False Passports, Undocumented Workers, and Public (Dis)Order in Late-Eighteenth-Century Russia

In 1798, a case of suspected passport forgery in the new town of Gatchina brought to light an array of legal, semilegal, and totally illegal behavior when it came to tsarist Russia's documentary requirements that governed mobility. Although there had been earlier kinds of documents required for travel, in the early eighteenth century, decrees established a system of short-term passports to allow a degree of mobility within a social structure based in binding legal statuses (soslovie) that tied nearly all subjects of the tsar to their localities or their owners. This specific case demonstrates that although the tsarist state clearly viewed this passport system as a method of social control, there were several significant limits to that control. First, documents were only reliable as long as they could be taken as truthful; cases of passport forgery like this showed how difficult it was for authorities to ascertain that truth. Second, the investigation uncovered many individuals who were negotiating (or sometimes ignoring) the passport system in ways that show the real limits of tsarist control. And third, the passport system took significant effort to maintain, effort that did not necessarily always seem worthwhile to some local authorities.