Fundamentals of bureaucracy

Who are you?

To characterize a person in the official documents of the Russia Empire, fairly much information was needed.

1. Estate
This was a very important piece of information, and the estate usually went before the name. The structure of estates was really complicated and is shortly surveyed in another Page.

Quite frequently the estate of artisans and other professionals was mentioned in documents in details and for us now it sounds like a profession.

2. Name
Everybody had the first name from the very beginning. The possession of the hereditary family name depended on the estate of a person. To the year 1800 almost all free persons and few serfs had hereditary family names. The naming of peasants took quite long time over after the serfdom was abolished. In Vidzeme [Livland] the naming was carried out in 1826, in Kurzeme [Kurland] much later - in 1835, but in Latgale, where the serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was completed in 1866.

A married woman was obliged to bear the family name of her husband. A divorced wife until 1913 could retain her husband's name only with his permission.

To my knowledge, the Jews in the Empire, though they were free persons, had no family names until the 1820s, when the naming of Jews went on, though the Law 1804 had already prescribed that each Jew should have had his hereditary family name. It is mentioned in the book of B.O.Unbegaun /Unbegaun/ that the naming of Jews was completed in the 1840s. I think that actually it was going on in different time for different regions. For example, I remember reading hints that the Jews were named first in the border regions for better fight against smuggling. I am sure, however, that relatively many Jews migrated to Kurzeme [Kurland] in the 17^th or in the 18^th century already having hereditary family names.

3. Patronymic
As a rule, patronymic (the first name of the father) was used only in the documents written in Russian.

Catharine II issued (1765) the rules that regulated the usage of the forms of patronymic. The full form ending with -ovič (Ivanovič, Petrovič etc.) was allowed to apply only to persons that had rank of the 5^th grade or higher. (see the Rank system in another Page).

The second form of the patronymic ended with -ov, -ev or -in, that makes it to sound like an adjective (Ivanov, Petrov, Iljin), was accepted for persons of 8^th-6^th rank grade. As this form coincides with the common form of family names, it is even difficult to say in some documents whether a patronymic or a family name was mentioned. Even more, in the Russia provinces outside Baltics (also in Latgale that was part of Vitebskas province) it was recommended that the hereditary family names of   illegitimate children were coined of their presumed patronymic in this way.

Formally the people of lower social status were not allowed to use patronymic in any form. However during the 19^th century the real usage was tempered and since 1880s the forms with -ov can be frequently found in documents of peasants and the forms with -ovič even in lists of Jews.

It could also be mentioned that Russian peasants in their everyday life used patronymics with -ovič as the honorific kind of addressing. For example, a wife had to address her husband by the first name and patronymic.

4. Religion
As religion was a very important part of the organization of the Empire, and until 1905 nobody was allowed to be out of all of the legally recognised religions (no official atheists existed in the Empire), it was almost always mentioned in documents.

5. Place of registration
In the Russia Empire all people were registered on the lists of the appropriate estate community of localities. It was said, that he or she is a citizen of this locality, and the place (locality) was shown in the documents. It is of great importance to realize that not the place of the actual living, but rather the place of registration was shown in documents. Of course, in the most cases both of these places coincided, but, if not, it may cause some misunderstanding.

For example, many Latvians lived in Riga or in another city, but continued to be the citizens of the home pagasts and paid the taxes there, because they did not register themselves in the city for certain reasons, for example, they did not wish to pay pretty good money for the registration. In the newspapers of the 1870s one can find advertisements of some pagasts officials with the information when they are going to Rīga to collect the taxes and to prolong the passports of the pagasts' citizens living in the city.

Jews from the Pale - i.e. citizens of a shtetl in the Pale - lived for rather long time in Rīga or in other localities of the Baltic provinces with regularly renewed temporary permission. If they now migrated to, say, USA, how they answered the question of an immigration officer about the place they were coming from? I suspect it was rather difficult to understand what the Americans wanted them to tell - the place of the actual living or the place of the registration. And, vice versa, it should have been rather hard work to explain to an immigration officer what meant both the registration place and the living place and how they could be different, though for  inhabitants of Russia it was part of their everyday life, and they understood the system quite easy.

Initially the system of registration was introduced primarily for fiscal purposes, and the subjects of the Empire were to pay person taxes in their places of registration, except those who were free of person tax payment (women, children and tax-free estates), of course. In fact, those who did not pay the taxes were also registered, and the registration continued after the person tax was abandoned in 1887.

A child, as soon as it was born, could be registered in the place of registration of a parent. The spouses could have been registered in different places, you know. When the child grew up, he/she could quite officially migrate to another place but still remain registered in the birth place and pay the taxes there.

If peasants moved from one pagasts to another, it was not very difficult for them to get registered in the new place, though they should had paid all taxes in the old place and should had got appropriate permission from both the old and the new pagasts governments and even from the appropriate manor owners (until 1850s). Of course, in the time of serfdom the migration of serfs could take place only with the order of the owner, and in this case the registration was his problem.

