For decades, the Soviet Union denied rural people the right to move freely. City residents got passports.
Peasants didn’t. At 16, most village teens were automatically pushed into collective farms.
Photo: Zhelezniak M. via Radio Liberty
Writer Olga Bergholz captured the truth in her diary. A boy told his teacher: “It’s still like serfdom. Everything goes to the state. We get the scraps.”
Image: Olga Bergholz’s diary.
Without passports, peasants couldn’t travel, settle in cities, or choose better work. In Ukraine, cities filled with resettled Russians, pressuring Ukrainians to abandon their language.
Image: “Into a new apartment” by Alexander Laktionov, 1952.
By the late 1960s, the system was failing. In 1974, rural citizens finally got passports, but city access was still tightly restricted.
In a Soviet militia precinct, checking the registration. Photo: TASS
By 1981, 50 million peasants finally had passports—documents they carried into the Soviet Union’s final years.
Photo: Sergey Titov/Sputnik