Vehicle registration plates (Russian: Регистрационные знаки транспортных средств, 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. 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.
History
Russian Empire's first attempts to hold accounts for horse-drawn carriages driving through cities were taken in the 19th century to only 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 the resolution on the admission of cyclists in traffic was published, bicycles were also made subjects to compulsory registration. Automobiles, which appeared later, also needed such registration.
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, which, for the carriages, was in the 1930s and until the publishing of a decree on the cancellation of registration of bicycles by 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.