Conceived as a sequel to The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands, this book radically shifts the focus away from a comparison of the centuries-old competition among multicultural conquest empires for hegemony in Eurasia to the Soviet Union, the central player in the renewal of that contest in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the issues remain the same, but the cast of characters has changed. The Soviet Union was heir to much of the territory of the Russian Empire and many of its problems, both foreign and domestic, flowed from that hard-won inheritance. But its response was radically different. Its new leaders were engaged in transforming its foreign policy as part of rebuilding a multinational state. From the outset they were obliged to enter into complex and often contradictory relations with a ring of smaller and weaker successor states, constituting the new borderlands, which had replaced the rival empires all along their frontiers. In many cases these borderland states were allies or clients of the major powers and perceived by the Soviet government as hostile or threatening.

In the first decade of Soviet rule, the leaders sought to fashion a foreign policy that privileged stability by establishing normal diplomatic relations within the postwar capitalist state system while nurturing the cause of socialist revolution. But darker clouds were already gathering. By the early 1930s, they were forced to confront a more direct and formidable challenge to their policy from the rising power of Nazi Germany and a militarist Japan. The imperialist designs of the two flank powers focused initially on exercising control over the successor states all along the Soviet frontiers, although their aspirations, at least in theory, like those of the Soviet Union, also extended beyond these territories. This book, then, is a study of how the Soviet leaders, primarily Stalin, who dominated policy-making during this period, sought to combine the twin processes of transforming the state and its relations with the external world within the context of a renewed struggle over the borderlands.

The Soviet state emerged from the wreckage of the Russian Empire much weakened and diminished. The war against the Central Powers, revolution and Civil War, and foreign intervention had stripped the old empire of its western borderlands.

The rise and consolidation of Soviet power inaugurated a new era in Russia's relations with the borderlands. The Bolsheviks came to power in the Great Russian heartland. But the leadership assumed that their revolution would not be isolated there or even confined to the territory of the old tsarist empire. They expected it to break out elsewhere in Europe, particularly in the advanced industrial states and spread rapidly to the rest of the globe. Instead, what happened in the decade after the revolution was a series of civil wars in the periphery of tsarist Russia and disconnected revolutionary outbreaks and national liberation movements in Central Europe – Germany twice, in 1918 and 1924, Hungary in 1919, Bulgaria in 1924 – and China in 1927.

All the Bolshevik leaders beginning with Lenin sought to resolve the dilemma by domesticating foreign policy. That is, without abandoning the rhetoric or the long-term goal of world revolution, they gave precedence to strengthening the institutions of the Soviet Union and centralizing state power by restricting autonomy in the borderlands and controlling the activities of foreign Communist parties in the Comintern. Stalin gradually accelerated this trend. By the mid-1930s his campaign to suffuse Soviet institutions and ideology with a Great Russian coloring suggests that the process of domestication was giving way to nationalizing the state.

Stalin lifted domestication to a new level. His victory in the constitutional struggle had marked a major stage in weaving his borderland thesis into the conduct of both domestic and foreign policy. His concept of the state had severely weakened if not wholly eliminated the political challenge of the national opposition led by representatives of the borderlands. He now shifted his attention to defeating his ideological and personal enemies among the top party leadership by employing his borderland thesis in order to reformulate the relationship between the newly constructed Soviet state and the world revolution. At the same time, he moved to take under his control the main instruments of foreign policy, the army, the Foreign Commissariat and Comintern, all bastions of his rivals’ influence and power. Finally, he did not neglect to finish off the remnants of the national opposition within the party and to refine his nationalities policy in ways that would further consolidate the political domination of the center over the periphery while preserving, partly in real and partly in bogus terms, the multicultural character of the state.

There is no evidence that Stalin had a master plan in mind for the political future of the borderlands in postwar Eurasia beyond the new Soviet frontier. If he had one, or even the elements of one, he did not share them with any of his colleagues in the leading organs of the party or military: in other words the individuals who would have to carry out such a plan. As more documentary evidence becomes available, it becomes clearer that throughout the war he had not made up his mind about a number of questions, including the pace and extent of the socioeconomic transformation of the postwar regimes within the states liberated by the Red Army; there is evidence that he changed his mind about some, such as the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. Although these conclusions are still debated, the following pages will attempt to demonstrate their validity.

