Abstract
This volume presents a rigorous examination of Stalin’s policies towards the territories on either side of the shifting Soviet boundaries – that is, the borderlands – from Stalin’s revolutionary days to the consolidation of borders after the Great Patriotic War. The study brings together analyses of foreign policy and domestic policy in the peripheries, and underlines the shared aims, assumptions and tactics that shaped decision-making in both areas of policy. These commonalities were the product of what Rieber terms Stalin’s ‘borderland thesis’, a variation on the national security thesis familiar from foreign policy scholarship, but with the added consideration of what national security meant for Stalin as a man of the periphery and a Marxist-Leninist. The first two chapters explore this dimension, and establish that, with the failure of the international revolution, the borderlands came to represent for Stalin the key to securing the revolution in the Soviet Union in terms of both defence against foreign intervention and autarchy through the supply of raw materials. Based on his experiences in pre-revolutionary Georgia, however, Stalin expected that ethnic identity would trump class consciousness in the peripheries, giving way to ‘national deviation’ and corrupting the revolution. This risk was compounded by the fact that Soviet boundaries often cut through ethnic settlements rather than grouping them on one side of the border, providing enemies with fruitful avenues for subversive activity within the USSR – a persistent fear of Stalin’s. The solution was direct political control by the centre, which involved continuous purging and the forced relocation of suspect ethnic populations in order to shore up borders. This was tempered, however, by allowing a degree of cultural autonomy so as to defuse potential nationalist resistance and gradually fuse the peripheries and Russian core into a strong centralized state. Complementing these internal border-shoring tactics was the strategy in foreign policy of deflecting war away from vulnerable Soviet borderlands (and ethnic groups) and encouraging the focus of international relations to remain on distant neighbours, such as Spain, China and Iran.
Though developed during his time as People’s Commissar for Nationalities, it was during the succession struggle following Lenin’s death that Stalin put this thesis into action. As explored in Chapters 3 and 4, Stalin welded foreign policy to domestic aims, using the campaigns of socialism in one country – the clearest enunciation of the ‘borderland thesis’ – the war scare and rooting out national deviation to consolidate his leadership. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the interwar period, providing particularly valuable insight into the context and genesis of the nationalities operations during the purges. The final four chapters are devoted to the war years as the ultimate test and fulfilment of Stalin’s strategies. Rieber traces the elements of the ‘borderland thesis’ through these chapters using a breath-taking range of case studies from both within and outside Soviet borders. In addition to the familiar examples – Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltics, Poland, Germany and Spain – Rieber also explores lesser-known cases, including Bessarabia, Tuva, Inner Asia (Mongolia, Manchuria and Xinjiang) and Turkey, and brings to bear fresh archival research and a familiarity with the most recent historiography in each case. Particularly welcome is his treatment of Inner Asia and foreign relations with China and Japan, which are all too often glossed over in surveys of Soviet foreign policy, despite their significance at the time, fuelling, for instance, the drive for war preparedness during the First Five Year Plan. Although Rieber’s purpose is to tease underlying order out of the chaotic, inconsistent web of Stalin’s foreign and nationalities policies, he does not downplay contradiction or sacrifice detail in order to do so, but instead provides an analytical framework to facilitate rather than prescribe interpretation. Particularly worth highlighting in this regard is Chapter 7, which is devoted to untangling the civil conflicts that erupted in the Western borderlands during the Great Patriotic War. Rieber makes a compelling case here for the continued relevance of comparative analysis of Nazi and Soviet governance in contested territories, linking it to the various phases of the civil conflicts, but without imposing a tidy relationship of cause and effect.
This is a rich resource for students of foreign and nationalities policy. Taken together with its predecessor, 2014’s The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War, this volume represents a crowning achievement in a long and accomplished career. I, for one, have already added it to my course reading list.