Ode to a Soviet Passport
Is it possible to be sentimental about a passport? Apparently, it is. In 1929, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote Stikhi o sovetskom pasporte ("Verses on My Soviet Passport"), one of the many late works that helped generations of Soviet schoolchildren learn to loathe this great and complicated poet. For readers who were not obliged to declaim these verses by heart while proudly wearing their "Young Pioneers" kerchief, let me provide a brief summary.
Mayakovsky begins the poem by affirming his longstanding hostility to bureaucrats and nearly all their hateful works, but reserves special affection for one particular document as he sets a scene that would be familiar to those privileged few who, like Mayakovsky himself, traveled outside of the Soviet Union during a time when this country was none too popular with its neighbors. Such intrepid voyagers knew that not all passports are created equal:
К одним паспортам -
улыбка у рта.
К другим -
отношние плевоe"
At some passports -
the mouth smiles.
At others - / it spits
Border guards accept American passports "like tips", but when they come to the poet's red-skinned booklet, they hold it gingerly, like a poisonous snake. But Mayakovsky, being Mayakovsky, responds to contempt with proud defiance:
Я
достаю
из широких штанин
дубликатом
бесценного груза.
Читайте, завидуйте,
я--
гражданин Советского Союза.
From my wide pants
I
take out
a copy
of my priceless cargo
Read it
Envy it
I
am a citizen of the Soviet Union.” [1]
In Mayakovsky's poem, the passport is the physical manifestation of the speaker's pride in his country; it is the pride of citizenship. But the passport he describes is not one that would have been available to all his fellow Soviets. The poem is about his "zagranpasport," his foreign travel documents that were in no way an inalienable right. The "Citizens of the USSR " cannot pretend to make such passports, because they would run up against the fundamental flaw in their model of Soviet sovereignty: a foreign passport can only function as such if countries other than one's own recognize them as legitimate, but the entire world has accepted that the Soviet Union no longer exists. In the twenty-first century, a Soviet foreign passport is no more valid than an invitation to Hogwarts.
And so the "Citizens of the USSR " must confine themselves to making (or forging) passports that are not actually designed to facilitate border crossings. In both the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the identification documents issued to every citizen aged 14 and over are called "passports," with a design to match. Like most passports, these internal documents are in a booklet format that is unfriendly to both wallets and lanyards. Consisting of 20 pages and containing information about marriages, divorces, children, domicile, and conscription status, the latest (2007) version of the Russian internal passport is an awkwardly portable compendium of all the biometric data that the state deems essential for moving through daily life.
The "Citizens of the USSR's" objections to the Russian passport are multiple, reflecting a range of attitudes towards documentation from paranoid skepticism to something akin to idolatry. Numerous commentators have demonstrated the ideological links between the "Citizens of the USSR " in the post-Soviet space, the Reichsbürger ("Reich Citizens") movement in Germany, and the various Sovereign Citizens groups actives throughout the United States. All three reject the generally recognized statehood of their respective countries in favor of a previous constitution or legal framework that they claim has never been invalidated. Since 1985, the Reichsbürger have insisted that the 1919 Weimar Constitution is still in effect, rendering the current Federal Republic of Germany an illegal entity (often said to be controlled by the World Zionist Conspiracy, of course). They refuse to pay taxes, and issue their own documents (for a fee).
In the States, the Sovereign Citizens movement, rooted in the Christian fascist Posse Comitatus movement, argues that the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution disrupted the citizenship regime that had existed up to that point, obliging "sovereign citizens" to assume the status of "federal citizens" and subject themselves to the tyranny of American's central government. Given the overt white nationalism of most of the Sovereign Citizen groups, the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was the mechanism for granting citizenship to previously enslaved Black people is hardly coincidental.
As much as these three movements have in common, however, their approach to documents, while superficially similar, shows a divergent attitude towards bureaucratic modernity and the modern state. The Sovereign Citizens have developed in a country with a longstanding suspicion of central power; it is crucial to note that, unlike Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, the United States has never issued or required national IDs (hence the disputes over requiring identification for voting, which would be a non-issue if all citizens carried such documentation as a matter of course). Also important is the Sovereign Citizens' selection of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a historical turning point. Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment precedes the Weimar Constitution by 51 years and the Soviet collapse by more than a century. 1868 for American represents a much more significant rupture with modernity than 1919 or 1991.
Where the Sovereign Citizens can display unalloyed contempt for the very idea of federal documentation, the Citizens of the USSR find themselves engaged in a balancing act. As their very name suggests, their identity is based on the concept of a powerful central state. The Sovereigns look back to a time when the federal government left them alone, while the Citizens of the USSR long for the days of a lost great power. If we think of the state as a figurative parent, the Sovereigns are playing at parricide, while the Citizens of the USSR demand the return of the Prodigal Dad.
Hence the movement's insistence on their own documents necessity while denouncing all the instruments of Russian Federation data collection as the instruments of oppression. Again and again, Citizens of the USSR exhort their skeptical family members to withhold their personal information:
"Yesterday I told a relative that my Sberbank card is finally ready, and I can pick it up tomorrow. Him: did you give your biometric information? Me: when I get the card. Him: don't even think about it. It's all the work of Satan." When I ask why, and where biometrics and Satan come in, there's no real answer" («Муж сестры съел свой паспорт РФ!»)
As another frustrated relative puts it: "Mama answered that we don't actually live in Russia, but in the USSR, and that we're all being zombified [brainwashed] and that they want to harvest our organs. She stated that all the information about us is known by our enemies, because we give our biometric data when we get our passports."
But when it comes to the documents forged by the movement's leadership, all hostility to the collection of biometric data vanishes. The Citizens of the USSR love paper documents; they cannot get enough of them. Of course, issuing their own documentation is a significant source of income (as it is for the Sovereigns and the Reichsburger), but that does not explain the emotional attachment displayed by rank-and-file citizens, whose zeal for their passports is positively Mayakovskian. But it is also a manifestation of the Manichaean, binary thinking so common to conspiracy theorists and moralizers. Soviet (and pseudo-Soviet) documentation is heroic, if not holy, while the corresponding papers issued by the Russian Federation are, at least in the opinion of some Citizens of the USSR, literally the work of Satan himself.
Note
[1] Whipping something out of his wide pants is surely a Mayakovsky signature move.