Drowning in a Paper Sea

...In February of this year, Izvestia opened up a new campaign to curb the flood of paper...

...Comrade Kucharev, the account ends, "has written to Moscow to departments which are introducing additional forms of certification ...to ministries whose branches in various places are piling their archives high with certificates...

...Factories receive more directives than raw materials and produce more reports than spare parts...

...In short, more paper...

...Before he took power, Lenin denounced the ubiquitous internal passport as a remnant of bondage and a sign of enslavement of the Russian citizen to the state...

...His last one went "to the Presidium of the Russian Republic Supreme Soviet...

...Along with him, "millions of our country's citizens hope to live to see the day of the elimination of the abundance of certificates...

...At least twice in the Thirties and once in the Forties, it organized a vast propaganda campaign to reduce the number of producers of documents in favor of increasing the number of producers of the goods and services described in the documents...

...Since the document in question is printed by the state on paper bearing the state emblem, poor Kucharev wonders out loud why they must be stamped...

...Two total wars, the burgeoning state intervention into new fields of economic life, the magnitude of industry, the scale and nature of taxes, the maze of regulations and priorities, the adoption first of wartime and then of peacetime conscription have brought here, too, a slow but steadily increasing accumulation of bureaucratic prescriptions, documents and forms...

...But each time, after a brief reversal, the trend got under way again at an increased tempo...

...64 poods...

...In one year, 1,025 kilograms of paper were used for these directives, etc...

...mothers who come dragging their children along to get certificates "that such and such children are alive and healthy...

...With a little band of men in the Kremlin who know all, plan all, control all, decide all, intervening with directives on everything and demanding reports on everything, the whole system gets clogged with paper...

...A vast number of agricultural specialists and collective-farm personnel are being diverted [from agriculture] to the compiling of reports, statements and accounts...

...They are buried in directives, orders, decrees, demands for reports...

...At the other extreme, the United States of America, classic land of free movement and free migration, has begun to surround itself with an ever loftier wall of restrictions, screenings, quotas...

...During the year," said Khrushchev, "each collective farm submits to the District Agricultural Body figures for 10,000 indices...

...The paperwork and paperworkers, both governmental and non-governmental in the United States and pretty exclusively governmental in the Soviet Union, have increased steadily since that date, but the U.S.S.R...

...In the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1928-31, the word "passport" has the following definition: "The passport system was the most important weapon of police control and taxation policy of the so-called 'police state.' The passport system was in force also in pre-Revolutionary Russia...

...How remote now seems that ancient world of 1913, in which one could go to a ticket office and buy a ticket to anywhere in the world-except Turkey or Russia-without visa or passport...

...In 1937, the Soviet Government reported 1,617,000 bookkeepers and accountants and 822,000 economists and statisticians taking care of the records, estimates and reports of its industry...

...But paper reproduces itself faster than our population grows...

...Trud, the trade-union journal, complains of factories which refuse to certify that a given worker is at work during the appropriate hours and therefore cannot call in person to collect a package addressed to him...

...With 50,000 Communists descending on the countryside, will the flood of paper grow less...

...The farming of paper...

...Of course not...

...Other peoples," it used to be said in the nineteenth century, "consist of two parts: body and soul, but the Russian of three: body, soul and passport...

...Comrade Kucharev sits all day at his desk, issuing and signing many hundreds of documents...

...If we do not find ways of reversing the trend, our whole civilization may yet drown in a paper sea...

...In all the corridors and flowing over into the street are lines of people waiting for documents of one kind or another...

...citizens who need certificates that "he or she lives in his or her own house, in an apartment, alone or with his or her family, and so on and so on...

...The Soviet Government has worried about this more than once...

...Thousands of mothers come to the borough executive committee every month to have the coupons in their personal allowance books stamped...

...long ago "caught up with and surpassed" the United States, and, way out in front, is steadily increasing its lead...

...Russia may be out in front...

...He is still awaiting a reply...

...The United States in 1940 (with paper enough in all conscience) counted a total of 447,000 bookkeepers, accountants, cashiers, ticket agents, etc...

...Perhaps the increase and multiplication of paper is as good an explanation as any of why the same report reveals a failure in the increase and multiplication of cows...

...Yet, the Soviet Government wants to know at every moment who has how much living space, and millions and millions of documents pretend to certify it...

...A popular brochure should be published, containing samples of proper legal forms for authorization papers...

...He is slowly "drowning in a sea of paper" as higher trade-union officials shower him with directives and demands for reports...

...Is it possible to know who has how many children, who has how much living space...

...Has the Soviet Union decided to permit free travel abroad...

...From 1,250 to 10,000 in a little over a decade-here, at least, is one branch of Soviet agriculture that is booming...

...The other becomes so soaked in bureaucratic jargon that, when the head of the Oblast Agricultural Administration visits his office, he blurts out: "SOS EXCLAMATION MARK SAVE OUR SOULS COMMA REMOVE BUREAUCRACY COMMA LEAVE A MARGIN EXCLAMATION MARK...

...Hence, it does not occur to Izvestia to suggest that the abolition of passports for employment, for registration, for medical care, for schooling, for domestic travel would abolish both passports and certificates...

...What will these 50,000 do...

...in the U.S.S.R., one bookkeeper for every 20 workers...

...Compared to prewar, the number of indices in collective-farm reports has increased almost eight times...

