Although the first program of the Bolshevik movement in Russia included a demand for the "abolition of passports",
[23] just two months after the
Russian Revolution of 1917, the new regime instituted passport controls and forbade the exit of belligerent nationals.
[24] The reasoning was partly that emigration was conflated with opposition to the socialist state and also the fear that emigration would inflate opposition armies.[24] The 1918
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk obligated Russia to allow emigration of non-Russians who wanted German citizenship, but the regime attempted to reduce this flow by allowing it during only one month.
[24] Beginning in 1919, travel abroad required the approval of the
NKVD, with the additional consent of the Special Department of the
Cheka added in 1920.
[24] In 1922, after the
Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, both the
Ukrainian SSR and the
Russian SFSR issued general rules for travel that foreclosed virtually all departures, making legal emigration all but impossible.
[25] However, the Soviet Union could not control its borders until a system of border guards was created through a special corps of the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (GPU), such that by 1928, even illegal departure was all but impossible.[25]
In 1929, even more strict controls were introduced, decreeing that any Soviet official serving abroad who went over "to the camp of the enemies of the working class and the peasants" and refused to return would be executed within twenty-four hours of being apprehended.[26] In 1932, as Stalin's first
Five Year Plan forced collectivization, to allocate scarce housing and weed out "nonproductive" elements,
internal passport controls were introduced.
[26] When combined with individual city
Propiska ("place of residence") permits, and internal freedom of movement restrictions often called the
101st kilometre, these rules greatly restricted mobility within even small areas.
[26] When the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was promulgated, virtually no legal emigration took place, except for very limited family reunification and some forced deportations.[26] Very small numbers snuck into Romania, Persia, and Manchuria, but the bulk of the population remained essentially captive.[27]Moskovskaya Pravda later described the decision to emigrate as "unnatural and like burying someone alive."[28] Those wishing to leave were viewed not just as deserters, but traitors.[28]
The mobilization of labor in the Soviet Union was not feasible if emigration remained an option with the relative low standard of living that existed at that time.
[29]Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev later stated "We were scared, really scared. We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn't be able to control and which could drown us. How could it drown us? It could have overflowed the banks of the Soviet riverbed and formed a tidal wave that which would have washed away all the barriers and retaining walls of our society."
[28]
In addition, emigration restrictions were used to keep secrecy about life in the Soviet Union.
[30] Starting in 1935,
Joseph Stalin had already effectively sealed off outside access to the Soviet Socialist Republics ( and until his death in 1953 ), effectively permitting no foreign travel inside the Soviet Union such that outsiders did not know of the political processes that had taken place therein.
[31] During this period, and until the late 1970s, 25 years after Stalin's death, the few diplomats and foreign correspondents that were permitted inside the Soviet Union were usually restricted to within a few miles of Moscow, while their phones were tapped, their residences were restricted to foreigner-only locations, and they were constantly followed by Soviet authorities.
[31] Dissenters who approached such foreigners were arrested.
[30] For many years after World War II, even the best informed foreigners did not know the number of arrested or executed Soviet citizens, or how poorly the Soviet economy had performed.
[30]