Vehicle registration plates of the Soviet Union (, Registratsionnye znaki transportnykh sredstv, ) were used in the Soviet Union for registrations of automobiles, motorcycles, heavy machinery, special-use vehicles as well as construction equipment, military vehicles and trailers. The international code for the Soviet Union was SU. Every vehicle registration plate contains a unique registration mark embossed on a metal plate or a plate made of other materials. All vehicles were required to display the plates on the front side and backside, with the exception of trailers and motorcycles, which were only required to display one on the backside.
1980 USSR series, used until 1994License Plates of the Soviet Union Example Description ш 98 05 МК Private 52 19 МНБ Government, Police, OfficialТ 124 327Diplomats in USSR Р 504 367Car for export out of the USSR, foreign residents in USSR
History The Russian Empire's first attempts to register horse-drawn carriages driving through cities were taken in the 19th century to prevent tax evasion by their owners. Sometime in the 19th century, every coachman and his carriage had to have a registration number which was only valid for a year, and they had to pay the tax in order to have a replacement. In the 1890s, after cyclists were legally admitted into traffic, bicycles were also made subjects to compulsory registration. This was later extended to automobiles.
There was no standard for the registration numbers at that time. Every city had its own plate format and color, and the background color for the plates could vary from year to year in a single city. The plates were required to contain a numbers-only registration number and optionally the name of the city, the year of issue, the type of the vehicle as well as other information as demanded by local authorities. Plates for automobiles were similar to those for bicycles in appearance, but are five to eight times as large. Regular fixation points were not provided for automobiles at that time, so the plates were simply drilled to have two holes, and were suspended with ropes going through them.
In 1920 the first attempt to standardize vehicle registration plates was made. On June 13, 1920, a decree named "On registration plates" was published, which required all vehicles to mount the front license plate on the left wing and the rear one on the backside. In 1927 the standardization proceeded with the introduction of "Rules of the All-Union Registry of Cars and Motorcycles", which standardized the form of the plates, dimensions for front and rear plates, as well as those for motorcycles, the color and height of the characters, and the width of each character stroke, whereas the background color continued to vary annually.
However, these changes did not affect registration plates of carriages and bicycles, which continued to vary in shape and color until their cancellation; this took place in the 1930s for carriages, but bicycles continued to be registered until 1970.
By the early 1930s the number of automobiles and motorcycles skyrocketed, with frequent trips from a city to another "on motors". To conduct a full registration of all cars and motorcycles across the country, a unified standard for license plates for cars and motorcycles came into force in 1931.
1931 to 1946 During the 1930s the format of plates never standardized.
The first Soviet registration plates issued in 1931 had an "L-NN-NN" format, where L represents a Cyrillic letter and N being a number. Every registration is linked to a single vehicle, while motorcycle plates differ from those for cars in terms of dimensions. Two license plates were issued to every vehicle: a frontal plate and a rear plate. Frontal plates for motorcycles were to be mounted along the front wing of a vehicle, while rear ones were to be mounted perpendicular to the rear wing. Registration plates for test-drive vehicles appeared later, which contained the word "проба" (proba, literally "test") on the top, with the first pair of digits absent, therefore forming the format "L-NN". Two major drawbacks of this format were later found, with the first being that the letter was issued in sequential order regardless of any situation, while the second is that a letter could stand for two sparsely populated regions, and on the other hand, a large city could possess a number of letters. These drawbacks caused the termination of this format in 1934.
In 1934, a new replacement standard was set: the letter on the former design was changed to a digit, and there was the name of the registry, or "Dortrans" below the digits. There were at first 45 Dortrans, one for each region, under the administration of the Central management of highways and dirt roads and road transport at the Council of People's Commissars of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, known in short as the TsUDorTranse, and then after a reorganization of administrative divisions, the number went up to 52. The former format was considered temporarily valid and owners must change to the new format before July 1, 1934. The format was not strictly defined, i.e. there need not to be exactly five digits on the plate, and the name of the region could reach up to 8 characters excluding dots and dashes, which made it often written in abbreviated form. Test and transit plates remained their format, except that the name of the Dortran was replaced by the word "транзит" (tranzit, "transit"), or "проба" (proba, "test"). These plates have the same color schemes as ordinary plates, but there were also plates for experimental vehicles in an inverse scheme.
