issued [9] in town A entitled you to live only in town A; if you wanted to live in town B with a passport issued in town A, it was possible, but you had to clarify the reason for changing your place of residence at the housing department; a particularly good justification was finding employment in that town and producing a document issued by the enterprise that employed you, confirming that you were indispensable to it; otherwise, the authorities could refuse to register you; consequently, one always needed to know in advance whether one would be able to obtain accommodation and register in the town to which one wished to move. By the way, it should to be said that the issue of accommodation is a relatively complex problem in the USSR, as the metric areas are fixed, that is, the number of square metres for accommodation of one person. And also at some point [10] it was nine square metres, but then that norm was reduced to six square metres. So a family of three (husband, wife, and child) was entitled to a total of eighteen square metres; hence they occupied, one might say, two average-sized rooms and one larger room. Nobody was allowed live there besides them due to the insufficient metric space. At registration the upravdom (a tenement manager and administrator in one) even needed to show the commissioner the books stating the metric area of a given locale, [for the latter to decide] whether it was sufficient or not. Secondly, the above pertained to cases when the citizen had a passport without any restrictions. But I should say that even if one had an unrestricted passport one could not move from a small town to a larger one. Moreover, settling in a well-known city, such as Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, etc., was possible only with a passport [11] issued there, except for highly exceptional instances, such as a job transfer, which however happened very seldomly.
Passports for lishentsy with §11. Thirdly, in the USSR there are passports with §11, that is, with restrictions, meaning that their holders may not, or actually are forbidden to live in any larger town located less than one hundred kilometres from the border and less than one hundred kilometres from the town that issued the passport. Passports with that § were issued in the USSR to lishentsy (the deprived).663 According to Soviet citizens, in Russia such passports were issued to prostitutes, habitual offenders, and generally to people in any way suspected, including former bourgeois. Understandably, it was difficult to find work in a small town with such a passport.
