Foreign passport (Russian Empire)

The foreign passport of the Russian Empire was a special travel document required of any Russian subject wishing to go to a foreign country. It was, in the plainest terms, a permit to leave — an instrument that the state, which otherwise confined its Jewish population within the Pale of Settlement, could grant or withhold at will. To avoid the necessity of procuring such a passport, travellers often crossed the border without one, a fact that speaks to how formidable an obstacle the document could be. For the Antin family, the passport was one of the "magic agents" — along with a trifling sum of money and the steamer ticket — by means of which they hoped to span the five thousand miles of earth and water between them and the father who had gone ahead to America.

The Passport as an Instrument of the Czar's Control

The passport belonged to a larger system of surveillance and restriction that defined Jewish life in the Russian Empire. Within the Pale of Settlement — the area that grouped Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other places under the Czar's command — Jews were ordered to stay, forbidden to be found outside its boundaries. The foreign passport was the exceptional document that could lift this confinement, but only at the state's discretion. It was one of many kinds of duties and taxes the Jews owed the Czar, who extracted payment on houses, rents, business, and profits, and who levied special taxes for public works that never seemed to materialize. The passport was thus not merely a travel document but a token of the Czar's power over movement itself, a power exercised through the police who could attach a family's household goods for unpaid dues, leaving a young bride with no sheet to wrap her first baby in for his circumcision.

The passport also intersected with the brutal realities of military conscription. Men of twenty-one — the age of conscription — were already married with children, and their families suffered during their absence, their businesses often ruined. At the end of their term they were beggars, hurried back into the Pale like escaped prisoners, stripped of their good uniforms and given a free ticket for the return journey. If within a limited time they were found outside the Pale, they would be seized and sent home in chains. The foreign passport was the only legal means of escaping this fate, which is why the poor locksmith who owed the Czar three hundred rubles because his brother had escaped Russia before serving his term might hide under a false name, travel on a false passport, or bribe officials to issue a false certificate of the missing brother's death. Only by false means could he secure peace for himself and his family, as long as the Czar was after his dues.

The Journey to the Frontier

The Antin family's own experience with the passport began in earnest on a gray wet morning in early April, when they set out for the frontier on their way to Hamburg, their port of embarkation. Their travelling outfit was much more bulky than valuable — bags and bundles that contained the accumulated necessities of a family leaving home forever. The passport was supposed to pass them over the frontier without any trouble, but on account of the prevalence of cholera in some parts of the country, the poorer sort of travellers, such as emigrants, were subjected to more than ordinary supervision and regulation. The document that was meant to guarantee their passage was, from the first, shadowed by the suspicion that the state cast on those who sought to leave it.

At Versbolovo, the last station on the Russian side, they met the first of their troubles. A German physician and several gendarmes boarded the train and put them through a searching examination as to their health, destination, and financial resources. As a result of the inquisition, they were informed that they would not be allowed to cross the frontier unless they exchanged their third-class steamer ticket for second-class, which would require two hundred rubles more than they possessed. Their passport was taken from them, and they were to be turned back on their journey. The document that was supposed to be their guarantee of passage had been seized, and they were left homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place.

The Passport and the Meaning of Freedom

The contrast between the passport's promise and its failure at Versbolovo illuminates the deeper meaning of the document in the family's story. The father, who had emigrated three years earlier, had almost his first act on landing on American soil been his application for naturalization. He had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United States. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. The foreign passport was the document that stood at the threshold of this transformation — the last barrier of the old world, the first test of whether one could leave it.

In America, the family would encounter a different kind of document culture, one in which the Constitution of the United States guaranteed the right of a Fellow Citizen to have any kind of God she chose, and in which a schoolyard dispute over atheism could be settled by invoking the separation of Church and State. The foreign passport belonged to a world where the Czar's portrait and flags were reminders that "it is a false world," where one was advised never to tell a police officer the truth. It was a document of the old world, where the state's power over movement was absolute, and where the only way to escape it was to cheat — to cheat the Government of part of its duties, to hide under a false name, to bribe officials. The passport was the emblem of that world's control, and its seizure at Versbolovo was the moment when the family confronted, in the most concrete terms, the arbitrary power that the document was supposed to mediate.