Dr Stephan Rindlisbacher works as a researcher at the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Previously, he was research assistant at the Institute of History at the University of Bern. For his dissertation he studied the radical movement in the late Russian Empire. He is currently editing a book on managing diversity in the early Soviet Union.

Separating Communities: The Local Impact of National Bordering in the Early Soviet Union

Abstract: Based on the slogan of “self-determination,” the early Soviet state created and implemented boundaries between local communities that had been interconnected for centuries. This unique state sponsored approach to the nationality question has created challenges for the world today. The Russo-Ukrainian war, the question of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as the war between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2022 are rooted in decisions taken in the 1920s.

After the Civil War, Lenin and his comrades saw few alternatives to embracing the slogan of “self-determination” and structuring the Soviet state accordingly. From their perspective, such a frame would allow them to mobilise the “backward” population. The rationales for border-making between these newly established national entities like Ukraine, Armenia, or Uzbekistan provide an angle to comparatively analyse Soviet federalism. In the borderlands between Ukraine and the RSFSR, in the borderland between Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as in the Fergana Valley, people began to link basic needs for subsistence with national frames.

In all three regions, the union republics, not the party and state leadership in Moscow, were allocating state resources, nationalised fields and pastures. Hence, peasants saw their villages cut off from pastures and woods on the other side. Mobile herdsmen faced existential challenges when migrating with their flocks between their summer in one republic and winter pastures in another. Nomadic and sedentary people struggled for water resources divided between national entities.

The creation of national-territorial entities interrupted traditional migratory practices and local interconnectedness. Local economic interests as well as local petitions and requests for border revisions soon adopted a nationalised language. Within the Soviet frame, one nationalised group thus gained privileges, whereas “others” were excluded. Such practices enforced – despite local resistance – a separation of previously interconnected communities.