Printing and Social Control in Russia 1: Passports

30 Pages·2.065 MB·English

by  Franklin S.

Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237 brill.nl/ruhi
Printing and Social Control in Russia 1: Passports
Simon Franklin
Cambridge University, UK
Abstract
Studies of the history of print in Russia tend to focus on the printing of books, and to a lesser
extent pictures. However, the implications of the spread of information technologies extend
beyond their cultural uses. In particular, the adoption of printing (like the spread of writing
before it, and the spread of electronic and digital technologies in recent decades) has potential
implications for administration and social control. Th is study – the fi rst in a series on related
themes – considers the introduction and uses of print in one category of document, the passport,
in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Th e main sources are legislative. Th e printing of passports
was not just an administrative practice but a legislative issue and a recurrent problem. Th e use of
print for specifi ed types of passport was fi rst decreed in 1726, as an anti-forgery measure, but
successive revisions and modifi cations of the legislation show that precisely the feature which
made print attractive as a device to combat fraud - centralised State control of the means of
production - also created logistical diffi culties which could obstruct the eff ective operations of
the passport system itself. Th e fi nal section of the survey is comparative, setting Russia’s practices
and preoccupations in the printing of passports in a wider European and American context, in
order to identify what may have been distinctive to Russia.
Keywords
Russia ; information technology, administration ; printing ; passports ; 18th century
On 1 February 1726 Catherine I decreed that peasants undertaking cer-
tain types of journey must fi rst obtain a printed permit issued by specifi ed
agents of the State. As far as I am aware, this u kaz was the fi rst Russian law
which required that a category of offi cial document (apart from decrees
themselves) must be issued in printed form, and that handwritten equivalents
were to be regarded as invalid.1 Catherine’s decree of 1 February 1726 is there-
fore a signifi cant, yet largely unnoted, landmark in the history of the social
and political uses of information technology in Russia, an innovation in the
1) Legislation for printing in legislation will be the topic of the next study in this series.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187633110X510428
S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237 209
technology of governance. In the present study I will consider the 1726 ukaz
in three contexts: in relation to preceding passport requirements in Russia; in
relation to subsequent technical specifi cations and modifi cations until the
early 19th century; and in comparison with equivalent – or non-equivalent –
requirements and practices in Western Europe and America. Th e aim is to
map out an under-explored area of Russia’s engagement with the potential of
print, and to consider to what extent its features conform to, or are distinct
from, contemporary practices elsewhere.
I
In the 21st century it hardly needs stressing that changes in information tech-
nology can facilitate, or stimulate, changes in the methods and structures of
social control. Th e administrative potential of digital monitoring, recording,
storage, retrieval and distribution has led to the routine introduction of sys-
tems for identifi cation, surveillance and instant data-checking, which make
Orwell’s dystopic fantasy seem endearingly primitive. In its own time the
assimilation of an earlier information technology - writing - had a transforma-
tive potential which, with appropriate allowances for context, was in many
respects analogous, with wide-ranging implications for the development of
administration and the exercise of power.2 However, the administrative logic
of technological change is not inexorable, and actual interactions between
newer and older technologies have been neither uniform nor predictable.
Diff erent societies and institutions have responded to technological oppor-
tunity in diff erent ways. For example, four-thousand-year-old Babylonian
cuneiform tablets refl ect a far more extensive development of the bureau-
cratic uses of the technology than was the case a millennium-and-a-half later
in ancient Greece.3 In the Middle Ages the kind of written administrative
practices and structures which became established in England were not mir-
rored in the social and institutional uses of writing in contemporary Rus.4
Technological opportunities do not ensure their own exploitation.
