Propiska - History

History

In the Russian Empire, a person arriving for a new residency was obliged (depending on the estate) to enroll himself in the registers of the local police authorities. The latter could deny undesirable persons the right to settle (in this case, no stamps were made in passports). In most cases, that would mean the person had to return to the permanent domicile. The verb "propisat" was used as a transitive verb with "vid" being the direct object.

After internal passports were reintroduced in the USSR in the 1930s, the noun propiska was also associated with the result of residential registration. In common speech, the stamp in the passport in which the residential address was written into was also called "propiska". Permanent propiska (Russian: "постоя́нная пропи́ска") somehow confirmed the housing rights of its owner. Temporary propiska (Russian: "вре́менная пропи́ска") could be provided alongside with a permanent one when a resident had to live outside his permanent residence for a long period of time. As an example, students and workers leaving to study or work in other cities received temporary propiska at their dorms.

When reintroduced in the 1930s, the passport system in the USSR was similar to that of the Russian Empire where passports were required mainly in the largest cities and in the territories adjacent to the country's external borders. Officers and soldiers always had special identity documents, while peasants could obtain internal passports only by a special application.

In the USSR, the term Russian: "Вид на жи́тельство" ("vid na zhitelstvo", residential permit) was used as a synonym for temporary propiska, particularly with regard to foreign nationals. By the end of the 1980s, when emigrants from the USSR could return those who lost Soviet citizenship also could apply for an identity document with this title.

The "passportization" of the citizen of the USSR reached its all-encompassing scope only in the 1970s. In the 1930 to the 1950s, the local rural authorities' refusal to issue passports to their residents was an effective way to curb migration to urban areas (according to many Russian people in modern blogs, the rural authorities usually provided such permit after the Second World War and it was usually easy to obtain). Instead, in the 1970s, the right (and obligation) of every adult (from 16) to have a passport promoted the propiska as the primary lever of the regulation of migration. On the other hand, the propiska underlined the mechanism of the constitutional obligation of the state to provide everyone a dwelling: no one could refuse or be stripped of the propiska at one location without substitution with another permanent propiska location.

All employers were strictly forbidden to give jobs to anybody without a local "propiska". To provide themselves an extra labour force, the largest enterprises had to build housing for their workers beforehand. In addition to dormitories, some of them also built conventional apartment blocks for individual resettlement. Registration in these apartments was called "vedomstvennaya" or "sluzhebnaya" propiska ("work-related" residency permit Russian: "ве́домственная" or "служе́бная пропи́ска").