...He has lost touch with the plant, with production, with the workingmen, and lives only with decrees, forms, lists, reports and endless demands for more reports than he will ever be able to make...

...Here is a line of patiently waiting mothers...

...The result of this outburst is that he is promoted and the Machine-Tractor Station knows him no more, except that it receives two or three directives or demands for reports bearing his signature every day...

...Since Khrushchev reported the startling achievements of agricultural officials in carrying out the first commandment of the Bureaucrats' Bible, "Increase and multiply documents," the same dizzying achievements have been noted in a number of other fields...

...Comrade Kucharev multiplies these letters of protest...

...50,000 Communists are being mobilized to make up the shortage and . . . increase Party control...

...descend on every official...

...But, one year after the last volume of the Small Encyclopedia appeared, Stalin reintroduced the internal passport as part of the new bondage which he was imposing upon the Russian worker and peasant...

...But, even in Russia, the organs of bureaucratic documentation and control had been withering away for more than half a century into mere vestigial appendages...

...They need passports, Izvestia explains in matter-of-fact tones, to "present to the personnel department when starting work, to the department for recruiting people for out-of-town work, to the railroad to get a pass to cross to the right bank of the Tom, to schools for young workers, trade schools, mining schools, plant and factory schools, registry offices, the workers' medical-inspection office, the borough social-security office...

...The package was not collected...

...Sereda could not go to the post office to collect it himself because he was not released from work to do so, and his factory refused to certify his authorization for his wife...

...Another article published by Izvestia in February tells the story of two Soviet agronomists, fresh from school and full of enthusiasm for farming...

...I cannot end this picture of the world's greatest paperocracy without an uneasy glance over my shoulder at our own land...

...It took the case of one Comrade Kucharev, secretary of a borough soviet executive committee in the comparatively new industrial town of Kemerovo...

...Many have children with them...

...Wolfe discusses the avalanche of cards and forms which accompany the growth of bureaucracy In First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's report on Soviet agriculture to the Plenum of his Communist Central Committee last September, there is one figure which makes one gasp...

...A passport then was the superfluous privilege of the envoy and the wealthy globe-trotter, not a necessity for every humble citizen seeking to cross a frontier and every refugee looking for some spot in the world on which to plant his foot...

...A notary tells how one factory worker's wife brought his passport "and asked me to notarize her husband's authorization for her to collect a package addressed to him...

...Izvestia's campaign is being followed up in other papers...

...People wait on lines from morning until late at night to get certificates to entitle them to wait on other lines to purchase goods that aren't there...

...Instead of becoming a trade-union chairman, he found that he had become a clerk...

...Comrade Kucharev's complaint continues with accounts of men and women who, although they are manifestly city-dwellers, require "certificates that they are not members of a collective farm...

...Khrushchev notes "an inordinate inflation of all sorts of directives and reports...

...Thus, even in prewar Russia, the collective farm had to answer 1,250 such questions-not to mention the countless reports demanded on cultural, political, demographic and other matters not directly related to farming...

...And then Bolshevism riveted the bonds of a new fixity more firmly on Russia than before...

...What volumes these suggestions for "improvements" tell about the system of fixity which binds every Soviet citizen to his collective farm, his village, his job with a bureaucratic bond testified to by an endless flood of paper...

...Though the figures may not be precisely comparable, the general significance is that, in the United States, we required one bookkeeper for every 54 workers...

...When he gives up for the day, the waiting lines are still there...

...Its only suggestion for improvement is: "Why not issue a passport on production of a birth certificate and an entry in the house register...

...Is special certification really necessary for a railroad pass when, in the course of a single application, both passport and certificate of place of work can be referred to...

...Another issue of Trud tells the sad story of a worker who left the bench to become Chairman of the Trade Union Committee of the Sverdlov Machine-building Plant...

...Finally, one of them jumps out of the sea of papers into the watery sea...

...In 1861, Russia abolished serfdom, in 1907 began to cut the last bonds which tied the peasant to the communal village mir, in 1917 proclaimed all the freedoms which men had won in the West, and more...

...Assigned to a collective farm, they never manage to leave the office and get out into a tractor or a field...

...But, alas for Russia, it was her fate to complete her struggle for the "loosening of the bonds" at the very moment when total war had engulfed the earth...

...True, there were more documents needed in 1913 in France than in England or America, more documents in Germany than in France, and more documents in Russia than anywhere else on earth...

...Or, in other words, 5.33 poods [188 pounds] a month, 40 pages a day...

...The Leningrad Trade Union Council," Trud informs us, "sends provincial trade-union committees and plant trade-union committees thousands of decrees, directives, reminders, demands...

...Why do so many citizens need passports...

...Far from it...

...One's existence could be attested then by mere physical presence, without documents, forms, reports in multuplicate, permits, licenses, state instructions, identity cards, draft cards, ration cards, visas, passports, or other authentications of one's being, one's birth, nationality, status, one's right to enter, move about, trade, purchase, produce, dwell...

...Soviet law knows no passport system...

...Especially burdensome for the toiling masses, the passport system is a hindrance also for the civilian aspect of the bourgeois state, which abolishes or weakens it...

...Trud's remedy...

...France and Germany and postwar England may still have a little lead on us...

...Do you think for a moment," asks the Borough Secretary, "that I know everything I confirm, stamp with my seal, or sign...

...There is a shortage of farm labor of all categories...

...Others are waiting for "certificates of place of residence in order to obtain passports...