2) See e.g. Jack Goody, Th e Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
3) See the essays in Alan K. Bowman, Greg Woolf, eds., L iteracy and Power in the Ancient World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4) Compare M. T. Clanchy, F rom Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (2nd ed.,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and Simon Franklin, W riting, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-
c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
210 S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237
Th is truism is notoriously exemplifi ed in Russia’s initial engagement, or
non-engagement, with the technology of printing. Russia was almost wholly
unaff ected by the “print revolution” in Western Europe from the second half
of the fi fteenth century. For the fi rst hundred years of Europe’s exploitation of
moveable type, Moscow had no local printing whatever. For the next hundred
and fi fty years, local print-production was, with very rare exceptions, limited
to ecclesiastical books plus basic primers. When a more diverse Russian print
culture began to develop in the 18th century, it was structurally distinct from
its counterparts. In much of Western Europe independent printing presses
mushroomed in the post-Gutenberg decades. In Russia print production
remained substantially a State monopoly. Th e implication, put crudely, is that
printing in Russia was more predominantly associated with power. Th is has
been recognized and analysed with regard to the printing of books and control
over the dissemination of ideas.5 However, relatively little attention has been
devoted to the study of printing as a technology for the exercise of power itself,
as a regulatory tool.
Th is preliminary investigation is about one category of administrative doc-
ument: the passport. Th at should be compact enough, but even the vocabu-
lary is slippery. In the fi rst place, the single word “passport” covers a variety of
documents with distinct forms and functions: documents to control travel; or,
by contrast, documents to facilitate travel; requests for safe passage and assist-
ance; attestation of identity or citizenship; documents for general use; docu-
ments for restricted categories of people such as diplomats, couriers, peasants
or foreigners; documents issued by States or by private patrons or institutions;
even documents issued for inanimate objects, such as ships or merchandise.6
Secondly, “passport” has not been the only term for such documents, so a
study of passports may include objects which may or may not have been des-
ignated as such in the sources. Th e word pasport (or pashport ) came into regu-
lar Russian usage in the second quarter of the 18th century. Its fi rst attested
legislative usage dates to 1719, and in the early sources it denotes various
forms of document relating mainly to travel within Russia. Other terms in the
5) See esp. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia,
1700-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); also S. V. Konovchenko, V last’, obsh-
chestvo i pechat’ v Rossii (Rostov-on-Don: SKNTs VSh, 2003).
6) For a basic tabulation of passport functions, both for the holder and for the state, see Leo
Lucassen, “A Many-Headed Monster: the Evolution of the Passport System in the Netherlands
and Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, ed.,
Documenting Identity. Th e Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 237.
S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237 211
18th-century sources include: o tpusknoe pis’ mo , propusknoe pis’ mo ; prokhozhee
pis’ mo , prokhozhaia gramota , proezzhee pis’ mo , proezzhaia gramota , p as , priez-
zhii pas , abshid , erlyk , iarlyk , otpusk , pokormezhnoe pis’ mo . Although each label
may convey a distinct nuance, their usage was frequently interchangeable.
Here I will be more concerned with a document’s forms and functions than
with its label.
Th irdly, the terminological nuances diff er in English (or French, or Italian)
and in Russian. Bilingual dictionaries render “passport” in English as p asport
in Russian, and vice versa .7 Th is impression of straightforward equivalence
is deceptively simplistic. Th e meanings c an be identical, but are not necessarily
or normally so. In Russian the prime meaning of p asport has related to a stand-
ard-issue identity document for internal use,8 whereas the English “passport”
(or indeed the French p asseport , or the Italian p assaporto ) tends to denote a
document used for foreign travel. It is no accident that a recent English history
of the “passport” (mainly in the West) and a recent Russian history of the
pasport (in Russia) are about diff erent things, refl ecting the diff erent principal
meanings of the word: the former largely about a document for cross-border
travel, the latter largely about a document for internal travel.9 English studies
of the “passport” in Russia have adapted to local usage.1 0
Fourthly: whatever the terminology, studies of passport history, whether in
Russia or in general, have tended to pay relatively little attention to the forms,
still less to the technologies, of the actual objects. Th e documents are poorly
documented. As Valentin Groebner comments, “the history of compulsory
identity documents in Europe remains largely unwritten.”1 1 Passports have
7) E.g. Th e Oxford Russian Dictionary. Revised Edition , ed. Marcus Wheeler and Boris Unbegaum,
revised by Colin Howlett (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 333, 1042.
