Overview

Borders in Red shows how Lenin and his Bolshevik leadership embraced the nationality question as a way of managing diversity and institutionalized it as a means of governance. Stephan Rindlisbacher uses the making of national borders as a lens through which to examine the Bolsheviks' fundamental shift from proletarian internationalism to ethnonational federalism sui generis. Comparing how party and state managed issues of national diversity in the core regions of Soviet federalism—Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia—Rindlisbacher provides insights into their policymaking and into the roots of current territorial conflicts. President Putin has condemned Lenin's nationality policy to be a historical mistake, and with its war against Ukraine, Russia has tried to revise borders that date back to the early days of the Soviet state. However, Borders in Red shows that the Soviet Republics were not arbitrarily divided by leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev. They were the result of long-lasting debates involving politicians, experts, and people from the border regions. The developing Soviet order was a product of trial and error.

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9781501780585

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Reviews

Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union offers particular analytical resonance... by highlighting the tensions between ideology, institutional practice, and local agency, this book deepens our understanding of how the Soviet Union managed complexity, and how its administrative architecture continues to reverberate today. * CEU Review of Books *

Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union offers particular analytical resonance... by highlighting the tensions between ideology, institutional practice, and local agency, this book deepens our understanding of how the Soviet Union managed complexity, and how its administrative architecture continues to reverberate today. * CEU Review of Books * Rindlisbacher, a historian, reconstructs how the Bolshevik government of the early 1920s delimited the boundaries of the Soviet republics in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, as well as the border between the Russian and the Ukrainian republics within the newly formed Soviet Union. * Foreign Affairs * Overall, this is an excellent, concise book that draws the reader into the complexity of border-making and state building as a 'work-in-progress'. * European History Quarterly * Rindlisbacher, a historian, reconstructs how the Bolshevik government of the early 1920s delimited the boundaries of the Soviet republics in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, as well as the border between the Russian and the Ukrainian republics within the newly formed Soviet Union. He highlights the inherent contradictions involved in this process. * Foreign Affairs *

Author Information

Stephan Rindlisbacher is a postdoctoral researcher at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder).

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