Despite the absence of a master plan, Stalin's policies can be explained as an application of his borderland thesis within two distinctive but interconnected spatial dimensions or fields of operation. Let us call them the inner and outer perimeters. The inner perimeter refers to the territories lying within the operational sphere of the Red Army and the outer perimeter to the sphere of Anglo-American military operations. In both, the military commanders assumed special administrative powers during the liberation. There was no formal agreement on this de-limitation, although Stalin referred at least once to such a separation of responsibilities. The boundary between them resembled a frontier zone; it was initially blurred and porous, even on occasion disputed. Stalin's tacit acceptance of this separation reflected his estimate of the Soviet needs arising from the German invasion and the threatening presence of a militarist and expansionist Japan. He responded by entering into an unprecedented military and political alliance with the leading democratic capitalist powers in order to win the war and obtain guarantees of Soviet security and stability in the postwar period. For Stalin a successful outcome of the war would involve an extension of the wartime alliance in order to prolong the flow of economic aid for the reconstruction of the shattered Soviet economy, prevent the rapid recovery of a strong Germany and Japan, and gain Allied acquiescence in Soviet hegemony over the Eurasian borderlands.

The renewed campaign against the national opposition among Muslims in the second half of the 1920s was yet another skein of plots that Stalin wove entangling internal enemies and foreign governments. He was increasingly concerned by the persistence of a Muslim “religious movement” based on the schools and the economic influence of the mullahs. But he was still cautious about launching a massive anti-religious campaign against Islam. In secret, however, in December 1927 Sultan-Galiev was arrested for the second time. Further arrests and a widespread purge of Tatar Bolsheviks followed. This time there was to be no thought of leniency. Genrikh Yagoda was put in charge of cooking up a case. Sultan-Galiev and his associates were falsely accused and condemned for forming a “counter-revolutionary program…that included the formation of a Turanian government”; this was not just a “federation with statist tendencies” as had been alleged in 1923, but implied the greater crime of aspiring to foster the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After a long struggle against Crimean Tatar nationalists, “a party within a party” with a national program of “the Crimea for the Crimean Tatars,” the president of the Crimean Central Executive Committee, Veli Ibragimov, was arrested in January 1928 and then shot.

Ethnic tensions caused by indigenization and social conflict aroused by collectivization proved an explosive mixture throughout the South Caucasus. In October 1931, the OGPU reported a serious rise in cross-border banditry linked to resistance to collectivization, fed by rumors of the collapse of Soviet power and supported by the Iranian government. The general political situation in the Caucasian Federation of Azerbaizhan, Georgia and Armenia was especially troublesome. Union party officials ignored or discriminated against the interests of local minorities. In the summer of 1931 several thousand “Turkic” families resettled across the frontier with Turkey. Most serious of all, a massive armed uprising broke out in the Nakhchevan Autonomous Republic caused by violent “excesses” in the drive to collectivize. Among the participants were poor peasants, workers and party and Komsomol members. The organizers of an uprising in Abkhaziia demanded that local Islamic traditions and economic activities be respected and not identified with kulaks. In 1931 the leading party organs of the federation were still pressing ahead vigorously in their efforts to carry out the principles of indigenization despite the obstacles, which they freely admitted.

In the closing months of the war, Stalin was forced to recognize that his policy of maintaining the wartime coalition into the postwar period, and at the same time tightening his grip on the Eurasian borderlands, was coming apart. Although the show of unity among the Big Three at Potsdam appeared to paste over the growing divergence, it was increasingly evident that the British, and especially the Americans, were no longer prepared to accept the Soviet interpretation of the Declaration on Liberated Territories or what constituted the essential elements in Stalin's view of a “friendly country.” Moreover, the anti-Communist elements abroad and in the territories liberated, or, as they insisted, “occupied” by the Red Army, took encouragement from the public disagreements among the erstwhile allies. They hoped for a breakup of the wartime alliance and even anticipated an armed conflict between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. From Stalin's point of view these hopes and expectations resembled those expressed by Hitler and Goebbels during the last stages of the war, and confirmed his already deeply held suspicions that resistance of any kind to the Soviet definition of a “friendly government” was “objectively” speaking tantamount to fascism.

