Russian passport


The Russian passport is a booklet issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to Russian citizens for international travel. This external Russian passport is distinct from the internal Russian passport, which is a mandatory identity document for travel and identification purposes within Russia. Russian citizens must use their Russian passports when leaving or entering Russia, unless traveling to/from a country where the Russian internal ID is recognised as a valid travel document.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Soviet Union passport continued to be issued until 1997 with a validity of 5 years, when the first modern Russian passport are known to be issued. The first version of passports issued in 1997 was handwritten. Passports issued from 2000 to 2010 were machine-readable passports, had a validity of 5 years and included 36 pages. In 2006, Russia issued the first machine-readable biometric passports and in 2010, the design of the biometric passports was modified to include 46 pages and have a validity of 10 years.
Citizens under 18 traveling without either of their parents must have written consent of both parents allowing their departure from the country. When a child travels with one parent, consent of another parent is not required. Articles 20 and 21 of the Federal Law "On the entry in the Russian Federation and departure from the Russian Federation" govern only departure from Russia and have nothing to do with the requirements of other countries regarding entry to these countries.
In addition to regular passports there are two special-purpose types of passports for travelling abroad: diplomatic passports and service passports.

History

Russian Empire

Foreigners arriving in Russia met various restrictions in the Tsarist period; border magistrates could allow foreigners to pass within the state only with the permission of the senior government. In troubled times, it began to produce and to travel within the country system "roadways" letters in order, mainly police. As a general rule letters carriageways were built by Peter I, in connection with the entered his conscription and head tax. In 1724, to prevent the possibility to evade the payment of the poll tax, special rules about absences of peasants.
Under the legislation in force for the period of 1906 in Russia in the place of residence, as a general rule, the passport was not required. The capital and other cities which declared an emergency situation or enhanced protection were the exception. In addition, in areas that were subject to the rules on the supervision of industrial establishments, the workers of factories and plants were required to have a passport, and in the place of permanent residence. A passport was not needed when absent from the place of permanent residence: 1) within the district and outside it as recently as 50 vents and no more than 6 months, and 2) from the persons hired for rural work, in addition, within the townships adjacent to the county of residence, even if more than 6 months.
Law of June 10, 1902 the regulations on residence permits June 3, 1894 extended to the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland, with some modifications. Formed in 1902, the Committee on the needs of the agricultural industry is recognized as desirable in the types of facilitating the movement of agricultural workers, the simplification of passport regulations. A special meeting of the needs of the agricultural industry has been entrusted to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the revision of statutes on residence permits, in the sense of saving for a passport solely value of an identity document. Elaborated on these grounds in 1905, a new draft statute was a passport to postpone consideration until the convocation of the State Duma.

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

Immediately after the Russian Revolution the Russian Republic not followed the emigration; Many disagreed with the new regime left the country since 1917 to the end of the 1920s left the country about 8,000 people, including about 500 scientists. In 1922, two flights so-called philosophical ship from Petrograd to Stettin and several ships from the territory of Ukraine and trains from Moscow on the personal instructions of Lenin were expelled 225 intellectuals. Of the emigrants only a small part returned, such as Marina Tsvetaeva and Alexei Tolstoy.
By the mid-1930s the Soviet government sealed the borders. Traveling to capitalist countries was only possible to employees of the Foreign Ministry, the nomenklatura and selected artists while most ordinary Soviet citizens had the opportunity to travel only in socialist countries with trade union tours.
The third and final wave of Soviet emigration coincided with the rupture of relations with Israel. June 10, 1968 the Central Committee received a joint letter to the leadership of the Foreign Ministry and the KGB signed by Andrey Gromyko and Yuri Andropov to the proposal to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate from the country. As a result, in the 1970s only about 4,000 people had left, many against their will, for example, such well-known dissidents as Brodsky, Aksenov, Aleshkovsky, Voinovich, Dovlatov, Gorenstein, Galich.
On May 20, 1991, a few months before the collapse of the USSR, the last Soviet law on the exit of citizens abroad was adopted, according to which citizens could leave at the request of the state, public and religious organisations and enterprises.

