The Temirtau city’s Museum opened the exhibition "Passport without a Photo" online as part of the "Exhibit of the Month" project on October 11, 2024,.
In the USSR, a unified passport system was introduced in 1932; previously, work books served as passports. All citizens of the Kazakh ASSR, then part of the USSR, who had reached the age of 16, were required to have passports. Passports were not received by military personnel with Red Army books, military cards, and residents of collective farms, whose records were kept according to settlement lists. The functions of a passport for residents of collective farms were performed by certificates indicating the reason and for how long the villager was leaving the area.
Soviet citizens acquired photographs in their passports only in 1937; before that time, there was no talk of any photographs. A photo in a passport was introduced to improve citizen identification. From that moment on, all citizens of the USSR had to provide two photos to the NKVD to receive a passport. One of them was to be pasted into the passport, the other remained with the police.
One of the samples of a passport without a photo, issued in 1935, is kept in the funds of the Temirtau Museum and is presented in the project "Exhibit of the Month". The passport has a gray fabric cover. At the top is the black coat of arms of the USSR, and the inscription "Passport" is repeated 6 times: in Cyrillic, Georgian and Armenian letters, Latin, Arabic script. The passport contains the following columns: name, patronymic, surname, time and place of birth, nationality, social status, permanent residence, military service, the passport owner's signature, who issued the passport and the reason for issuing the passport. This column made it clear whether a person was in prison, because passports were issued in places of detention. Instead of a photo in the passport - a verbal description of the owner. On the ninth page of the passport, which belonged to Vsyaskikh Maria Ivanovna, born in 1900, the owner's characteristics are indicated: Orthodox, thin, light brown, gray, medium, no characteristics.
During the opening of the exhibition, information about the modern passport of the Republic of Kazakhstan is presented, a sample is presented.
The exhibition will be open for a month.
