Propiska in the Soviet Union


A propiska was both a residency permit and a migration-recording tool, used in the Russian Empire before 1917 and in the Soviet Union from the 1930s. Literally, the word propiska means "inscription", alluding to the inscription in a state internal passport permitting a person to reside in a given place. For a state-owned or third-party-owned property, having a propiska meant the inclusion of a person in the rental contract associated with a dwelling. A propiska was documented in local police registers and certified with a stamp in internal passports. Residing anywhere for longer than a few weeks without a permit was prohibited.
The USSR had both permanent and temporary propiskas. A third, intermediate type, the employment propiska, permitted a person and his or her family to live in an apartment built by an economic entity as long as the person worked for the owner of the housing. In the transition period to a market economy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the permanent propiska in municipal apartments was one factor leading to the emergence of private-property rights during privatization.

Etymology and history

The Russian verb прописа́ть is formed by adding the prefix про~ to the verb писа́ть. Here this prefix emphasizes the completion of the action, which supposes permission or other related formal action.
Originally, the noun propiska meant the clerical procedure of registration, of enrolling the person into the police records of the local population. Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary describes this procedure as "to enroll in a book and stamp it". Page 20 of the internal passport of the Russian Empire was entitled Место для пропи́ски ви́довъ поли́цiею. Five blank pages were gradually filled with stamps with the residential address written in. It allowed a person to reside in his/her relevant locality. Article 61 of the Regulations adopted on February 7, 1897 imposed a fine for those found outside the administrative unit in which they were registered to live.
As a clerical term, the noun вид is short for вид на жи́тельство. Although translated into English as a "residential permit", in Russian, this combination of words also conveys a presence of the right of a resident to live somewhere. In the sense of a " right" the word vid also appears in the phrase иметь на неё виды. Among many explanations of вид, Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary indicates a "certificate of any kind for free passage, travel and living", mentioning "passport" as its synonym.
Propiska stamps in the passports of the Russian Empire used one of two verbs to describe the civil act committed: яви́ть "to present", or заяви́ть "to claim". Their non-reflexive form clearly rules out the binding of this act to the owner of the document, so it is not the person who appeared in a police department but the passport itself. Vladimir Dahl mentions both verbs in his description of "propiska" procedure as related to passport. Presenting a passport to the officer implied the claim of a person to stay at a designated location.

History

In the Russian Empire, a person arriving for a new residency was obliged to enroll in the registers of the local police authorities. The latter could deny undesirable persons the right to settle. In most cases, this 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 the reintroduction of the passport system in the Soviet Union 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 confirmed the housing rights of its owner. Temporary propiska could be provided alongside a permanent one when a resident had to live outside the permanent residence for a long period of time. As an example, students and workers leaving to study or work in other cities received temporary propiskas at their dorms, apartments, or hostels.
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 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 had lost Soviet citizenship could also 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 1970s, the right of every adult 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 a "work-related" residency permit.

The limit system for migrant workers

The system of a propiska limit existed in the last 30 or so years of the USSR. This was the only means by which outsiders could settle in big cities like Moscow and Leningrad, except marriage. This meant that enterprises in large cities built hostels with dormitories at their own expense, to provide accommodation for migrant workers from smaller towns and rural areas. After long-term employment at an enterprise, a worker could be given an apartment, with permanent "propiska" rights to it. Millions of people were using this system.
The system was introduced with the aim of social fairness in the allocation of housing which was in very short supply, and in a way replaced the Western system of mortgage.
Nevertheless, conditions in these hostels were often poor, worsened by the mandatory security outposts on the hostels' entrance, who would disallow any non-dwellers to the hostel. While reducing the chances of the hostel being used for criminal purposes, it was a major hindrance for relations with the opposite sex and for planning, starting, and raising a family. There was usually no official gender segregation in the hostels, but since many jobs and student specialities were and are gender-imbalanced, there was often de facto gender segregation in the hostels.
Students from rural areas or smaller towns lived in very similar hostels, with the termination of right of abode in the hostel on graduation or on exclusion from their schools.
The native populations of large cities like Moscow often despised these migrant workers, considering them rude, uncultured, and violent. The derogatory term "limita" was used to refer to them.

