Sergei, a fellow colleague, Russian linguist, and English teacher told me, "I'm sorry but when I spoke to the Headmaster of this Gymnasium he said he could not employ you because you don't have Propiska. If he employs you he runs the risk of getting into trouble with the authorities. They can get a heavy fine for violating the law. He doesn't want to get any trouble. I can well understand that. Sergei had actually taken on the challenge of attempting to find a job for me which he managed to do. I had just run into him while sitting outside a student hostel I was residing at.
Sergei, who was a kind, amiable, and frank teacher, actually went to the great trouble of finding me a job. It was 1993, and we were both in Kishinev, in Moldova. By some deft persuasion, he managed to persuade his own Russian School 53 to employ me. It was disquieting for me to learn that within a few months Sergei would die from health complications related to blood pressure. This was the first time I had heard the word “Propiska.” It was certainly not the last time.
Again and again this word surfaced to torment me and some of my acquaintances. Someone would tell you, "We can't employ you because you don't have Propiska." In 2015, a refugee from the war in Ukraine asked me to see if it was possible to get him a job as a train driver in the Moscow Metro. But I quickly learnt it was impossible because he required the famous Propiska.
The absence of this “legal permit” not only damaged a person's job prospects, but also undermined the privacy and property of people who dwelt in their own apartment. For instance, an ex-husband could suddenly turn up out of the blue after 5 years and tell his ex-wife, "I'm moving into your apartment. I have the right to do this because I have this Propiska stamp on my passport." The woman could respond, "I won't allow this. I inherited this apartment from my aunt. I'll get new locks for this door.” But the man could simply respond, "If you do that I will call the police and get them to break down this door." So an ex-wife felt she had no choice but to tolerate the unwanted presence of her ex-husband. This is because following a divorce both partners are still entitled to part of the apartment they share if both partners have the stamp of Propiska in their passports.
Once, a 32-year-old Woman Maira told me, “Propiska could be handed down from parents to their children. So when my parents divorced many years ago, my mother got an official document sent to her home which declared that 25% of her apartment was now the sole possession of his son from his second wife. It came as a shock. It is very difficult to get rid of the Propiska. People have been denied the right to both medical care and education on the spurious grounds they don't have Propiska!
WHAT IS PROPISKA?
So what is Propiska? It is impossible to translate it word by word into another language. There is no equivalent word in English. It would be highly misleading to translate it as registration. They are not really synonymous. For this is a special registration which encompasses not only your residential rights to live in a city but also your rights to obtain work in your own town, city or village. It can be defined as the stamp in your passport which indicates your permanent place of residence which confirms your rights to employment, education, medical care, and a pension. Without this stamp you might be denied work, medical care or entrance to a local university.
While a person who lives in Glasgow can go to London and attain a job, a person from Smolensk can't just turn up in Moscow and obtain a job. Employers can insist on whether he has local legal residence here, a work permit and more often Propiska. So a person in Russia does not have the free right to just move out of his own town and go and live in another city. He has to notify the local police that he has arrived in the city and at least obtain some form of registration. In a sense, even local Russians can begin to feel like foreigners and aliens in their own country.
Indeed a very perceptive African refugee in 2018 stated that, "Even the Russians themselves live here as refugees. Sometimes, when someone from Russia tells me about his life, I wonder if he's Russian or African, like me, at first. Then I realize, no, he is in fact Russian, but living as a refugee. I'm scared of such stories."
HISTORICAL ORIGINS
Before the revolution, a Russian peasant could not just leave their local villages to get work. He had to have approval from the Elders who would decide whether to grant him an internal passport or forbid him from leaving. However, the new Soviet Law regarding the Propiska was introduced in 1932 to control countless peasants from the villages who were flooding into cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Those people were desperate to obtain work at any cost. Many were fleeing from famines which killed millions of people. Many of those migrants were homeless.
A lot of those homeless were abandoned children. According to police reports as many as 842,144 children were rounded up by the police and taken to reception committees from 1932-34. Those children had no home of their own. Orphans lived on building sites. They roamed around the streets, rummaging through rubbish for unwanted food. They scraped a living from begging, petty theft, and prostitution, many joining children's gangs which controlled those activities in railway stations, drinking places, and busy shopping streets {page 99, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, by Orlando Figes, London: Penguin Books}.
The Russian authorities were afraid they would lose control of the situation and be overwhelmed by the homeless. So in November 1932, they introduced the new law of Propiska to seven cities and step-by-step to other cities. The main goals of the law were to strictly control people and observe them. The law was also employed to contain any potential security threats to security by “subversive elements” threatening to topple the state. However, the sheer numbers of migrants made this impossible. Millions of people kept on working illegally at construction sites. If they were found, they would be detained, and released. They then simply moved to other places of work.
THE LAW LINGERS ON
This law remains in force. The Russian state is in no hurry to scrap the law. The influence of this law is so pervasive that I sometimes find it difficult to persuade some Russians that in Britain, we don't have such strict passport laws. A local person in Britain can't be fined just because he visits another town and fails to register with the local police. Some Russians simply do not believe me.
Strangely enough, the law of Propiska still has defenders. They will say, "Without this law we would overwhelmed with migrants" or "There would be chaos and things would break down" or even “Without such strict laws in a massive country like Russia we would have total disorder.” If officials don't trust their ordinary citizens, then the local people don't trust them either.
The justification that this law prevents or contains crime is unconvincing. In fact, it could be said to encourage crime in the form of illegal labor. It inspires widespread corruption in the form of bribery, employment of illegal labor, and also false marriages. Such an archaic law belongs to a distant age and is at odds with any advanced and truly free society. The cliché “Well this is Russia" represents not only an insult to foreigners but the majority of Russians.
It is also an illegal law which contradicts the Constitution of the Russian Federation. According to article 40, clause 1, “Everyone has the right to living accommodations. Nobody can deprive a person of their residence.” Article 41 guarantees the people the right to free medical care. Article 43 declares that everyone has the right to education. It does not matter whether those people have or don't have Propiska or registration. And article 2, clause 1 states that everyone has the right to freely move around the territory of the Russian Federation. You would be forgiven for not believing this is the case where you see local police constantly stopping people and asking, "Can I see your passport please?"
You might also begin to wonder if it is a crime not to carry your passport around with you. That is not the case. Compared to Europe, Russians attach a great importance to their two passports: an internal one and a foreign one. You will notice that people can treat documents with undue reverence. Someone once struck my hand in horror as if I was committing some kind of blasphemy when I simply and casually folded a legal document. Russians take legal documents seriously indeed. There is even a saying that “A person without a passport is a non-person.”
Although we should not overstate this law as say, a primary cause of homelessness, this law certainly does not help the homeless get off the streets. On the contrary, it keeps them on the streets. It renders and reinforces their unemployment. Having no safe place to keep their most precious possessions, the homeless often have their passports stolen. Not having legal permits also means they have no legal protection and can remain unpaid by dishonest employers. A survey by the Charity Nochlezhka conducted in 2020 stated that one of the causes which fostered homelessness was “lost documents.” They claim that 16.63% of the homeless have had their documents stolen. Although they don't regard this as a primary reason for homelessness it is an additional factor that compounds their plight. And the law of Propiska certainly makes them less employable in cities. The report states, “Without documents, getting off the street becomes even more difficult.”
Repealing such a law would allow Russians to have the right to freely move around their country. They would begin to feel more at home in their country. They would no longer feel such deep alienation. They'd feel a stronger sense of belonging to their surroundings.
They just might stop feeling like a stranger in a strange land!