8) See e.g. Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka , vol. 9 (Moscow, Leningrad:
Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1959), col. 260.
9) Martin Lloyd, Th e Passport. Th e History of the World’s Most Travelled Document (Stroud:
Sutton, 2003); V. G. Chernukha, P asport v Rossii 1719-1917 gg. (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii,
2007).
10) Mervyn Matthews, Th e Passport Society. Controlling Movement in Russia and the USSR
(Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1993); note that only the fi rst three pages of
this book deal with passports before 1850; cf. (mainly on the mid-19th century) David Moon,
“Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport System in the Russian
Empire,” in David Eltis, ed., C oerced and Free Migration. Global Perspectives (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002), 325-57.
11) Valentin Groebner, “Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and
Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures and the Limits of Identifi cation, 1400-
1600,” in Caplan and Torpey, ed., D ocumenting Identity , 19.
212 S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237
provided supplementary evidence for studies of issues other than themselves:
issues as diverse as migration, state-formation, liberty and repression, military
recruitment, taxation and censuses, practices of naming, the construction of
identity. Yet as artefacts their history remains obscure. We lack the most basic
reference tools. Ignored by cataloguers and bibliographers, treated as mere
curios - ephemera – by print historians, passports have often barely been
noted, let alone systematically assembled, described and analysed. Th is study
is therefore based mainly on early sources ab out passports: in particular, on
Russian passport legislation. However, the restricted focus is appropriate for
our main theme, since, in passport legislation of the 18th and early 19th cen-
turies, the technology of passport production - specifi cally, the relations
between handwritten and printed documents - turns out to be not merely a
fact but an issue, a problem, a leitmotif.
II
Before the 17th century the dots of evidence on travel documentation in Rus
and Russia are too sparse to be persuasively joined up. Travel credentials have
existed almost as long as travel. A mid-tenth-century treaty stipulates that Rus
merchants were to come to Constantinople with seals as verifi cation of iden-
tity, and that the composition of the delegation as a whole was to be confi rmed
in writing in a letter from the Rus prince; in the late 13th century a prince
issues a letter guaranteeing safe passage for merchants arriving from Riga;1 2
references to p ropusknye gramoty turn up occasionally from the late 15th cen-
tury, and to p roezzhie gramoty (or p is’ ma , or i arlyki , or p amiati ) from the mid-
16th century.1 3 By the end of the 16th century some of these implied
documentary practices were clearly habitual and embedded, but the sources
allow only vague speculation as to their form or extent.
Th e earliest extant normative, legislative Muscovite account of documen-
tary travel requirements coincides with the fi rst phase in the legislative use of
printing. Russia’s fi rst printed code of State laws, the 1649 Ulozhenie of Aleksei
Mikhailovich, mentions three types of travel documents (always p roezzhie
gramoty ): those issued to Russians for internal travel in Russia; those issued to
Russians for travel abroad; and those issued to foreigners for travel to and
within Russia. Th e brief Chapter 6 is specifi cally headed “On documents for
12) Franklin, W riting, Society and Culture , 117, 164, 169.
13) See e.g. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI-XVII vv , vol. 20 (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), 126, 200.
S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237 213
travel to other States” (O proezzhikh gramotakh v inye Gosudarstva ), and its fi rst
article lays down the basic procedural rule: “[anyone wishing to travel abroad]
in Moscow shall petition the sovereign, and in the provincial towns the gover-
nors ( voevody ), for travel documents. Without a travel document he shall not
travel.”1 4 Th e much longer Chapter 18 is not directly about travel documents,
but it presupposes their existence. It deals with the rules for seal fees (p echatnye
poshliny ) and exemptions therefrom; and where there are seals, there are docu-
ments. Article 48 states that seal fees should not be levied on boiars, d eti boi-
arskie and those in the Tsar’s service travelling to the Lower Volga or Siberia in
order to transport essential supplies by offi cial request; and Article 55 affi rms
exemption from seal fees on travel documents issued by the Foreign Aff airs
Chancellery for English, Dutch or North German merchants who are engaged
in legal claims against Russians.1 5 By specifying the exemptions, the U lozhenie
implies the rule: that normally in these contexts travel documents were
required.1 6 However, as will be amply illustrated through the 18th century,
normative, legislative statements are in themselves poor indications of prac-
tice. Th ey cannot show how broadly or consistently, and by what means, such
documentary norms were not merely implied but applied.