Details of propiska

The verb "propisat" was used with both the passport and its owner as a direct object. Reciprocally, "propiska" became an object which one can have, e.g.: "to have a propiska in Moscow".
The propiska was recorded both in the internal passport of a Soviet citizen and at local governmental offices. In cities it was a local office of a utility organisation, such as РЭУ, ЖЭК, or ЖСК. The passports were stamped at the local police precinct's Ministry of Internal Affairs office, with the Military Comissariat also involved. In rural areas, it was a selsoviet, or "village council", a governing body of a rural territory. A propiska could be permanent or temporary. The administrations of hostels, student dormitories, and landlords were obliged to maintain temporary propiska records of their guests. The propiska played the role of both residence permit and resident registration of a person.
Acquiring a propiska to move to a large city, especially Moscow, was extremely difficult for migrants and was a matter of prestige. Even moving to live with relatives did not automatically provide a person with a permanent propiska because of a minimum area limit for each resident of a specific apartment.
Owing to Soviet property regulations, the permanent propiska was nearly impossible for authorities to terminate. The only major exception was a second criminal sentence. If the authorities needed to rule in a certain case, they might refuse a permanent propiska for an individual, but usually not revoking the existing permanent propiska.
This also resulted in a situation in which if a spouse agreed to provide the marriage partner with permanent propiska at their apartment, the propiska could not be terminated by divorce, and so exchanging the apartment for two smaller ones was often the only possibility.

Sanitary norm

Spouses could always provide one another a permanent propiska, but explicit consent was required for this. Children were granted a permanent propiska at one of the parents' permanent propiska locations, and this could not be terminated during the lifetime of the child even as an adult, unless the grown-up child voluntarily relocated to another place.
It was not this easy for any other relatives. For such cases, as also for any unrelated people, the so-called "sanitary norm" was used: a propiska would not be issued if it would cause the apartment area to fall below per person. Also, the number of rooms in the apartment was important: two persons of different sex, one or both being 9 years or older, were forbidden to share a single room. If the new "propiska" of the new dweller violated this rule, the propiska would not be granted. This was officially meant to prevent unhealthy overcrowding of apartments and sexual abuse, but since most Soviet people had only a little over per person, it was also an effective method of migration control.
The above norms were very similar to the norms of getting onto the governmental "housing list", which was yet another Soviet form of mortgage. The main difference was that to gain admission to the housing list the space had to fall below the required per person in an existing apartment. This housing list was very slow, and sometimes it took a person's whole life to get an apartment.
As a result of the above, practically the only way for a person legally to improve their living conditions was marriage or childbirth. This was also a serious driving force in migration of young people to "monocities", the new cities built from scratch, often in Siberia or the Arctic, some around a single facility.

Housing property rights and mortgage

In the USSR, there were some so-called "cooperative" apartments, owned on a Western-style mortgage basis, but they were scarce and getting one was very difficult. These were the only apartments which passed down to children by inheritance; in normal apartments, when the last dweller died, the apartment was returned to the government. Since, when the grandparents became older, they usually preferred to live separately from their children and grandchildren, this was usually connected to cheating of the propiska system: the grandparents were registered not for the apartment in which they lived but the apartment of their children, to avoid the return of their apartment to the government after their death.
Violations of propiska system within a single city/town were rarely actually punishable. Also, Moscow employers were allowed to employ people from the vicinity of Moscow living in a given radius from Moscow.
In theory, it was possible to exchange apartments over mutual agreement between parties. Few people wanted to move from a large city to a smaller one, even with additional money, but the exchange of two flats for one in a larger city was sometimes possible. Also, apartment exchange with money involved was something of a "gray area" bordering on a criminal offence, and there was a real possibility that the participants would be prosecuted as for an economic crime, and real estate agents arranging such things were strictly outlawed and prosecuted, living in a "gray area" and hiding their activities from the authorities.
Many people used subterfuge to get a Moscow propiska, including marriages of convenience and bribery. Another way of obtaining Moscow residency was to become a limitchik: to enter Moscow to take certain understaffed job positions, such as at cleaning services, according to a certain workforce quota. Such people were provided with a permanent living place for free, in exchange for working for a certain number of years. Some valuable specialists, such as scientists or engineers, could also be invited by enterprises, which provided them with flats at the expense of the enterprise.
At a certain period, residents of rural areas had their passports stored at selsoviets which prevented them from unofficial migration to the areas where they did not have apartments. This was intended to prevent cities from having an influx of migrants who sought higher living standards in large cities but had permanent registration far away from their actual place of residence.
In 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, propiska was restructured as resident registration, so the modern Russian legislation does not use the terms "propiska" and "propisat". However, it is still used as a colloquial abbreviation for permanent residency registration.