The Russian Federation

In 1993, exit visas were canceled and free issuing of passports was allowed. The right to freely leave the country was enshrined in a 1996 law. Passports with the symbols of the Soviet Union were issued to citizens of the Russian Federation until the end of 1997, to be replaced by machine-readable Russian passports. The last Soviet passports issued had an expiration date at the end of 2002, about 10 years after the dissolution of the Soviet state. Since 2001, Russian passports have been issued with a design which includes the emblem of Russia, a double-headed eagle. Since 2010, the application for the registration of a passport can be submitted via the website www.gosuslugi.ru.
In 2006, biometric passports were introduced in Russia. Since 2009, in all regions of Russia there are points of issue of passport and visa documents of new generation. The data of these items come in a single personalisation center. After 1 March 2010, biometric passport are valid for 10 years. The data on the chip Russian passports are protected by a technology access control BAC, which allows producing read data only after entering the passport number, date of birth of the holder and the expiration date of the passport, which excludes unauthorised access to data on the chip.
The holders of Russian Federation passports issued in Crimea and Sevastopol after their 2014 annexation, territory that is internationally recognized as a foreign-occupied part of Ukraine, do not have their passports recognized by the United States, and are denied European Schengen-zone visas. Canada and the United States are also refusing to recognize passports that Russia started issuing in 2019 to Ukrainians in the non-government-controlled Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, and the European Union was considering their non-recognition.

Description

Each passport has a data page and a signature page. A data page has a visual zone and a machine-readable zone. The visual zone has a digitized photograph of the passport holder, data about the passport, and data about the passport owner:
At the bottom of the data page is a machine-readable zone, which can be read both visually and by an optical scanner. The machine-readable zone consists of two lines. There are no blank spaces in either line. A space which does not contain a letter or a number is filled with "<".
The first line of the machine-readable zone contains a letter to denote the type of travel document, the code for the citizenship of the passport holder, and the name of the passport holder.
The second line of the machine-readable zone contains the passport number, the code of the issuing country, the date of birth of the passport holder, a notation of the sex/gender of the passport owner, the date of expiration of the passport, and, at the very end of the line, one or more overall check digits.
A signature page has a line for the signature of a passport holder. A passport is not valid unless it is signed by the passport owner.

Transliteration of Russian names

Due to the fact that Russian visas are intended for use in Russia only, there are certain other Latin letters as well as other alphanumerical symbols used to transliterate the letter with no direct analogue in Latin script into the machine-readable zone. As an example, the letter "ч" is usually transcribed as "ch" in Russian travel documents, however, Russian visas and internal passports use "3" in the machine-readable zone instead. Another example is "Alexei" => "Алексей" => "ALEKSEQ"

Types of passports

;Regular : Issuable to all citizens of the Russian Federation. Period of validity is 10 years from the date of issue.
;Diplomatic : Issuable to Russian diplomats accredited overseas and their eligible dependents, and to citizens who reside in the Russian Federation and travel abroad for diplomatic work. Passport issued for the period of work, but no more than 10 years.
;Service : Issuable to Russian federal and regional civil servants assigned overseas, their eligible dependents, to members of the Russian parliament who travel abroad on official business and to judges of the Supreme and Constitutional Courts. Also issued to military personnel when deployed overseas. Period of validity: length of service, but not to exceed 10 years.
;Certificate for return: Issuable to Russian citizens and nationals overseas, in urgent circumstances. This document is valid only for return to the Russian Federation.

Visa-free travel

Visa requirements for Russian citizens are administrative entry restrictions by the authorities of other countries placed on citizens of Russia. As of 26 March 2019, Russian citizens had visa-free or visa on arrival access to 118 countries and territories, ranking the Russian passport 47th in terms of travel freedom according to the Henley visa restrictions index.

Foreign travel statistics

According to the national statistics these are the numbers of Russian visitors arriving to various countries per annum:

Issue time

According to the federal law and the orders from 2012 and 2014 for the old 5-year laminated and the new 10-year biometric passport, respectively, either document has to be issued within one to four months,

depending on circumstances, with the issue time being three months in case of an application being made to a consulate outside of Russia.
However, in practice, some consulates require an appointment to be made prior to the applicant being able to provide documents to apply for the passport, in some cases, appointments can only be available many months or even possibly years into the future, effectively undoing the upper limit for a timely issuance of the travel document.
Additionally, if passports are expired or lost, applications for the new passport are routinely declined to be accepted when abroad, prior to the verification of citizenship, for which the consuls require a separate application to be made, either in person or notarised by a notary public, with the processing times for verification itself often exceeding many months. Such practice of causing the extra costs for the applicant, however, seems to be in violation of point 23 of orders 10303 from 2012-06-28 and 3744 from 2014-03-19, which guarantee that no extra services are required in order to apply for a passport.