Passport system in the Soviet Union

The passport system of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an organizational 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 authorized by the Constitution of the USSR in the sphere of internal affairs.

The foundations of the passport system of the Russian Empire, inherited by a Russian Republic in March, 1917 for a short period of 8 months, were scattered with the October Revolution, which dismantled all the state apparatus, including police as one of the backbone elements of this system. The allegation that in the first post-revolutionary years an internal passport system did not exist at all neither in the RSFSR, nor in the USSR (established December 29, 1922), is only partially true: old passports were not made null and void in the function of an identification tool. However, by 1917 a known part of the adult population had no passports at all: many peasants, soldiers and officers, prisoners, etc.

"Metrika" (Russian: метрика), an excerpt from the birth registration books (Russian: Метрическая книга) was a kind of identity document available to everybody.

On December 18, 1917 the Sovnarkom issued the decree which laid the legal and institutional framework for the organization of registration and statistics of the three major type of life events: birth, marriage/divorce, and death. Once run by the church, all this paperwork was transferred to the state authorities.

As it was before the revolution, the "metriks" records (both in the books and in the excerpts given to the parents) contained such critical identification parameters as: date and place of birth, name and sex of a child, full names of his parents (if known). By default, a child inherited a surname of its father (if known), mother (if single); however both parents were not limited in their choice. Unlike the pre-revolutionary "metriks", civilian documents of new Soviet authorities said nothing of parents' religion. Also, due to the non-clerical status of the birth registration, an information about "vospriemniki" (godfather and godmother) also disappeared from this document.

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