Passport system in the Soviet Union

The passport system of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an organisational framework of the single national civil registration system based upon identification documents, and managed in accordance with the laws by ministries and other governmental bodies authorised by the Constitution of the USSR in the sphere of internal affairs.

On 18 December 1917 the Sovnarkom issued the decree[2] which laid the legal and institutional framework for the organisation of registration and statistics of the three major type of life events: birth, marriage/divorce, and death.

Also, due to the non-clerical status of the birth registration, information about "vospriemniki" (godfather and godmother) also disappeared from this document.

Urban population had to obtain ID cards at the local militsiya departments; rural residents were serviced by volost ispolkoms (executive governmental offices).

The document declared that all citizens at least sixteen years old residing in cities, towns, and urban workers' settlements, as well as those residing within one hundred kilometres (62 miles) of Moscow or Leningrad, within fifty kilometres (31 miles) of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Minsk, Rostov-on-Don, or Vladivostok or within the hundred-kilometre zone along the western border of the USSR were required to have a passport with propiska.

Historian Stephen Kotkin argues that the sealing of the Ukrainian borders (caused by the internal passport system)aimed to prevent the spread of famine-related diseases.

[6] On 10 September 1940 the USSR Sovnarkom decreed the Passport Statute (Russian: Положение о паспортах, romanized: Polozhenye o pasportakh).

It enabled special regulations concerning the propiska in the capital cities of the different republics, krais, and oblasts, in state border areas, and at important railroad junctions.

After the First Congress of Collective Farm Workers in the summer of 1969, the Council of Ministers of the USSR relieved rural residents from procedural difficulties in obtaining a Soviet passport.