The "Yellow bilet" or "Yellow ticket" (Жёптый бипеть)
or Medical Card (Медицинский бипеть)
was used by a female serf as an internal (not international) passport to designate
that the holder could work as a prostitute (in a city). The medical card was
slightly different as is showed that the holder had taken medical tests. This
is referred to in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment".
Catherine the Great designated the Pale of Settlement as an area where Jews must live,
effectively a ghetto, except this area was not in a town or city, but consisted of a
governmental administrative area like the Ukraine. However, after the Polish partition
of 1795, Tsarist Russia gained Polish and Ukrainian lands where many Jews lived. If a
Jewish woman in the Pale of Settlement wanted to study at a university, for example,
in St. Petersberg or Moscow, the Jewish woman could petition to obtain a yellow ticket
(to gain access to a university in a major city), then go to the university. She need
not actually engage in prostitution, however much the Tsarist government preferred this.
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