Before the revolution, the Tsar in Russia had a system of in-
ternal passports. The people hated this system. These passports
marked the estate from which you came, and this marking deter-
mined the places you could go, with whom you could associate,
what you could be. The passports were badges that granted access,
or barred access. They controlled what in the Russian state Rus-
sians could come to know.
The Bolsheviks promised to change all this. They promised to
abolish the internal passports. And soon upon their rise to power,
they did just that. Russians were again free to travel where they
wished. Where they could go was not determined by some docu-
ment that they were required to carry with them. The abolition of
the internal passport symbolized freedom for the Russian people —
a democratization of citizenship in Russia.
This freedom, however, was not to last. A decade and a half
later, faced with the prospect of starving peasants flooding the cit-
ies looking for food, Stalin brought back the system of internal
passports. Peasants were again tied to their rural land (a restriction
that remained throughout the 1970s). Russians were once again
restricted by what their passport permitted. Once again, to gain
access to Russia, Russians had to show something about who they
were.