New Books In Russian And Eurasian Studies

In The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Polity Press, 2021), Albert Baiburin provides the first in-depth study of the development and uses of the passport, or state identity card, in the former Soviet Union. This richly empirical book will be of great interest not only to students and scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union, but to to anyone interested in the shaping of identity in the modern world. The Soviet Passport was first published in Russian in 2017; this is the first English-language translation of the book. First introduced in 1932, the Soviet passport took on an exceptional range of functions, extending not just to the regulation of movement and control of migrancy but also to the constitution of subjectivity and of social hierarchies based on place of residence, family background, and ethnic origin.  While the basic role of the Soviet passport was to certify a person’s identity, it assumed a far greater significance in Soviet life, with wide-rangi