Formation of the Passport System in the Karaganda Region during the 1930s

Research article

Abstract

This study presents an institutional and socio-historical analysis of the formation of the Soviet passport system with particular focus on its implementation in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (KASSR), specifically in the Karaganda region, which held strategic importance in the USSR’s plans for industrialization and labor mobilization. The introduction of a unified passport system in 1932 became part of a sweeping bureaucratic transformation of the Soviet state aimed at comprehensive demographic registration, filtration of migration flows, and population selection based on labor utility. Drawing on archival materials‒including documents from GASKO, GAKO, RGASPI, and GARF—the research traces the normative evolution of the passport campaign and its local mechanisms of execution. Marked by rapid industrial growth, the establishment of camp infrastructure (Karlag), and influxes of special settlers and spontaneous migrants, the Karaganda region emerged as a site for experimental implementation of registration and control policies. Even prior to the official launch of passportization, schemes of registration, address bureaus, fees for residence permits, temporary identity documents, and sanctions against the “nonproductive element” were developed. The study illustrates how administrative acts and local council resolutions materialized into operative models of control: alphabetized registration, appointment of commandants, paid residence registration, and enforcement of penalties for non-compliance. Special attention is paid to the social stratification caused by the division between “passport holders” and the “passportless,” the latter effectively excluded from legal frameworks and deprived of access to employment, housing, and mobility. The work reveals the repressive capacity of the passport system: arbitrary arrests, denial of documents based on social status, delays in issuance, and citizen complaints to the prosecutor’s office. Passportization appears not only as a tool of registration but also as a technological instrument of governance impacting identity, citizenship status, and social mobility. The analysis suggests that the passport system operated as a mechanism of political-administrative segregation: separating the population into “documented” and “undocumented,” with the latter losing access to housing, labor, and legal recognition. Repressive elements were accompanied by normative adjustments, including exceptional cases of passport issuance as a reward. In conclusion, the experience of the Karaganda region reflects the structural contradictions of Soviet passport policy, which blended modernization ambitions with exclusionary and disciplinary practices under conditions of authoritarian industrialization. Thus, passportization in the KASSR emerges as a phenomenon uniting the goals of modernization with instrumentalized mechanisms of exclusion. The study uncovers the administrative logic of total surveillance and local variations of implementation amid authoritarian industrial expansion.