Regulating internal migration: “No documents, no person” 57 !

In understanding the dynamics behind internal migration in Kyrgyzstan, problem-free notions of citizens moving internally within their nation-state are challenged to highlight how, qualitatively, this form of mobility becomes embedded between past (notably here, ‘Soviet’) and contemporary legal frameworks, identities and contradictory claims to the city. During the Soviet period, the propiska system was introduced to ‘count’ (uchet) and ‘cleanse’ (ochistit’) the cities’ urban populations (Kessler, 2001). While

37 _{An exact statistic is unobtainable given that so many of the residents living in Bishkek do not, or cannot,}

register with the local authorities (i.e. they cannot obtain a valid propiska)

38 _{Taken from Mikhail Bulgakov’s (1996 [1967]) book, The Master and Margarita as a comment on Soviet}

bureaucracy and the importance of documents for identification purposes: “‘You were right’ said the Master impressed by the neatness of Korovyov’s work, ‘when you said: no documents, no persons. So that means I don’t exist since I don’t have any documents.’”

officially abolished following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new system, known as ‘registration’ (‘registratsia’), retains key aspects of the former system and is still referred to as propiska by residents of the city and by those working in the system.

The propiska was a form of internal passport introduced in specific areas of the Soviet Union under Stalin in 1932, and in Kyrgyzstan in April 1939. As Pipko and Pucciarelli (1985, 917), writing at the time of the Soviet Union, note:

“The propiska is a right to live in a particular administrative district, on a particular street, in a particular building and apartment … it is akin to an internal visa because it provides one with official permission to take up residence in a particular place.”

Initially, the propiska was distributed only to residents living in urban areas, industrial centres and border zones of the Soviet Union (Matthews, 1993). The propiska monitored the populations of these ‘regime’ areas and was designed to remove those superfluous individuals39

who were not engaged in ‘socially useful labour’ (Matthews, 1993, 28).40 _{After the collectivisation} of farming in rural areas and the resulting migration of individuals to cities trying to escape rural mass famine, “the system also had the effect of excluding large swathes of the population from possession of a passport, and thus, effectively, of obtaining resident rights in passportised areas” (Reeves, 2013).41

Rural populations were specifically excluded from the passportisation process. As Ioffe and Janis (1987) and Höjdestrand (2003) argue, this formed a ‘territorial stratification’ between urban and rural the populations. Those who were fortunate to have the right to live in cities often had better access to foodstuffs and services such as medical care and schools in comparison to those living on the collective farms. Soviet governments were biased in favour of cities and suspicious of the countryside “where the farming population, suffering from heavy taxes, compulsory deliveries of foodstuffs and collectivisation, was reluctant to support ambitious plans of industrialisation” (Enyedi, 1996, 114).

In July1974, ‘passportisation’ was expanded to rural areas of the Soviet Union.42

This rural expansion was complete in Kyrgyzstan by 1981 (Dzhunkovskii, 1982). Restrictions on migration, however, still applied (van

39

This included those not involved in ‘useful’ production or the work of institutions as well as criminal and other anti-social elements hiding in the towns (Kessler, 2001).

40 _{Kessler (2001) notes that, in Moscow alone, 65,904 persons were denied a passport and subsequently}

‘removed’ from the city in the 1930s.

41 _{The 1939 Decree of the Frunze City Soviet declared that every citizen reaching the age of 16 living in the city,}

entering the city or changing of place of residence within the boundary of the city needed to obtain propiska. The Decree also notes that collective farms and individual farmers are not entitled to a propiska.

42 _{One newspaper noted that it was necessary to extend the passport system to rural areas because of the “big}

social-economical and cultural transformations we [the Soviet Union] had experienced during the past 22 years” (Toktosunov, 1975).

den Berg, 1989). If a Soviet citizen wished to move from one address to another, either permanently or temporarily, they would have to obtain permission from their local division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Migrating permanently to a city was often refused unless it fulfilled a labour shortage.43

It was particularly difficult to move to the bigger cities of the Soviet Union, as well as the regional urban areas of the republics such as Kiev, Tbilisi or Bishkek. By the time ‘passportisation’ was introduced to rural areas, the propiska system had become an official form of identity infiltrating into the everyday practices of life in the Soviet Union (Pipko and Pucciarelli, 1985). As Höjdestrand (2003, 2) notes, “the propiska became (and to a large extent remains) the precondition for most civil rights and social benefits such as formal employment, access to housing, medical insurance, education, unemployment benefits, ration cards, the right to vote, even access to public libraries.”

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the propiska was officially abolished in many of the newly independent countries. New constitutional enactments guaranteed freedom of movement and choice of place of residence for all citizens on the territory of the country.44

In Kyrgyzstan, this enactment was officially incorporated into the country’s first constitution as an independent state in 1993,45 _{although attitudes towards} the relaxation of the propiska in relation to migration were evident during the final years of the Soviet Union (Sergeev, 1990). The enactment of these new constitutions did not, however, abolish the propiska altogether. Rather, the propiska system was legally repackaged into a less restrictive form under the new name of registratsia. Individual regulations were implemented in a piecemeal fashion during the 1990s and were eventually codified by the Kyrgyz Law on Internal Migration enacted in 2002.

These regulatory changes, introduced in many post-socialist countries, provided the freedom to move within the country unrestricted. Nonetheless, upon arrival in the new place of residence, bureaucratic and complicated procedures remained. As Höjdestrand (2003, 5) notes, in discussing the propiska in Russia, in light of few practical changes, the “administrative practice permits the old system to linger on”. As explored further in paper I, the propiska remains important for some groups of

43

This is similar to the hukuo system introduced in China, a similar form of residence registration system, originally implemented to “control the urban population at a level which would meet the demands of industrial development so as to avoid unproductive expenditures (Ying and Chui, 2010, 297) and whereby “cities were closed off to the peasantry by ‘invisible walls’ … poverty was locked in the countryside” (Chan, 1996, 134). See also: Cheng and Selden, (1994); Chan (2010); Zhang and Wang (2010); The Economist (2010).

44 _{In illustrating the malleability of such laws at the time (and still today), the city of Moscow refused to}

implement the law on the right of citizens to choose their place of residence, as O’Leary (1994) notes: “Moscow’s administration charge that the propiska system was one of the few tools the city possessed to help control the flow of immigrants and ‘speculators’ into an already crowded city and a stricter registration system is required to maintain safety in the city”.

45 _{“Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and choice of place of residence within the territory of the}

individuals in Bishkek today, particularly in relation to (officially) accessing public services such as schools and health centres, paying taxes, opening bank accounts and for voting in elections.46 _{The system, as was also} evident during the Soviet period (Höjdestrand, 2003), remains corrupt (a common feature of many aspects of public administration). In Kyrgyzstan, the passport offices, which issue the ID-card in relation to the new process of registratsia, were a key target of the government’s ‘anti-corruption’ campaign in 2012 (OSCE, 2012).