Livin' La Vida Moskva

One thing I find myself doing over and over again as an EFL teacher is asking basic "getting to know you" questions: What's your name? What do you do? Where are you from?

The last of these is the one that tends to come up the most. At all levels of English, students have to be prepared to discuss their background and life story with people they meet. A beginner can get by with, "I'm Russian"; more advanced students may have to discuss tourist accomodations in their native cities. But I guess asking questions about strangers' origins is part of human nature, since every foreign language textbook I have ever seen--for English, Hebrew, French, or Russian--dwelt on it. Only when I was forced to take Latin and Greek in high school do I not recall having to ask and answer these types of questions. Homer pretty much told us where Achilles was from.

When I ask this question of Muscovites, I have found, one answer tends to be repeated over and over again: Moscow. For a long time, I suspected that there was almost no one in Moscow who was not born here, or who would admit to not being born here. I had heard a bit about Russia's system of registrations and internal passports, and read a few news articles to the effect that millions of people are now living in Moscow without proper registration, and figured that people not born in Moscow might have difficulty getting official permission to live here and might therefore have a status akin to that of illegal immigrants Stateside.

I was very surprised, therefore, on Tuesday, when Volodya told me he had been born in Riga but raised in a city of about 300,000 located about 1000 kilometers from Moscow. This gave me all the cue I needed to ask about how registration actually works in Russia. I told him that few people I had met so far hailed from anywhere far from Moscow and inquired about the registration process in Russia. To make my point clear, I told him that in the United States, the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to live where he pleases.

Volodya told me that the same right exists under Russia's constitution. Though it originated in tsarist times and was most extensively used to control population movements by the Soviet regime, Russia's registration system is no longer a means of keeping people under a tight fist. Rather, it is a means of forcing compliance with ordiannces about how many people can live in one apartment.

As I gathered from Volodya, the system works as follows: if a person changes his place of residence for more than ninety days, he has to go and register with the police in his new locale. Any police officer may, at any time, ask to see people's registration documents. Registration is not difficult to get if you buy a house in your new location, but if you rent, you need the cooperation of your landlord. Violation of the registration laws carries a fine, but it never involves being forced to leave the city in which you failed to register properly.

Once I processsed what Volodya had said, I realized this system was no more oppressive than having to change your driver's license when you move in the United States. It may not be as common for Americans to carry their passport around with them as it is in other countries, but I am beginning to realize this is more because our driver's licenses have information that, in other countries, is only on a passport.

So indeed, it's not very difficult for Russians who wish to relocate to Moscow to do so. No efforts are being made to limit who can live here.

Any Russian who wants to can live la vida Moskva.