ing their registration at a given building. As nobody, literally nobody in Lvov had a photograph with the required appearance and format (and, making matters worse, a black background), everybody had to go to a photo studio as the first step.
“Photographic” queues. It was characteristic of Lvov that immediately after the Bolsheviks had marched into the city, every pedestrian encountered queues on every street every day. Seeing a queue, he would walk up and ask, having reserved a place first, “What can you get here?” and if a given article was of no interest to him he would give up his reserved place and walk away. During the “passportisation” period, when [3] one saw a very long queue
on a street you ignored it because one could be sure that it was a queue to a photographic studio. Admittedly, those “photographic queues” were indeed record-breaking. The people queued for eight or nine hours to finally enter and have their photograph taken. According to the announcement, “passportisation” was to conclude by a specified date, with deadlines set for every first letter of a surname. But in practice the organisation was so poor that, for instance, if one reported to a station on Monday as one was supposed to according to the plan, it took two or three days before one could finally enter the station on Thursday or Friday. That meant that one had to queue outside (there were very long queues inside as well) for [about] three days in a row. Of course, the local [4] periodicals (Czerwony Sztandar and Vilna Ukraina) were spreading propaganda, explaining the benefits of having a Soviet passport, which was almost tantamount to having Soviet citizenship.
Mayakovsky’662 poem about the passport. The periodicals mentioned above printed, for instance, a poem by the famous Bolshevik poet Mayakovsky about the [Soviet] passport. In that poem the poet described how wonderful he felt when travelling abroad in an international carriage when during passport inspection the other passengers showed passports from their own capitalist countries, whereas he felt proud and happy when he realised that he was the only citizen in the carriage who produced a Soviet passport, which in his mind meant that he had an international passport because he was or actually felt like a world citizen, because his country was the only country with freedom and equality in the entire world.