Consequently, Stalin began to withdraw to his traditional borderland thesis, conceiving the Soviet Union as an embattled fortress but now buttressed by defensive outworks that could at some future, more auspicious time become the launching pads for a renewed political offensive. This shift meant that the consolidation of the inner periphery assumed greater importance, evolving into a series of concentric security zones. In the first zone, the re-sovietization of the liberated regions of the USSR within its 1940 borders accelerated as hostilities came to an end in Europe. At the same time, within the Soviet core Stalin dashed wartime hopes for a relaxation of controls and an end to repressive measures. The restoration of the collective farm system and the suppression of anti-Soviet guerrilla bands in the forests of Belorussia and West Ukraine, and the deportations of national minorities from frontier areas, alternated with amnesties and hard-driving political work.

Soviet policy toward the borderlands was largely the work of Lenin and Stalin. But it was Stalin, a product of that milieu, who completed the structure in his own image. He was raised, educated and initiated as a Marxist revolutionary in the South Caucasus, a borderland of the Russian Empire. At the time of his birth in 1878, the region had become a crossroads, intersecting the movement of people and ideas from Western Europe, Russia and Trans Caspia. In his youth Iosif or “Soso” Dzhugashvili filtered elements of all these currents into a revolutionary ideology of his own making and tested it in its unique kaleidoscopic social and ethnic setting.

In his youth, the circulation of European and Russian books in translation, students from imperial universities to the region and the migrations of seasonal workers from Iran helped to spread radical political ideas among the small Armenian, Georgian and later Azerbaizhan intelligentsia. The economic life of the region was also undergoing significant changes. Burgeoning pockets of industrialization formed around the oil industry in Baku, textiles and leather manufacturing in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and Batumi, and mining in Kutais. A small proletariat was emerging in a multicultural environment. Dzhugashvili's first experiences as a revolutionary agitator were played out in three of these cities: Baku, Tiflis and Batumi where he encountered the complexities of class and ethnic strife. Already as a seminary student in Tiflis, the young Soso, like many of his contemporaries, identified himself with several strands of this borderland 10culture. Woven together, they helped to shape his beliefs, attitudes and politics. In the process he constructed an identity that combined native Georgian, borrowed Russian and invented proletarian components.

While many of his contemporaries in the revolutionary movement forged their careers and spent their lives in the South Caucasus, Stalin, as he began to call himself in 1912, projected himself onto the all-Russian stage, bringing with him as he rose to power trusted comrades from his early days as a labor organizer and propagandist. Along the way he propagandized a vision of the state that mirrored his presentation of self as a representative of three interlocking identifications: an ethno-cultural region (Georgia) as a territorial unit, Great Russia as the center of political power, and the proletariat as the dominant class.

As Stalin's thinking evolved during the war, his strategic aims in the inner perimeter gradually took shape along three converging lines. His first aim was to obtain military bases – “strong points,” as he first called them at the Teheran Conference – on the periphery of the Soviet Union in Europe and Asia; the second aim was a demographic transformation by annexing territories along the frontiers of Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania inhabited by nationalities similar to those in adjacent Soviet republics, and by expelling German-speaking populations from Eastern Europe; and the third aim was to promote the establishment of friendly governments on the borders of the Soviet Union. The meaning of friendly governments in the inner perimeter was not, at first, uniformly fixed in Stalin's thinking; it differed most in his attitude toward with European and Asian states. In general, however, friendly states would serve as political buffers and economic providers in rebuilding the Soviet economy.

Strong points and security in Europe

In the early months of the war, Stalin first outlined the territorial dimensions of his war aims in Europe during his negotiations with Anthony Eden on the conclusion of an Anglo-Soviet alliance. His territorial demands in the Middle Eastern and Far Eastern borderlands, while equally well defined, came later, when he began to plan for the war against Japan. His political aims for friendly governments throughout the Eurasian borderlands from Finland to Manchuria evolved more slowly and were subject to change throughout the war and postwar years, reflecting shifts in local conditions and the balance of forces as he perceived them.

In December 1941 Stalin held his first wartime meeting with a leader of his Western allies. He surprised Eden by insisting that the conclusion of a military alliance depended on Britain recognizing the security needs of the Soviet Union: “I think that the whole war between us and Germany began because of these western frontiers of the USSR including particularly the Baltic States. That is really what the whole war is about and what I would like to know is whether our ally, Great Britain, supports us regarding these western frontiers.” He was asking Britain to recognize the territorial expansion of the USSR in the western borderlands that Hitler had endorsed in the pact of 1939.

