The Soviet Union exercised stringent control over its borders. Citizens could neither travel freely abroad nor emigrate. For most of the country's existence, it also had no internal freedom of mobility. From 1932 onwards, migration and settlement were regulated by a system of internal passports and residence permits. This was a system of exclusion. In strategically important urban and rural areas settlement restrictions were in place that targeted certain categories of citizens. Until 1974, internal passports – a prerequisite for internal mobility – were not issued to the rural population, which meant it was denied one of the fundamental liberties enshrined in the Soviet constitution.

The inception, operation, and evolution of the Soviet internal passport system are dealt with in this wide-ranging and detailed study by Albert Baiburin, first published in Russian six years ago. The book is subdivided into three parts. The first deals with the history, introduction, and subsequent evolution of the passport system. The second part focuses on the passport as a document and on the information it contained. The third and last part focuses on the reception of the passport by the population and the way it shaped people's existence. It draws on a wide array of sources and secondary literature, including most of the relevant archival records unearthed since the opening up of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s, as well as literary sources, visual documents, and a series of interviews with former Soviet citizens conducted by the author himself.

Tsarist Russia had also known a system of internal passports and settlement restrictions, which served to keep a tag on the mobility of sections of the population with fiscal, service, or other obligations towards the state. A hated symbol of tsarist oppression, it had been abolished right after the 1917 Revolution. The reintroduction of internal passports in the Soviet state in 1932 was therefore by no means a logical step. Traditionally, the historiography has linked its introduction to the threat of an influx of starving peasants to the towns during the famine of 1932/1933, caused by the collectivization of agriculture and used by the Stalin regime to force a peasantry opposed to its policies into submission. The archival record that emerged in the 1990s, after the Soviet archives opened up, already sowed considerable doubt about this explanation. Much more than concerns over starving peasants, the documents revealed a drive to purge urban and other strategic areas of what were called “socially unreliable elements”. Taking up this evidence, in the first part of his book Baiburin argues that this was indeed the main aim of the introduction of the passport system – a social cleansing of urban, industrial, and strategic areas of sections of the population perceived to be a security threat to the Soviet regime, notably “class-alien elements”, people with criminal records, and representatives of the old regime. As such, it was a dress rehearsal, intended or not, for the Great Terror of 1936–1938, which served these very same aims.

Essential to this operation was the division of the country into three zones: strategic urban and industrial areas where strict limitations on settlement were in place; so-called regime areas, urban and industrial areas where the only prerequisite for settlement was the possession of a passport; and, finally, rural areas where the population was not automatically issued a passport, unless so required. Behind the scenes, secret regulations determined who was eligible for settlement in the regime areas and who was not. During the initial introduction of passports in the winter of 1932/1933 this meant the people concerned were refused a passport and expelled from the regime areas. Once the system was in place, they were barred from settling in the regime areas, which included the larger urban centres such as Moscow, Leningrad, and republican capitals. Over the years, the list of regime areas expanded and contracted several times, as the limitations on settlement in these areas periodically started to hamper social and economic development. The categories of the population which were not allowed to settle in these areas also changed over time, but at no point in Soviet history did settlement become completely free. The rural population, meanwhile, started to receive passports in 1974 and were thereby free to move to urban areas, including regime areas, provided of course that they did not belong to one of the barred sections of the population. The general workings of the system were largely known already from publications of the 1990s and early 2000s, but they are now presented in their entirety for the first time in the first part of this dedicated study.

In the second part of the book, Baiburin takes our understanding of the workings of this complicated system a step further by examining in detail what the passport actually looked like, what information it contained, and how this information circulated within the police apparatus to be actually used in determining who was and who was not liable for settlement in a certain area. Moreover, due to his wide array of sources, the author also produces some very valuable insights into how the passport and its restrictions were perceived by the population. Given that practically all the limitations of the passport system were essentially secret, this is a crucial perspective. It allows the author to reach conclusions as to how the population actually perceived the functions of the system, something people could judge only from its outcomes and the practice of its implementation, rather than from the formal rules governing it, since these were secret. Baiburin refers to this popular interpretation of the rules as Legal System 2, compared to Legal System 1, which are the official rules. This is a more widely applicable insight into the way Soviet power worked. As people understood that the hidden rules were more important than the official rules, they modelled their behaviour on the basis of this understanding. And what they saw very clearly, despite all the secrecy, was that the passport system was in the very first place a tool for purging and an instrument of repression, rather than anything else.

The third part of the book, then, deals with the strategies and ploys of the population to circumvent the restrictions in place, bend them to their own needs, or work the system to obtain desired outcomes. This is by far the most original part of the book and it draws heavily on interview material, which provides unique insights. Because of the complicated information flows behind the passport system, with its emphasis on secrecy, rather than efficacy, there were ample opportunities to “trick” the system. These ranged from simple ploys like losing one's passport or moving around a lot to erase potentially incriminating traces to elaborate strategies such as fictitious marriages to gain access to restricted areas.

Over the decades that followed its introduction in 1932, the passport system gradually became less repressive in nature, particularly after the death of Stalin, although its central discriminatory core remained in place until the very end. Meanwhile, the passport also obtained another significance, as a source of pride in being a Soviet citizen, and, given that citizens obtained their first passport at sixteen years of age, as a symbol of adulthood.

Central to the argument of the book is the author's view of the passport and the identification and self-identification procedures around it as providing a unique window on Soviet society at large. As an approach, this has strengths and weaknesses. It makes the book very rich in detail and in the aspects of the system covered, but at times it leads the author to stray too far off topic, into areas that have only a tenuous link to the passport or the passport system, such as the lengthy foray into names and naming practices. Meanwhile, the ins and outs of the functioning of the passport system as an administrative tool, including the evolution of the exact rules and legislation behind it, could have been dealt with in a more systematic manner. The division of the book into three parts does not help in this respect, because it tends to lead to the same arguments being repeated in multiple chapters. This notwithstanding, the book is surely set to become a standard work on the history of the passport system and the regulation of internal migration in the Soviet Union.