Propiska fee in Moscow

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, just before the collapse of the USSR, the authorities in Moscow introduced an official charge to be permanently registered in Moscow even in their own property. The fee was around US$5,000, around a quarter of the price of a small apartment at that time.
This system lasted several years, causing major public uproar from human rights activists and other liberals, and was abolished after several rulings of the Russian Constitutional Court, the last one in late 1997.

Propiska and education

Students not of the city in question were provided a temporary propiska in the dormitories of their university campuses. After graduation or leaving school early, this temporary propiska was terminated.
In Soviet times, this was connected to a "distribution" system: a mandatory official assignment of the first job placement for the college graduate, where the graduate had to work for around 2 years "to pay back for their education". Only postgraduates were freed from this requirement.
This system was despised as being a violation of freedom, since nobody wanted to relocate from a larger city to a smaller one, but it still provided at least some propiska to a graduate. Also, such a "young specialist" could nearly never be fired, the same as a pregnant woman and other beneficial categories of people.
After the end of the USSR, distribution was almost immediately abolished, leaving graduates with the choice of returning to their home town/village to their parents or other relatives or struggling to find work in the large city where the school was located. To do the latter, some people became "propiska hunters": people marrying anybody with permanent propiska in the large city, just to retain their legal right to stay in the large city after graduation.
Since once provided, the permanent propiska was not revocable, the natives of the large city were very suspicious about senior-age students from smaller towns or villages when it came to marriage.

Modern usage

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the propiska system was officially abolished. The Russian Supreme Court has ruled the propiska to be unconstitutional on several occasions since the fall of communism and it is considered by human rights organizations to be in direct violation of the Russian constitution, which guarantees freedom of movement. Several former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, chose to keep their propiska systems, or at least a scaled-down version of them.
Russia changed propiska to registration, though the word propiska is still widely used to refer to it colloquially. Citizens must register if they live in the same place for 90 days. There are two types of registration, permanent and temporary. A place of permanent registration is indicated on a stamp made in an internal passport, and a place of temporary registration is written on a separate paper. Living in a dwelling without a permanent or temporary registration is considered an administrative offence.
Registration is used for economic, law enforcement and other purposes, such as accounting for social benefits, housing and utility payments, taxes, conscription, and medical care.
Today, registration plays little role in questions of property. In Soviet times, for example, if after a marriage, a wife was registered in accommodation her husband rented from the state, in case of divorce, she could obtain some part of her husband's place of residence for her own usage. In modern Russia, this was mostly abandoned due to apartment privatisation, but if a person has no other place to live, he still cannot be evicted without substitution. This makes many people fearful of registering others on their property title.
At the same time, many documents and rights may be obtained only at the place where a citizen has permanent registration, which causes problems, for example, with obtaining or changing passports, voting, obtaining inquiry papers, which are often needed in Russia. Unfortunately, officials tend to ignore laws that allow people to obtain such things and rights if they exist.
For foreigners, registration is called "migration control" and is stamped on a migration card and/or coupon, approximately one third the size of an A4 paper, which must be returned to officials before departure.
Migration control is much stricter than internal registration. For instance, to employ any Russian citizen, even with the permanent registration out of the city in question, the employer needs no special permit; only the employee must be registered.
Employing unregistered people is an administrative offence for the employer, but penalties are rare: sometimes even Western companies in Moscow employ unregistered people. The penalty is much stricter in the case of foreigners. To employ foreigners, employers must have a permit from the Federal Migration Service.
Belarusian citizens have the same employment rights as Russian citizens in Russia.
In Ukraine, the Constitutional Court ruled that propiska was unconstitutional in 2001 and a new "informational" registration mechanism was planned by the government, though it never came to fruition. Additionally, access to social benefits such as housing, pensions, medical care, and schooling are still based on a propiska as are the location for a driving test and the associated lessons.
In Uzbekistan, even though citizens are issued a single passport, severe restrictions on movement within the country apply, particularly in the capital Tashkent. After the 1999 Tashkent bombings, the former Soviet era restrictions were reimposed, making it virtually impossible to acquire propiska in Tashkent.