April 28, 1925
The term appeared "registration" — The Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR issued a decree "On the registration of citizens in urban settlements."
Seven years earlier, immediately after the establishment of Soviet power, the passport system was abolished as a relic of the past. Lenin, back in 1903, wrote about the need to give people freedom of movement and industry:
What does this mean: freedom of movement? It means that passports should be abolished in Russia, so that no police officer, no zemstvo chief, should dare to prevent any peasant from settling and working wherever he pleases. The Russian peasant is still so enslaved by the bureaucrats that he cannot freely transfer to the city, cannot freely move to new lands... Isn't this serfdom?
However, the passport system was partially reinstated in 1919, when “labor books” (which served as passports) were introduced in Moscow and St. Petersburg to curb “labor desertion,” that is, migration across the country, which was suffering from famine and devastation.
After the Civil War, in 1922, the right to free movement within the RSFSR was restored. Furthermore, the 1923 decree "On Identity Cards" prohibited requiring citizens to produce "passports and other residence permits"; all such documents were revoked. Citizens could obtain an "identity card," but were not obligated to do so.
According to a 1925 decree of the Council of People's Commissars, propiska (residence registration) could be obtained upon presentation of any document, such as a trade union card. A registration stamp was placed on the very same "identity card," which citizens were not required to possess.
In 1932, internal passports were reinstated. A passport and visa service was created under the NKVD—not only to register the population of cities and towns, but also to "relieve these areas of people not engaged in socially useful labor, as well as to purge them of hiding kulak, criminal, and other antisocial elements, in order to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat."
It should be noted that collective farmers were not issued passports until the early 70s, which limited their freedom of movement.