III
Turning to the 18th century, we start with documents for travel within the
Imperial borders. Both in the 1649 U lozhenie and, still more explicitly, in
Petrine and post-Petrine legislation, the regulations regarding travel docu-
ments were linked to broader concerns about a need to control the movement
of peoples. Th e Ulozhenie affi rmed that peasants were to remain on the
land, townspeople in their own towns, soldiers with their units. Th e Petrine
decrees took up the theme, giving a range of reasons for the need to register
14) Th e Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 , transl. and ed. Richard Hellie, Pt 1, Text and
Translation (Irvine, California: Charles Schlacks Jr., 1988), 10.
15) Th e Muscovite Law Code , 148, 150. For examples of 17th-century passes issued to foreigners
see e.g. Janet M. Hartley, Guide to Documents and Manuscripts in the United Kingdom relating to
Russia and the Soviet Union (London: Mansell, 1987), 32, 151, 355 (nos. 38.46, 146.365,
269.112, from 1652, 1614 and 1626).
16) Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii , 18, misses this implication of the chapter on seal fees, though
she notes the rather recondite provision of the U lozhenie that released prisoners dispatched to the
periphery (u krainnye goroda ) should be given documents certifying that they had indeed served
their time.
214 S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237
the population and to limit and regulate movement. Vagrancy was abhorrent,
dangerous, and wasteful.1 7 Itinerant peasants (or indeed monks) were said to
be involved in all manner of deception and crime, from petty fraud right
through to sedition, to the detriment not only of the State but also of the
innocent majority. However, the immediate stimuli for anti-vagrancy legisla-
tion were more hard-edged, stemming from two contexts not unrelated to
each other: the military and the fi scal.
Th e Petrine project for the systematic requirement of a State-issued internal
travel document has been traced to an informal memo from 1713,1 8 but the
fi rst relevant legislative acts date from 1719 and relate specifi cally to military
deserters. Decrees of 19 March and 30 October 1719 stressed that desertion
was a very serious off ence, as was failure to report deserters, and that proof of
legitimate travel had to be in the form of written documents. Th e ukaz of 19
March stated that itinerants were to be reported to the authorities unless they
could show o tpuski or poruchnye zapisi .1 9 Th e ukaz of 30 October, “on the
capture of fugitive dragoons, soldiers, sailors and recruits” spelled out the
requirement, and the forms of documentation, in plainer detail: nobody may
travel from town to town or from village to village without the appropriate
travel permit or passport (p ashport : the word here used apparently for the fi rst
time in legislation). In an exemplary demonstration of Russian derivatives
from verbs of motion, the u kaz even makes a distinction between permits for
travel on foot ( prokhozhie pis’ ma ), and permits for travel by horse or carriage
( proezzhie pis’ ma ).2 0
Th e terms and the terminology of both of the 1719 decrees imply that they
were intended to reinforce existing documentary requirements. Th e more
ambitious legislation for internal travel permits was enacted not in relation to
military recruitment and desertion, but in connection with the introduction
of the poll tax.2 1
17) See e.g. E. V. Anisimov, P odatnaia reforma Petra I (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), 116-34.
18) N. P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, P roekty reform v zapisiakh sovremennikov Petra Velikogo. Opyt izuche-
niia russkikh proektov i neizdannye ikh teksty (St Petersburg: St Petersburg University, 1897),
1146; cf. the project of Ivan Filippov on the introduction of police supervision through passports
( otpusknye pis’ ma ), ibid., Appendix IV, esp. 62-3.
19) Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii , series 1 (St Petersburg, 1830; microfi che: Zug,
1971) (hereafter P SZ ) no. 3334; vol. 5: 683.
20) PSZ , no. 3445; vol. 5: 750.
21) Evgenii V. Anisimov, Th e Reforms of Peter the Great. Progress through Coercion in Russia , transl.
John T. Alexander (Armonk, London: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 227-35; also Lindsey Hughes, R ussia
in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 136-39.
S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237 215
Uncontrolled, unmonitored internal travel was a threat to the State’s
income, since it might enable unspecifi ed numbers of people to evade the
census and hence to avoid taxation. A detailed memo setting forth the princi-
ples for an internal passport requirement (here termed a e rlyk ) probably dates
from the early stages of planning for the poll tax.2 2 A decree of 6 April 1722,
on the return of fugitive peasants and their families, stipulated - as a new
requirement - that henceforth any peasant who was allowed to travel in order
to take paid work must be provided with a letter of release, signed by the lord
or overseer ( p rikazchik ) or priest.2 3 Th e fi nal articulation of the passport sys-
tem for peasants was contained in Peter’s p lakat of 26 June 1724, which dealt
with local offi cials (the zemskoi komisar and the permanently stationed p olko-
vnik and offi cers) entrusted with the administration for the poll tax.2 4
Th e underlying assumption and desire was still that peasants should stay in
their villages, monks in their monasteries, priests in their parishes. Movement
was not a right. It was acceptable only by permission, with authorisation. Th e
plakat provided for the exceptions, the circumstances in which some move-
ment was recognised to be desirable, even necessary. Peasant travel for employ-
ment was potentially of benefi t not only to the peasant but also to the landlord
(if it improved the peasant’s ability to pay dues) and indeed the State, which
needed mobile labour for major or seasonal projects. Some professions - mer-
chants, iamshchiki , for example - were intrinsically and of necessity mobile.
Regulation, therefore, needed both to control and to facilitate - to facilitate in
a controlled way.
Th e 1724 plakat established a two-tier system of travel permits, and a form
and procedure for each. Th is system was subsequently regarded as a kind of
constitutional norm, to be augmented or modifi ed in detail but not altered in
essence. Th e principle was that two diff erent levels of authorization and docu-
mentation were required, depending on the scale of journey: one for travel
within prescribed local borders, another for travel which breached internal
(not international) administrative frontiers. Permits for local travel could be
On the administrative structures and changes underlying the legislation in this survey see, espe-
cially, L. F. Pisar’kova, G osudarstvennoe upravlenie Rossii s kontsa XVII do kontsa XVIII veka:
Evoliutsiia biurokraticheskoi sistemy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007).
22) Anisimov, P odatnaia reforma , 253-55.
23) PSZ no. 3939; vol. 6: 639.
24) Hereafter p lakat : annotated edition: R ossiiskoe zakonodatel’stvo X-XX vekov. Tom 4.
Zakonodatel’stvo perioda stanovleniia absoliutizma (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1986),
200-20 (text: 202-12).
216 S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237
issued by the local authority, permits for more distant travel had to be issued
by representatives of the central authorities. Th us, according to the p lakat , a
peasant wishing to travel within his own u ezd , or no further than 30 versts,
needed a permit from his p omeshchik , but a peasant travelling more than 30
versts, or outside his own u ezd , needed a permit from the local representatives
of central government.2 5
Th e landlord’s permit was more than just a letter of assent. Th e plakat speci-
fi ed that it must include features which we would now associate with a formal
identity document or passport, including a fi xed term of validity, and, as a
protection against fraud (here p odlog ), details of the peasant’s personal appear-
ance (height, facial characteristics, distinguishing marks).2 6 Th e “higher” form
of documentation added nothing to the contents but was procedurally more
stringent.