6. Ethnicity
The Ethnicity in the understanding of this Site (see the special Page) was not usually mentioned in official documents of the Russia Empire.

Your papers, please!

Individuals could live in their places of registration and visit the places 30 wersts (32 km) away without any documents, but if somebody left his (in rare cases her) permanent dwelling place, it was obligatory to have the appropriate documents that certified person's identity and carried necessary permission. In different time spans different papers were issued by different authorities for different groups of the population, so it is very complicated to overview all the details.

The main idea was that a person who wished to go to another place was obliged to make an appropriate personal document at the local authorities of his living place. It should be realized that these local authorities were different for different estate communities during almost all the 19^th century. Nobility got the documents in one institution for all their life but peasants in quite another and for short time only. Here exceptions for Jews existed who, as far as I know, got their papers not in their localities but a level higher at the apriņķis or province level state institutions. See, for example, the rules for Jews visiting Riga. For the later time, when the passport booklets (see below) were introduced, no special rules for Jews are known

When somebody arrived in another location, he was obliged to go to the local Police institution as soon as possible (on the same day in most towns) and to produce his personal documents to the Police officials for making notes on it. Now the document became fully legal dwelling certificate. In many cases the Police took away the original document for the dwelling time and instead another paper handed which now was a dwelling certificate.

I translated Russian term "vid na žiteļstvo" as dwelling certificate. In any case, it means a document that gives somebody the right to live in a particular place for some time. There were several kinds of dwelling certificates. The best known are Passports, they were of different kinds, then existed Billets of different kinds and sometimes very simple texts written and signed by manor police or pagasts officials. A person without relevant documents was considered as a vagrant and was jailed in a convict labor gang. The time and the institution of imprisonment changed during the 19^th century, however.

At the beginning of the 19^th century only nobility had the right to have passports without restrictions, and they could make passports whenever they wanted, and the passports were legal for lifetime. Later other estates could make an appropriate personal document rather freely, if they were allowed to move out of the residence place, of course. At the middle of the 19^th century people usually received Placard passports that were just a sheet of paper with the appropriate information. The charge for this document gradually decreased during the 19^th century.

In 1894 new rules for the dwelling certificates were adopted, and the Passport booklets were introduced that looked like normal passports of today (without photographs, however) and were handed for ever to persons belonging to the estates of nobility, clergy, honorary citizens, literats etc. The artisans, workers, peasants etc. could receive Passport booklets for the term up to 5 years. On October 5, 1906 the Order of the Tzar was issued that allowed all subjects of the Empire (except Jews and some sectarians) to choose freely the residence place and to have Passport booklets without time limitation of legal force. Jews were limited in the choice of residence place, though they could get Passports. It was decided in 1897 that the Passport booklets should be issued without charge, except the payment for the physical booklet that was priced to 15 Kopecks.

For all information available on this site about real personal documents connect to the Page about personal documents

The people without appropriate documents were imprisoned, which does not mean that it was not possible to travel without documents. Actually one could wander around for long time never seeing a policeman, because their number was relatively small, and I am not sure that all of them were literate enough to understand what was written on the paper a person fished out of a pocket. It was relatively difficult, however, to travel by transportation means, because a proper document was required (not always, however) for a ticket to be sold or for horses to be hired.

One can realize the force of documents in the Russia Empire from the following newspaper information about a criminal deed. The information was found in Latweeschu Awises (Latvian Newspaper) of May 1, 1874.

In a town Mogiļansk in Podolia a sugar factory was situated that needed working force. At this factory some months ago two Jews arrived who produced credentials of a pagasts and informed the factory management that they could recruit about 200 citizens of that pagasts as workers in this factory. The management agreed to hire these workers and made contract with Jews that as soon as passports of these workers had been received, the factory would pay money for transportation of the workers, and the workers would arrive at the factory. Quite soon 200 passports were handed to the management, and the agents were paid 1400 Roubles. Unfortunately, nobody arrived at the factory, and  it was soon discovered that the passports were counterfeited - there even existed no pagasts in the world that could have issued these passports. As you see, for the factory management it was much more important to have passports than real humans. The factory administrations of the Empire usually collected the passports of all their workers and in this way guaranteed that a worker would not leave the factory without permission of the management whatever would be the wishes of this worker. I think, that in the above described case the factory management was even happy that the Jews kindly agreed to collect the passports.

Speaking about the organization of the crime, it is clear that not only Jews could make false passports, but one may conclude from the criminal information of that time that Jews were relatively more frequently engaged in the passport making. I think, because, firstly, it was relatively easy to find a Jewish engraver for making necessary stamps, and, secondly, their needs in forged passports were high, as it was relatively difficult for them to get right passports. And, after all, 1400 Roubles was really good money.