of forgery were still common. In 1803, the emperor once again decreed that only printed travel documents were legal, after the government learned that several local authorities continued issuing handwritten passports due to the lack of official blanks (Franklin 2010: 223). With such passports still in circulation, forgers could continue to practice their craft and help rural and urban dwellers overcome restrictions on geographic mobility in the Russian Empire.
As tools of social control, passports could only be of limited utility in the early modern period. Without modern technological advances, such as watermarks, photographs, anti-scan patterns, and many others, passports lacked essential features that could both facilitate identification of individuals and protect passports from forgery. At the same time, the Russian imperial governmentâs continuous efforts at maintaining the passport regime underscore the essential role of these documents in the regulation of population movement despite their shortcomings.
References
Anisimov, E.V. 1982. Podatnaia reforma Petra I: vvedenie podushnoi podati v Rossii 1719-1728. Leningrad
Franklin, S. 2010. âPrinting and Social Control in Russia 1: Passports,â Russian History 37, no. 3: 208-237
Gornostaev, A.V. 2020. Peasants âon the Runâ: State Control, Fugitives, Social and Geographic Mobility in Imperial Russia, 1649-1796. PhD Dissertation, Georgetown University. Washington, DC
Hellie, R. 1990. âCommentary on Chapter 11 (The Judicial Process for Peasants of the âUlozhenieâ of 1649.â Russian History 17, no. 3: 305-339
Kosheleva O.E. 2016. ââBez pashportov i s vorovskimi pashportyâ, ili mozhno li obmanutâ gosudarstvennyi control,ââ in Obman kak povsednevnaia praktika. Individualânye i kollektivnye strategii povedeniia, ed. O.I. Togoeva and O.E. Kosheleva.: 323-348
Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (PSZ). 1830. 45 vols. St. Petersburg
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA)
Smith, A.K. 2020. âFalse Passports, Undocumented Workers, and Public (Dis)Order in Late-Eighteenth-Century Russia,â Journal of Social History 53, no. 3: 742-762
Torpey, J. 2000. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge University Press