early nineteenth century Odessa was handling 40 percent of the Russian empire’s
grain exports.
PASSPORTS
The century’s tremendous mobility challenged the state in its most important
efforts, namely, taxation and military recruitment. We have seen in Muscovite
times various efforts to identify and control travel. Use of the coach system required
written confirmation that it was official business; some exiled criminals were
branded; guards monitored passage across borders. But the reign of Peter
I intensified efforts to monitor mobility. To curb desertion from the army, a decree
of 1719 required itinerants to show travel documents, implying that such were
current practice. Poll tax legislation of 1724 produced a more complex approach.
Concerned with keeping taxpayers associated with their place of residence, it
mandated that a peasant traveling within 30versty(about 30 kilometers) of his
village needed written permission from his estate steward (or from the elders of a
state peasant commune), and for longer trips from a district (uezd) police official.
The term“passport”began to be used early in this century, joining a myriad of
older terms for travel and free passage documents (proezzhaia gramota,podorozh-
naia,propusknoe pis’mo). John LeDonne suggests that in the eighteenth century all
townsmen carried passports, as they were checked at city gates.
Soon thereafter, concern with fraudulent documents resulted in a 1726 decree that
passport documents for longer distances were to be written on printed blanks provided
by the state to all local administrative offices. As Simon Franklin remarked, in a setting
in which the state controlled printing presses, this was a good attempt at maintaining
authenticity. Germany, France, and other European countries were, like Russia, also
mandating travel documents to prevent desertion and tax evasion at this time, but
Russia’s centralized bureaucracy succeeded in standardizing printed forms decades
before its European counterparts. Nevertheless, that providing the forms in sufficient
number to all the relevant offices posed continual problems is suggested by repeated
decrees that all travelers carry a printed passport (1744, 1801). Issuing such docu-
ments was another key task entrusted to district level Treasury offices in the 1775
reforms. Fees for passports proved a helpful source of government income and they
were raised significantly in 1763. Since a passport contained information on a person’s
criminal record, it provided a form of surveillance, but a relatively weak one given the
incomplete coverage of passport ownership in this century.
Foreign travel required state permission and passports but it was not significantly
restricted for nobles through the eighteenth century (education abroad was encour-
aged). Nobles received passports from agencies where they served (or local admin-
istrators or Marshall of the Nobility if they did not serve), clerics from the Synod
and bishops, and townsmen from their magistrates. As in earlier centuries, foreign-
ers arriving in Russia were required to register and obtain internal travel documents,
and to obtain exit permits from Russian authorities as well (to hinder someone
escaping debts or litigation).
Surveillance and Control 343