Despite the war clouds gathering over the borderlands, Stalin long remained uncertain about the best means to oppose them. To be sure, he adhered steadily to his domestic course of building a great socialist power by creating a modern army, intensifying administrative centralization, forging cultural integration through socialist realism and furthering internal colonization through deportation and forced resettlement. Over the same period his consistent aims in foreign policy were to keep external conflict (in Spain and China) as far distant from the Soviet borders as possible and to prevent the Soviet Union from being isolated. By 1941 he had failed in the first aim and narrowly escaped failure in the second.

By leaving open the question of which foreign powers would most fully recognize the interests of the Soviet Union, Stalin permitted two groups within the Soviet ruling elite to advance their own agendas. He could afford to allow this once the opposition had been disgraced or exiled, although he had to exercise care that discussion did not spill over into factionalism. There could be no appearance of a new “opposition.” Both groups adhered to the standard Soviet practice of promoting a division within the capitalist camp in order to prevent a united coalition forming against the USSR. But they differed over the choice of powers with whom to associate and the form of that association.

Two tactics

Litvinov and his supporters in the Foreign Commissariat sought actively to engage the Western liberal democracies in a policy of collective security against fascism under the slogan of the indivisibility of peace. His opponents, V. M. Molotov and A. A. Zhdanov, favored a more passive policy verging on diplomatic autarchy until in 1939 they supported a closer association with Germany and Japan that did not, however, commit the Soviet Union to forming a military alliance with them. Molotov and Zhdanov had the advantage of occupying a much higher standing in the party. Litvinov was not even a member of the Central Committee when he officially presented his program to the government.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union ripped apart the fabric of Soviet society at its most vulnerable seam along the western and southwestern borderlands. In the case of the territories annexed in 1939–40 – the Baltic republics, Western Belorussia, Western Ukraine and Bessarabia – hostility toward the Soviet power, Russian carpetbaggers and Jewish and Polish minorities lay close to the surface. Bitter memories of forced deportations of indigenous political and cultural elites, anti-religious decrees and the beginnings of collectivization were recent and vivid. The national Communist parties in the borderlands, decimated by the purges four or five years earlier, were in no position to help sustain Soviet power or organize resistance to the invasion, or later to the Nazi occupation authorities.

For a decade Stalin had preached the doctrine of capitalist encirclement and the threat of war. He had eliminated any challenge to his personal dictatorship and secured full control over decision-making in foreign policy. He had tamed the Comintern; the danger no longer existed that foreign Communist parties might drag the Soviet Union into an international conflict by engaging in revolutionary adventurism. He had undertaken a rapid industrialization of the country, laying the foundations for a modern armaments industry. These were extraordinary achievements. Yet the means he had chosen to obtain his ends threatened to undermine the security of the state that he strove to guarantee. In the tension-filled years leading up the outbreak of the conflict, he had severely reduced the capabilities of the architects of the Soviet security system. The purges had cut deeply into the ranks of the weapons designers, the officer corps and the diplomats. Stalin remained obsessed with the security of the borderlands. But his suspicious nature was robbing him of the ability to assess the main source of danger or even to distinguish between imagined and real threats. This showed up most clearly in military planning and intelligence-gathering.

In the brief hiatus between the Nazi–Soviet Pact and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin scrambled to consolidate his hold over his recently acquired borderlands and to advance additional demands for strong points along the periphery of the USSR. Contrary to his intentions, the consequences were disastrous. His brutal treatment of the populations in the newly acquired borderlands provoked hostility to Soviet power and increased social instability. His utter lack of sensitivity to the reaction of the powers, both Axis and Western, brought him to the brink of war with France and Britain over Finland and possibly even accelerated the Nazi attack. It was very much the style of a Commissar of Nationalities. Subjugating and integrating the borderlands was for him the best guarantee of state security. The opinion of the outer world counted for very little.