At the end of 1936 the format changed once more, when the beginning of the sequence switched to a two-letter code of the regional registry, followed by two pairs of numbers separated by a hyphen, which made it an "LL NN-NN" pattern. The code uses letters of the Russian alphabet except for "Ё", "Й", "Ъ", "Ы" and "Ь". There was a single-line frontal plate plus a double-line rear plate for each vehicles, with motorcycle plates bearing the same format, albeit in a smaller size. This difference existed until 1994. Trial and transit numbers also remained, which replaced the region code with the word "транзит" (tranzit, "transit"), below which positioned a factory code.
Near the end of the 1930s, in coordination to the current format, there was also a so-called "уменьшенный" (umen'shennyy, literally "reduced") format: The plate was smaller, used a narrower and slimmer font, while the regional code became physically smaller, was placed in the top-left corner, with the numbers down-scaled. At the same time a single format was developed for trailers, but seldom given. Subsequently, this format became the basis for the next change.
Shortly before 1941, all military equipment received a number format different from the civil format, the "L-N-NN-NN" format. Before this there was no system for military plates at all. Moreover, there are a number of documented cases of plate type violations, including arbitrary hyphenation, adding of stars or anchors, and even violations concerning format, such as plates containing 4 to 6 digits, with 4 digits often for motorcycles, but with exceptions.
At the end of the 1930s, the first diplomatic plates were issued. Based on the "reduced format", a single digit replaced the first pair of numbers, with a large letter Д in the upper right corner.
The first unified car number of the USSR 1931-1934Car number of the USSR 1934-1936Car number of the USSR 1936-1946, frontCar number of the USSR 1936-1946, rearMilitary car plates of the USSR 1940-1960
1946 to 1959 After World War II the registration went into chaos with cars that had lost documentation, "mobilized" machines, war trophy equipment, automobiles and captured re-registered vehicles. All of these had to be taken into account, which prompted a mandatory replacement of old license plates with new ones in 1946.
The new format was once again based on the old "reduced" format, only changing the color of the background to orange and the color of letters and numbers to black. Diplomatic plates used a different "Д-NN" format for frontal plates, with the Д on the top row and the digits on the bottom row for rear plates. There were also formats for trailers, which formerly bore the same number as the truck attached to it. The format for trailers was the same as the rear version of civil plates, only with the inscription "прицеп" (pritsep, "trailer") next to the regional code.
At that time, there existed a white-on-black format which is to be assigned to business- and privately owned cars. Later, this color scheme along with diplomatic plates were put into use.
An interesting fact is that this standard did not concern test and transit plates. As "test" plates were common in autonomous regions, plates starting with "00" or "01" were often reserved for them, and the transit plate could be produced in any form on paper.
Front plates for motorcycles ceased to be issued in 1946, ending the trend in which all motorcycles, similar to cars, had to have two plates, of which the front plate was single-lined, and attached to the front fender.
Since the 1940s, large enterprises and car factories were allowed to have their own license plates for test-drive and internal transport, without leaving the territory of the factory. Some enterprises have modified their plates to conform to the standard, while others remained unchanged. For example, cars for internal transport within VAZ in the 1980s have registration plates similar to the Soviet standard, but the three-letter suffix was always the letters "ВАЗ". These plates could still be found in some modern car factories.
USSR car number 1946-1959, frontUSSR car number 1946-1959, rearUSSR car number 1946-1959, trailer
1959 to 1980
In 1959, a reform on the format of registration plates within the USSR began, changing the format to "NN-NN LLL", with the first two letters acting as a regional code, and the last letter simply being a serial, again in a white-on-black scheme. Plates for trailers, as in the previous format, received only two letters, both making up the regional code, with the word "прицеп" added next to it. The introduction of the third letter would cause the numbers and letters to physically exceed the limits of a registration plate in the previous formats, which is another reason for the reform.
In the early 1960s, military equipment were issued new types of registration plates, with the format almost identical to the civil type, but dropping the third letter (therefore creating the "NN-NN LL" format). Contrary to previous formats where the letters and numbers carried no information on the unit that was issued plates, the regional code was organized by the Armed Forces of the USSR themselves, which is why military plates do not actually "collide" with civil ones.
In 1965, two new types of plates were introduced specifically for tractors and tractor trailers. Previously, registration for tractors was not compulsory and motorcycle plates were issued to them instead, while trailers were not subject to registration at all. The color scheme was inherited from the previous format as black-on-orange, but the indication of a tractor and a trailer has been shortened to "ТР-Р" and "ПР-П" (shortened from "трактор" and "прицеп", "tractor" and "trailer") respectively. Sometimes a tractor bearing a plate that has a white-on-black scheme could be seen, which was originally intended for military use. However, this distinction soon faded as civil tractors and military ones soon bore plates of the same format.