Subsequent supplements and adjustments to the p lakat show that the dis-
tinction between the two forms of documentary requirement and authoriza-
tion was not determined by distance alone, but by administrative boundaries.
Th e higher-level, State-issued documents were, in a sense, issued as permits to
cross borders - albeit not State borders but internal administrative boundaries.
Th e p lakat itself refers to the borders of the u ezd . A decree of the Synod dated
9 September 1732 extended the equivalent principle to travel by monks. For
some years monks had required travel permits from their monastic superior,
but the 1732 decree stipulated that these monastic permits would henceforth
only be valid only for travel within the eparchy. A monk wishing to cross the
borders of the eparchy required a permit from the bishop (as the representative
of the Synod).2 7 Th e strictness of intent (legislation is evidence only of intent,
not of enforcement) can be seen in a further a decree of the Holy Synod dated
14 May 1734. Th is decree was enacted in order to deal with the problem aris-
ing when monks and priests, having been duly authorised to travel to Moscow
to petition the Synod, were sometimes redirected to the governing Synod in
St Petersburg, although their travel documents (p ashporty ), issued by their
abbot or bishop, were only valid as far as Moscow. In these circumstances,
declared the u kaz (and only if the priests or monks could produce valid
and witnessed evidence of the purpose of the journey, and on condition
that they were categorically forbidden to deviate from the most direct route),
25) Plakat , articles 12, 13.
26) Plakat , article 16.
27) PSZ no. 6177; vol. 8: 920 (article 11).
S. Franklin / Russian History 37 (2010) 208–237 217
passports for onward travel to St Petersburg should be issued by the Synod
in Moscow.2 8
In the plakat and the related legislation, the hierarchy of journeys was
matched not only by a hierarchy of authoritative document-issuers but also by
a hierarchy of authoritative documentary form and technique. Th e scale of
technical authority progressed from simple manuscript, at the bottom, up
through signed manuscript, countersigned manuscript, and signed and sealed
manuscript, through to signed and sealed printed document at the top. Th e
procedures of the 1724 p lakat were based on the lower and middle levels of
this hierarchy. Th e permit for local travel was to be in the form of a letter from
the p omeshchik , or in his absence the p rikazchik , countersigned by the local
priest. 29 For travel beyond the u ezd , the landlord’s letter had to be checked for
authenticity, copied into a register and retained by the z emskoi komisar , who
was then to issue his own signed manuscript permit, to be countersigned and
sealed by the commander (p olkovnik ) of the local permanent garrison.
From a distance the 1724 procedure might appear adequately complex.
However, those who wanted to bypass the system apparently found ways to do
so. Just eighteen months later, in the decree of 1 February 1726, Catherine
I introduced her new and momentous change to the formal requirement.
Hitherto all the documents had been hand-written. Catherine’s decree insisted
that the higher-level permits (those issued by the regional authorities as agents
of the State) must be issued on printed forms. Moreover, the blanks for these
forms were to be produced centrally, by the Senate’s own printing house,
whence they were to be distributed to the regions via the Kamer-Kollegiia (the
College of State Revenue - this allocation of institutional responsibility is a
signifi cant indication of the underlying purposes which passport legislation
was conceived to serve).3 0
What prompted Catherine’s technological innovation? One might imagine
that the transition to print would have been a straightforward progression
simply in order to streamline the system in the interests of improved economy,
effi ciency and convenience. In fact, only the fi rst of these advantages was
28) PSZ , no. 6574; vol. 9: 320-21. Chernukha, P asport v Rossii , 33 misstates the provisions of this
decree.
29) Plakat , article 16.
30) PSZ , no. 4827; vol. 7: 565-66. Note, however, a precursor to this legislation, though of a very
limited scope: a brief instruction, issued by the Senate on 23 January 1718, on the printing (by
the Pechatnyi Dvor), of podorozhnye – permits for the use of postal transport – between Moscow
and St Petersburg: PSZ, no. 3145; vol. 5: 532.