It Doesn't Register

Last night, I went to teach a woman whom I'll call Gulia, an individual student I have been teaching now for about six weeks. Gulia is a former schoolteacher turned bank executive (not uncommon to find in Russia, where teachers are paid an absolute pittance). Most of the lesson focused on common verbs used with transportation (catch a train, drop off someone, etc.), but in the end we got onto the topic of whether Moscow or New York had more people.

Gulia first asked me how many people live in New York, and I told her eight million. She asked me if this was the "official statistic". I explained, as best I could, that this was the figure from the last census. She then proceeded to ask me what the "real" population was. I was a bit baffled until she asked me about "registration."

Registration is one of the many minor bureaucratic annoyances of Russian life. A system first devised in tsarist times and maintained under Soviet rule requires citizens to register in a city if they are there for more than three days. This is required of both Russian citizens and foreigners staying in Russia; many hotels offer registration services in the price of accomodation. Indeed, one of the first things my school did when I arrived was take my passport for registration purposes, and a clause in my contract requires me to pay any fines that might be levied on the school due to my failure to comply with the registration laws.

I have been told different things about the rationale and purpose of registration. Volodya told me once that it was a combination zoning and population control measure, designed to prevent masses of people from living crammed into hovels (how well this system functioned in Stalin's time, when both the population and average number of people per apartment doubled in fifteen years, I know not). Other Russians seem to see registration as a necessity to keep out undesirable foreign workers--Russia having its own problems with illegal immigration, mainly from Central Asian republics formerly part of the Soviet Union. Indeed, some estimates suggest that, when all of the unregistered people living illegal in Moscow is factored in, the city's population is close to twenty million--more than double the official statistic given by the government.

One oddity of the registration laws both Volodya and Gulia have told me about is that renters have to obtain registration through their landlord, whereas owner receive registration automatically. This can put a burden on Moscow's poor, whose landlords sometimes refuse to provide registration and who must seek it out from various agencies that advertise, among other places, on the Metro.

Gulia, Volodya and other Russians seem to regard registration procedures as just a fact of life, and have expressed shock when I explained that there is no equivalent in America. When I told this to Gulia last night, she asked me a lot of questions about how, without registration, parents put their children into school or ill people go to the hospital. I gather that registration is somewhat like your social security number in America, in that you can do almost nothing involving the government without it. After some explaining, Gulia at last grasped that, in America, where you school does not always correspond to geography and that the main thing a hospital wants is your insurance card, not your registration documents. At last she let out a sigh:

"Ah, Democracy!" she said.

Registration illustrates the central paradox of Russian life over the centuries: that it has been, and continues to be, both relentlessly authoritarian and relentlessly lawless. Registration seldom seems to serve the public good, and often seems to frustrate it. Guidebooks to Russia often advise foreigners to steer clear of the militsiya (police), because, among other things, they have been known to demand bribes for phoney violations of the registration laws. On the books, the fine for foreigners' failing to register properly is only the equivalent of about $2, but the militsiya are often able to take advantage of foreigners' lack of knowledge, lack of Russian, and consequent lack of power to demand much more. Despite all of the effort put into enforcing them, the laws are wideless flouted, as evidenced by the large "unofficial" population of Moscow.