Passports, Internal Control, and American Politics
As I was going over different Russian channels, I came across this. For most people who don’t have an international passport, this makes little difference. However, if you are familiar with international law, this is a five-alarm fire.
What the Russian Embassy in Canada is essentially doing is creating stateless people. You can’t travel without a valid passport. I hope these young ones were born in Canada because they are otherwise stateless.
The Russian Embassy in Canada refused to change the passport of the minor children of a Russian woman. Formally, because of her subscription to an opposition group on Facebook.
Elena Pushkareva, who lives in Ottawa, has already had problems with the embassy: in 2023, she was not allowed there due to a “security threat to the foreign establishment.” Now she and the children were still allowed in, but they refused to accept documents to replace their foreign passports.
According to Pushkareva, the embassy stated that “services will not be provided by order of the ambassador.”
The reason for the refusal was the fact that Pushkareva allegedly “committed a crime.” We are talking about subscribing to the group “For a Beautiful Russia of the Future” on Facebook.
Now, what is she getting punished for? This is a thought crime. She dared to be critical of the government. This does not happen in free countries. This happens in closed states.
Now, let’s dig deeper into passports. These are internal passports. They don’t exist in Western nations, but Mexico has a sort of one. Mexico should serve as a warning for all of you clamoring for voter IDs. The Mexican federal voting ID has become necessary if you want to open a bank account, get a driver's license, or do anything legal in Mexico.
It is free and issued by the federal government. It’s not quite an internal passport. A valid international passport serves the same purpose as other official documents.
Russian internal passports go further from this. When traveling by land from Moscow Oblast to Kursk Oblast, you need to have an internal passport. You can also be stopped in the streets by a police officer demanding to see your passport. You need that passport to rent a property, let alone buy one.
So what are they doing? Here:
Consulates will also be given the opportunity to confiscate “passports with errors”
Now border guards have such rights, but the Ministry of Internal Affairs wants to give the same powers to employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the FSB, reports the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. And this will apply to both foreign and internal passports if an error is found there — including some kind of drawing or, for example, a mark about the ownership of an animal.
But, the Ministry of Internal Affairs consoles, if diplomats take “erroneous passports” abroad, they will be required to provide some document to return home
Confiscating an international passport that has been mutilated happens. But this reads more as residency permits are coming back. These were called Propiskas. They came with benefits, and there are rumors of these coming back. Among them housing:
The main benefit guaranteed by the residency permit was a place to live (see the essay on Housing in the USSR).
The permit tied the citizen to a specific town or city. It was possible to move from one apartment to another one in a different part of the same city; in that case, the passport was amended accordingly.
It was, however, problematic for ordinary Soviet citizens to move on their own initiative to a different city in order to live and work there. Without a residency permit in the new place an individual would simply not be hired. And getting a residency permit in a new city was all but impossible without the active involvement of the workplace.
The possibility of moving, with a permit, to a more desirable place was given only to individuals who were needed by the government. Either you were recruited by a job, or you yourself signed up for heavy unskilled labor under awful conditions with the understanding that you would spend years in a barrack or dormitory. After living in that fashion for a number of years (all that time under a temporary permit) you earned the right to stay permanently. Leningrad was one of the cities that, in contrast to the general poverty in provincial cities and rural areas, was favored by “enhanced supply.”
This is why confiscating internal passports is so disruptive. Being caught without one because it was taken away could lead to an immediate arrest. So, taking your passport away could be a way to get you to the front.
In a way, it feels like they are revving up that DeLorean. In the best case, we are going to 1960 Moscow. It’s the era Vladimir Putin knows because that’s his childhood. In the worst case, we are going back to the era of Joseph Stalin, whom Putin adores.
I realize that internal passports are alien to Americans and Europeans. We use our driver's license to fly. The documents are more secure with real ID, brought as part of the global war on terror. But we have nothing like this.
Granted, internal passports are old. They predate the Russian Revolution. However, they were systematized in the 1930s. And now they are going to become one more tool of repression.
Then, there was this post from Yigal Levin. It points to more shortages, no, not including the photo of the dead Russian:
One of the occupiers from the 127th reconnaissance brigade of the Russian Armed Forces liquidated on Kruglik Island on the Dnieper. Dressed in a Soviet camouflage robe. If such camouflage was still considered normal according to the standards of the Cold War, then in modern conditions it is quite outdated. At the same time, such camouflage suits are beginning to appear more and more often in photos and videos from the front. It remains unclear whether the issuance of such equipment is centralized, or whether these are separate initiatives to replace worn-out uniforms of the occupiers.
