On 27 December in Moscow, a decree was signed “On the introduction of a unified passport system across the USSR and mandatory registration of passports.” The passport regulations established that all citizens of the USSR aged 16 and older who permanently resided in cities and workers’ settlements, who worked in transport, on state farms, and at new construction sites, were required to have passports. In areas covered by the passport system, the passport was the only document certifying the holder’s identity. All previous documents that had served as residence permits were abolished. Mandatory passport registration with the police was introduced no later than 24 hours after arrival at a new place of residence. Deregistration also became mandatory—for everyone leaving the given locality permanently or for a period of more than two months; for everyone leaving their former place of residence, exchanging passports; for convicts; and for those arrested and held in custody for more than two months.
On 16 February in Moscow, the demolition of Okhotny Ryad and the Church of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa begins.
27 February — James Chadwick discovers the neutron.
3 April — Russian surgeon Yuriy Yuryevich Voronoy performs the world’s first kidney transplant operation.
4 April — American scientist C. King isolates vitamin C for the first time.
14 April — In Leningrad, the first residential building on Ruzovskaya Street, No. 15, is supplied with gas.
16 April — The first Russian television sets are manufactured at the Leningrad Radio Plant.
15 May — By a government decree signed by Stalin, a “godless five-year plan” is proclaimed, setting the goal that by 1 May 1937 “the name of God must be forgotten on the territory of the country.”
7 July — The Leningrad Research Institute of the Dairy Industry develops, for the first time in the country, a method for processing milk into powder.
6 August — The first Venice Film Festival opens.
5 January — Raisa Maksimovna Gorbacheva (Titarenko), the wife of the first President of the USSR, is born.
3 September — Pavlik Morozov is killed, a Pioneer who informed on his father, who had collaborated with the kulaks, and who fought those concealing harvests from Soviet authorities, for which he was killed by kulaks. Celebrated for several decades as a hero-martyr, Morozov later became an antihero in numerous journalistic articles, although he was merely a victim of his time and its ideas.