#5
Miami Herald
March 24, 2002
Russian passports vital, those without them find
BY SARAH KARUSH
Associated Press
MOSCOW - Alexander Lemekhov, a homeless Muscovite, has one prized possession that he jealously guards: a thin booklet with an official Russian seal, a glued-on photograph and his name and date of birth.
It's a Russian internal passport, something most of Lemekhov's countrymen take for granted.
Although called a passport, this all-important document is not used for crossing borders. Rather, it is needed for everything from signing a lease to buying a train ticket, and a Russian cannot function in society without it. Its closest U.S. equivalent is the social security number, but it's needed far more often and also serves as a photo ID.
A holdover from the Soviet Union, the internal passport creates a wide field for abuses, critics say. For the country's most marginalized groups, including refugees, ex-convicts and the homeless, the passport system can keep them trapped -- unable, for example, to get jobs or travel to another part of the country.
Police maintain that the system is necessary for security reasons and have intensified their passport checks in response to the war with separatists in the Chechnya region and alleged terrorist attacks.
Some officials in the United States and Britain have suggested instituting a national ID card in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Opponents fear such cards would encroach on personal freedoms and say there is no proven security value.
PETER'S IDEA
In Russia, identification papers were first introduced in the 18th century by Peter the Great to control population movements and to ease tax collection and conscription.
Under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, passports became a key instrument of totalitarian control. The passports contained residence permits, which meant official approval was required to move to another town or city.
Peasants were not issued passports at all, forcing them to remain in the countryside during the brutal collectivization drive and famines of the 1930s. They were granted passports only beginning in 1974.
A variation on the residence permit exists even today: Anyone who travels within the country is required to visit police within three days of arriving in a city to get a registration stamp in the passport.
Soviet passports were also infamous for the ''fifth clause,'' which identified a person's ethnicity, formalizing discrimination against Jews and other minorities.
Today, every Russian citizen is required to bring his or her birth certificate to the local police station to receive a passport by age 16.
The booklets are embossed with Russia's double-headed eagle seal instead of the Soviet hammer and sickle, but otherwise they differ little from their predecessors.
The new passport does not have an ethnicity clause, but contains data on its holder's place of residence, marital status, children and military service. Critics say that is too much information.
'Such `necessary' notes in an identification document are signs of a police state and are absolutely inappropriate in a democratic country,'' the magazine Yezhenedelny Zhurnal protested recently.
SOME ARE LEFT OUT
But, human rights advocates say, an even more glaring injustice is that some people are left out of the system completely, just as peasants once were.
''Without a passport, you're an outcast,'' said Lemekhov, who lived without one of the little booklets for 12 of his 57 years.
In Russia, medical treatment, employment, education, social assistance and voting are all tied to passports.
In some parts of the country, they are needed simply to walk down the street. Police in Moscow and other major cities regularly check the residence information in people's passports and fine those who lack a local registration stamp.
Lack of a passport can land a person in jail for up to 30 days.
For the homeless, lack of a passport is ''one of the main obstacles to returning to normal life,'' said Alexei Nikiforov, coordinator of a homeless assistance program run by the Belgian branch of Doctors Without Borders.
About 60 percent of the estimated 100,000 homeless in Moscow have no passports, according to surveys by the group.
Lemekhov tells of a labyrinth of conflicting regulations that combined with official indifference to keep him without a passport for years.
His struggle began when he was released from prison in 1987 after serving a four-year term for ''parasitism,'' the Soviet-era crime of not having a job. Like many ex-convicts, he had only his release papers to prove his identity. His original passport was confiscated upon his arrest and lost somewhere in the maze of the criminal justice system.
In the Soviet era, ex-convicts were not allowed to live in Moscow, so Lemekhov wandered from town to town. In 1995, after the regulation was overturned, he returned to the capital.
But without a passport, he could not obtain housing or get a job. Police frequently sent him to one of the city's seven holding centers for people without passports, where he could be held in a cramped, unlit cell for up to 30 days.
For most Russians, replacing a lost or stolen passport involves a trip to the police. But the lack of a national database can create problems for those far from home, or without a home.
To get a passport, Lemekhov was told to go to the police station in his old neighborhood, which should have had his records. But the building where Lemekhov used to live had been torn down, and the passport records destroyed.
Other police stations refused to deal with him, but authorities eventually issued Lemekhov a passport. It was only a temporary victory. Still homeless, he awoke from a nap on a park bench one day to find the precious booklet gone.
When he tried to have it replaced, Lemekhov again met with refusals, even from the police station that had issued him the lost passport.
Eventually, after great difficulty, he obtained a new one.
Back to the Top
Next Article
March 24, 2002:
#6154
- Back to the Top -