Now, we know Russia has been digging deep into its equipment reserves. Early in the war, we saw the occasional unit equipped with an old kit. But if this becomes more common, Russia will also run out of uniforms. So, can we expect to see troops wearing World War Two kit soon? Maybe it was the Afghanistan era, which is precisely what that dead Russian soldier was wearing.
Now, to nuclear blackmail because it continues. There is some good news in that department. It is not just me saying it is nonsense. Our leaders are finally getting it:
“The West has begun to understand that nuclear blackmail is nonsense”
Andrei Kozyrev: “This is a form of nuclear blackmail, to which I personally do not attach much importance and, in my opinion, the West has also begun to understand that this is all nonsense. Because, well, why on earth? Putin, who lives in the Kremlin, in luxurious surroundings, has all sorts of dachas and what not, and who, by the way, loves Western things, always dressed in fashionable Western things. Well, then, they say, he has daughters and probably grandchildren, in general, there are different options for his family. And he is a person who loves life, he has been like this all his life and this is normal, correct, he loves sports, loves to look good, at one time he was very afraid of Covid. That is, this is not a person who is suicidal. The threat of nuclear weapons is normal, it’s right: if you have something to threaten with, threaten. But to think about some kind of application or about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was on the brink of nuclear war — I think that no one believes it and they don’t want it.”
I find this interesting. Once you figure out the threat is empty, it loses a lot of its power. So, if the people who make decisions have realized this, it explains why we are telling Ukraine to go ahead and hit Russia in Russia, which Ukraine has been doing.
This brings me to a last piece of observation. Qatar is investing in Russia. However, there seems to be an effort to find an off-ramp. Victor Orban also went to Moscow. While not speaking for the EU, he may try to do some shuttle diplomacy. We may see a search for off-ramps. However, a lot of this will depend on our election.
Now, let’s talk a little about American politics…
Yes, I watched the debate on CSPAN. I read the transcript. Reading the latter clarified why people in translation or who read the transcript saw a different thing. It’s like the Nixon- Kennedy debate of 1960. I have been watching President Joe Biden's appearances since the debate. Then, this photo of Trump at a NATO summit reemerged. If we ask Biden to step down, so should Trump. After this ends, we need a constitutional amendment not allowing anybody over 75 to run for federal office.
I will repeat it. My feeling is that when the press tried to push Barack Obama in 2012 after a lousy debate night, and they tried to do the same after Hillary Clinton fainted, we need to ask what is the American media doing. I tend to watch American media skeptically, the same way I looked at my media when growing up in Mexico. It used not to be this way. This is not the press of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, not even close. I will offer this from Leslie Moonves in 2016. Respect, at least he was honest. He wanted Trump.
My only warning to the American media is to be careful what you wish for. The German media that fluffed Adolph Hitler to power ended up in Bergen Belsen, where they were some of the first residents. The Russian media that fluffed Putin to power is still paying for that.
And I will make it transparent. If the Democrats run a yellow dog, I vote for the pooch. Trump is that dangerous to the country. For the record, I am not a registered Democrat. I am one of those crazy independents that can go either way. Bicen (or Harris, or that dog) will do less damage to the country than Trump. It’s that simple. Trump admits he is looking forward to Kamala Harris because specialists like Allan Lichman say she is easier to take down.
Trump will be a disaster for the United States and Ukraine. But he will be a gift of fresh air for Putin. And if you want to vote for a third party, please. I only care if you are in four to six states, where your vote will make a difference. Go ahead and vote to insert a third party in California or Alabama. I did in 2016 in California. Oh, those halcyon long gone days when a few emails shared with Glen Greenwald seemed problematic…It will make no difference in the Electoral College. We don’t vote for presidents; we vote for electors.
That was the serious email story, that never got legs because it was way into the weeds. So, the media avoided the complicated story and instead tried to go for the easy-to-explain one. That she had a server at home. We found out because we downloaded the emails as they were posted on the State Department facing to the public website. The State Department had them online. The story that never got leggs was that Clinton shared documents on Lybia with Glenn Greenwald, who was never granted a clearance by the government. We knew the level of classification because of the markings. They were marked confidential.
For personal reasons we could not run with that story. But we passed it to Reuters. This is one of the stories they did run.