Residency Rule Keeps Soviets Down on Farm

For the average Ivan Ivanov from Omsk or Yaroslavl, it is easier to move to Paris these days than to Moscow.

In one of the stranger ironies of this topsy-turvy era of reforms, Soviet emigration rules have been eased almost to Western standards, but Stalin era residence restrictions on the country’s cities remain in force, creating nightmarish hassles for would-be migrants.

It is the nasty bureaucratic invention known as the propiska, the residence permit stamped into a citizen’s internal passport, that creates all the problems.

If you don’t have a Moscow propiska, you can’t get a job in the capital.

But if you don’t have a job in the capital, you can’t get a propiska and move here.

If you want to bring your aged mother to Moscow to live with you, you can’t get her a propiska unless you prove that none of her children in other cities can take her.

If you go to prison or into the army, you may lose your Moscow propiska for good.

Most recently, during a spurt of panic buying in Moscow stores, city officials decreed that you needed a propiska to pick up a box of matches or a can of fish.

These are only a few of the propiska rules, most of which have never been published because the decrees on residence permits--first issued in 1932 to cleanse the cities of “enemies of the people” and expanded over the years--are classified as secret.

But violating these unpublished rules is still a criminal offense.

The totalitarian image of the residence restrictions, with its suggestion of the heartless state meddling in private lives, embarrasses the Soviet government at a time when it is placing new emphasis on human rights.

Stanislav A. Khokhlov, a lawyer with the government’s new Committee on Constitutional Compliance, said the current propiska system clearly violates the human rights accords the Soviet Union has signed, accords that guarantee free movement within a country’s borders and free choice of employment.

Parts of the system “don’t conform to the constitution, nor to our own civil law, nor to elementary ideas of humanity,” Khokhlov said.

Khokhlov’s committee, which fulfills many of the functions of a Supreme Court, plans to examine the propiska rules in September, and it has the power to annul them if they are shown to violate basic human rights.

If only it were that simple.

For a Muscovite or Leningrader, the prospect of simply removing the propiska requirements is as hair-raising as it would be for an American to consider the abrupt lifting of all immigration controls in the United States.

Major Soviet cities, along with offering more opportunity than the country’s dying villages, are also better supplied and serviced than provincial towns, and residents fear a flood of interlopers.

“People say, ‘For God’s sake, don’t touch the propiska, ‘ “ Khokhlov said. “ ‘No, better to lock ourselves in here.’ ”

The propiska issue places the government in an all-too-familiar dilemma--caught between the desperate need for change and the fear that pulling out just one brick of a shaky structure will bring on chaos.

“To struggle with the system by changing individual points is very hard,” said Yuri Khramov, a deputy of the Moscow City Council who has dealt with dozens of propiska cases. “You have to change the system.”

That is just what the Moscow Council, dominated by radicals since March elections and led by innovative economist Gavriil Popov, is trying to do.

This fall, it will implement a plan to turn Moscow’s 3 million apartments from state into private property, probably by giving some apartments free to residents who are considered to have earned them, and by selling the rest. Leningrad, also under radical rule, is considering a similar step.

Theoretically, propiskas would then become obsolete because the influx into Moscow would be naturally limited by the price of renting and buying apartments. The free market would take the place of the oppressive bureaucracy.

But the housing shortage in the Soviet Union, and especially in the major cities, is so extreme that doing away with the propiskas would probably create mass confusion for years to come.

In Moscow alone, a city of 9 million, more than 1 million people are on waiting lists for housing, and they can expect to wait at least 10 years.

Veniamin S. Orlov, a Moscow Council official who himself lived for 30 years in a communal apartment shared by several families, said he fears that the waiting list would swell to 2 million if propiskas were no longer needed.

“The problem isn’t the propiska, “ he said. “The problem is that to get a propiska , you have to get housing that doesn’t exist in Moscow. . . .

“From my point of view, you have to start not from the idea that you can live where you want, but from creating better conditions everywhere. Then there will be no more pull to come to Moscow.”

In the meantime, however, the propiska is only gaining in significance under the country’s worsening shortages, and it serves to block the government’s plans to move to a market economy that would permit the free flow of labor.

Despite Popov’s stated opposition to the system, Moscow’s radical mayor turned the propiska into a meal ticket in May by ordering the capital’s stores, stripped nearly bare by shoppers fearing price increases, to sell only to customers with official Moscow addresses.

The propiska, ironically, is meant in part to be an instrument of Communist social justice, entitling people to free medical care and other goods distributed by region. In fact, it often turns into an instrument of human misery.

Among the ragged homeless in Moscow’s railroad stations and parks, almost all ended up on the streets because of propiska problems. They are ex-convicts, or elderly people who lost their Moscow propiska when they were sent to old-age homes far away, or former spouses of native Muscovites who didn’t stay married long enough to get their own permanent propiska.

The propiska system has also created an army of hundreds of thousands of Moscow limitchiki, in effect, migrant workers from other parts of the country who must work flawlessly at one enterprise for several years if they want the privilege of gaining a propiska in a workers’ dormitory and, someday, an apartment. They live mainly on the outskirts of Moscow in cramped squalor.

Khramov said he once met a man reduced to living in a doghouse because of a propiska tangle.

The rule that prisoners can lose the right to a propiska in their hometowns is perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the system, Khramov said.

“They’re thrown out of life, in a situation without housing and without work, and they’re literally floating in the streets,” he said. “They’re absolutely rootless, and there’s nothing left but to commit another crime.”

The Committee on Constitutional Compliance is likely to do away with the restriction on ex-convicts because they end up effectively condemned to permanent exile, an unjust, additional punishment that no court imposed, Khokhlov said.

Khramov of the Moscow Council said the craziness of the propiska system has touched his own life. His father, an army colonel, could not get a Moscow propiska when he retired until Khramov, who was registered in the family apartment his father had obtained, wrote an official letter accepting him back.

“I somehow think retiring American colonels don’t have such complications,” he said.

Orlov, who arranges exceptions to propiska rules, mainly for specialists needed by Moscow enterprises, said soldiers, prisoners or relatives who have a legitimate claim to live in the capital almost always manage to get a propiska.

Soviet citizens have long been experts in getting around rules, and Khokhlov, too, said the toughest propiska regulations could usually be bent.

But the system still requires the would-be resident to go through “horrible bureaucratic procedures,” a gantlet of housing and police officials, Khokhlov said.

“People, either following government instructions or just acting according to some ideas of their own, decide the most important thing for a person: where he should live. He doesn’t decide; they do.”