Passports for Population

Though passports of the sort which enable their holders to leave Russia are rarer than rubies in the Soviet Union, every Russian must carry at all times the sort of passport which confirms his right to live & work where he does live & work in Russia. Last week in the Soviet Union no other news was half so big as an announcement by the Moscow Government that before Jan. 14, 1936 every Soviet citizen must have his domestic passport renewed.

The last time this was done, the State forced some 600,000 Russians to move out of the great and fairly comfortable cities of Moscow and Leningrad by handing them new passports stating that they could live & work only on farms or in the smaller, pioneer cities (TIME, May 8, 1933). To make this mass passport process even harsher, Russians who had to surrender their old passports could not get new ones unless they rehearsed their entire life histories and proved that they were not enemies of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Anyone who turned out to be such an "enemy" was punished in drastic Soviet fashion.

To calm the initial panic produced last week by Stalin's new order, nervous Soviet citizens were assured that this time the Government will be more lenient in probing for enemies. Also, whereas Red passports have previously been for three years, the new ones will be issued for five years, a major Soviet boon.

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