If Stalin had long been preparing an accommodation with Hitler, his actions after August 1939 gave no evidence of having used the time well. Plans for the partition of Poland had been drawn up hastily. Stalin quickly had second thoughts about incorporating large numbers of Poles into the Soviet sphere. The agreement over Poland had to be renegotiated almost at once. Stalin's advance into the other territories in his sphere was marked by confusion, haste and enormous errors of judgment. He had not even taken the trouble to prepare the ground politically. On the contrary, he had made his task of absorbing the borderlands more difficult for himself. In the case of the Baltic states, Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine he had only recently decimated the ranks of local Communist parties. In the case of Finland he improvised a political solution that proved to be a complete fiasco.

The Baltic and Danubian frontiers

Shortly after the collapse of Poland, Stalin belatedly decided that it would be preferable to turn over all of the heavily ethnic Polish provinces to Hitler's tender mercies in exchange for Lithuania. The original demarcation of spheres had divided Warsaw in half. The revised German–Soviet Boundary Treaty of September 28, 1939 brought the Soviet frontier back to the Bug River.

Stalin's higher education in foreign policy took place during the Civil War when the line between state-building and revolution became blurred. To defend and if possible expand the territorial base of the revolution, to ward off the intervention of foreign powers, to create an international revolutionary movement and to improvise the rudiments of state power were, for the Bolsheviks, all parts of the same process. Yet individual leaders invested their energies and passions in different aspects of it. As a member of the Politburo, Stalin was naturally involved in major foreign policy decisions, but his main field of action was as a member of the Revolutionary War Council and Commissar of Nationalities. Initially, he took no active part in the Commissariats of Foreign Affairs and the Comintern – the two political centers of diplomacy and revolutionary action outside the old tsarist frontiers. Stalin did not appear at a Comintern Congress until 1924.

During the Civil War, Stalin learned to trust only those forces over which he could exercise direct personal control: that is, the party organizations and the army units under his command. Lenin and Trotsky also valued disciplined political and military organizations but, unlike Stalin, who relied on them exclusively for his success, Lenin and Trotsky did not discount the importance of coordinating the activities of the Red Army and the Russian Communist Party with local and republic party organizations.

After four years of Civil War and Intervention, Stalin concluded that the Soviet nationalities policy (that is, his policy) was the key to “a fundamental improvement of relations between Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, India and other neighboring eastern states with Russia which formerly was considered a bugbear of these countries.” Indeed, “without a systematic working out within the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic of the aforementioned nationalities policy in the course of four years of the existence of Soviet power this fundamental change in the attitude of neighboring countries to Russia would be unimaginable.”

After the October revolution, when the territory controlled by the Bolsheviks shrank to the old Muscovite core, the recurrent problem of incorporating the former tsarist borderlands emerged again in acute form.

In countries outside the zone of Soviet military operations such as Western Europe and Greece, or in Allied countries like Iran and China, where the Red Army was engaged along with Western forces for limited periods of time, the concept of a friendly government diverged in important ways from the model of the inner periphery. These differences should not obscure Stalin's intentions to forge new political and economic relationships that would enhance the influence of the Soviet Union outside this inner periphery.

Friendly governments in Western Europe

In negotiating with his major and minor allies in Western Europe, Stalin learned important lessons on how he might conduct his pursuit of hegemony in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. The first indications emerged from the political decisions taken by the three powers before the Yalta Conference and the Declaration on Liberated Territories. This chronology is important, for by the time the Red Army crossed the 1941 frontiers of the Soviet Union, Stalin had ample evidence to indicate how far the British and Americans were prepared to go in exercising political control over areas occupied by their military forces. And he could test the effectiveness of his policy of instructing local Communists in the liberated areas to subordinate themselves to the overall strategic and military demands of the Western allies but remain politically active as an example or even a precedent of how non-Communists ought to behave in territories liberated by the Red Army.

One of the most important recommendations of the planning commissions which has been ignored in the literature is contained in a memo of October 13, 1943 from Voroshilov to Molotov addressing the need to provide an alternative to the American military administration (AMGOT) imposed on the liberated territories. In North Africa the American military had experienced frustrations in dealing with conflicting civilian authorities. As a result the War Department began to plan for the creation of American military government for liberated territories. In Italy the Allied commander in chief, General Eisenhower, was determined that “so long as active military operations are being carried on, final authority regarding the political relations between the occupying armies and the local administration should remain with the Allied Commander-in-Chief.” The reaction of the Soviet Union helps explain the origins of their alternative model for administering the liberated territories as a key aspect of their political aims.