Uzbekistan document photos online

For nearly three decades after the USSR collapsed, an Uzbek passport alone was not enough to leave the country: you also needed a Soviet-style "exit visa" — a departure sticker pasted into your document by the interior ministry's OVIR office, which could be refused or quietly sold for a bribe. Uzbekistan was the very last post-Soviet republic to scrap the practice, abolishing exit visas only on 1 January 2019 — the same day it began issuing modern burgundy biometric passports. In two years a document that once trapped its holders became a chip-embedded travel credential, one of the fastest identity-document turnarounds anywhere in the former Soviet world.

• Exit visas Until 1 January 2019 Uzbeks needed a government "exit sticker" glued into their passport just to travel abroad, making the country the last ex-Soviet state to abolish exit visas — seven years after Cuba did.
• Passport power On the Henley Passport Index the Uzbek passport climbed to its strongest-ever position in September 2025, ranking around 72nd with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 62 destinations.
• Biometric switch Uzbekistan went from green Soviet-legacy booklets to chip-embedded burgundy biometric passports almost overnight in January 2019, and in 2021 split off a separate national ID card for everyday domestic use.
• One passport only Uzbekistan does not recognise dual citizenship — acquiring a foreign passport is itself legal grounds for losing your Uzbek nationality, so naturalising citizens must renounce every other passport.
• Currency The som's smallest sub-unit, the tiyin, became so worthless to inflation that the 1-tiyin coin was dubbed "the world's most worthless coin," and notes and coins below 50 som were pulled from circulation on 1 March 2020.
• Cash bundles Until 2013 the biggest banknote was just 1,000 som — worth about 60 US cents — so Uzbeks routinely carried bricks of cash; the central bank has since issued notes all the way up to 200,000 som (2022).
• Doubly landlocked Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries on Earth — every one of its neighbours is also landlocked — so a citizen must cross at least two borders to reach any ocean.
• Oldest metro The Tashkent Metro, opened in 1977, was the first and remains the oldest subway in Central Asia, with palatial stations that were treated as state secrets and banned from being photographed until 2018.
• Star records In 15th-century Samarkand, ruler-astronomer Ulugh Beg built a giant observatory and catalogued over 1,000 stars with naked-eye accuracy unmatched in his era — centuries before any modern travel document existed.