1869, Ep. 168 with Stephan Rindlisbacher, author of Borders in Red

7:18PM Jun 16, 2025

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Stephan Rindlisbacher

Keywords:

Borders in Red

Stephan Rindlisbacher

Soviet Union

Crimea

national self-determination

Lenin

Putin

territorial structure

Swiss National Science Foundation

open access

detailed maps

regional commissions

economic dependencies

water scarcity

war devastation.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Stephan Rindlisbacher, author of the new book Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union. Thanks to the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Borders in Red is available for free as an open-access ebook on our website or wherever you order books, Stephan Rindlisbacher is a post-doctoral researcher at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). We spoke to Stephan about how his new book, the first comprehensive look into how the border between Russia and Ukraine was drawn, helps us better understand today's current conflict between the two nations; how politicians, experts and people from the border regions themselves worked together to create the Soviet Republic borders in the 1920s and early 1930s; and the amazing detailed maps that accompany this rich history throughout the book. Hello, Stephan, welcome to the podcast. Yeah.

Hello, Jonathan. Thanks for the invitation. It's great to be here.

It's great to have you on I'm very excited to talk to you about your new book, Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union. It's an open access book, meaning that while you're listening to this, or after you listen to this, you can just go to our website, you can go to Amazon, you can go to any place that has ebooks, and you can download the book for free. So that's really exciting. Tell us, Stephan, tell us the backstory to this book, and how did it

come to be? Oh, this goes way back to the year 2014 when Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea, there was a lot of talk about, yeah, what is actually the background story for Crimea? So and then yeah, stories were in the press of Nikita Khrushchev giving Crimea as a gift from the Russian socialist federative Soviet Republic, RS FSR, in short, to Ukraine back then, from some not reasonable cause, so mostly from Russia. There was then talk, yeah, if the Crimea was transferred for an unsound reason back in 1954 why can't we take it back? And so then I was actually beginning to dig T deeper and question, question, ask questions about how did the territorial structure of the Soviet Union come to be and of course, then in academia, it's not always easy. I can't simply pack my stuff and go to the archives. First, I have to organize a grant, grant money in order to finance the research. So I made an application to the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the end, it was granted so I could travel to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to to ask questions how the territories of these Union republics came to be. And I was really surprised to find a lot of documents so but the main bulk of this history happened in the 1920s so in the end, I wasn't doing that much research on the Crimea question in 1954 but yeah, for instance, how was the eastern border of Ukraine defined in the 1920s or how did the republics in the South Caucasus define their borders in the 1920s or how was actually, were the republics in Central Asia created actually from a non existing background, because in Central Asia up to the 1920s we we did not have nation states. It was a new idea introduced, of course, by already existing nationalists, but not yet nationalized. Masses, yeah, and back then, right before the pandemic hit, I finished collecting all my source data, and during the pandemic, I had the chance to write my manuscript. And yeah, after all this time, now it's finally published, and thanks to the Swiss National Science Foundation, it's also available in open access. Nonetheless, there is also printed version that looks really well and it's not too expensive, if I may, place this ad here.

That's perfect. That's perfect. Very true, very true. Thanks for that. That lead up of the history of the book. And speaking of history, you have some two very interesting quotes in the beginning of the book, one from Vladimir Lenin in 1917 and I'll read it, they tell us that Russia is falling apart and is fracturing into separate republics, but we have nothing to fear. However, as many separate republics there may be, we will not be afraid. For us, it is not important where a state border runs, but that the union of the workers of all nations is preserved for the struggle against the bourgeois of any nation whatsoever. And then we juxtapose that to Vladimir Putin in 2022 quote when it comes to the historical destiny of Russia and its people, Lenin's principles of state development were not just a mistake. They were worse than a mistake, as the saying goes, this became patently clear, patently clear after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 very big split, and so obviously looking to the past helps us understand the present. And your book is very important for understanding the current Russian war against Ukraine, and provides the first comprehensive look into how the border between Russia and Ukraine was drawn. Tell us more about how this border was drawn and the rationales that led to Ukraine's internationally recognized borders after 1991

Yeah. So thanks again for this excellent question. I hope to be able to answer it concisely and clearly back then, yeah, in in the early or late 1910s early 1920s Lenin and his Bolshevik government, they were confronted with nationalist movements all over the former Russian Imperial space. So there was a nationalist movement in Ukraine, in the South Caucasus, but also rising one in Central Asia. So they were confronted with what they called the nationality question, and they had to find answers. So and the Bolsheviks, despite being internationalist socialists, they chose not to ignore this but serve the wave. So the Lenin told his comrades here, we can't act against this wave of nationalism. We have to live with it and use it for our own terms. So he promised national self determination for every community. But having in mind kind of a catch. So this national self determination was always bound to being part of a socialist state. So these national republics may be, yeah, national inform, but they will be governed by elite communists chosen, of course, by Moscow. So that was the basic instrument of the Bolsheviks to manage this national diversity of their state. So they had to appreciate it in order to be able to govern at all. And yeah, now back to Putin today. In his speech, he completely ignored the historical context. Lenin couldn't act otherwise. If he would have acted otherwise, we wouldn't have any Soviet Union or Russian Federation today. So the existence of these this post Soviet order is based on this Bolshevik idea of. Of national self determination within the bounds of unified Communist Party. And of course, this was now the big idea on the top. But this big idea does not define how a real Republic like Ukraine, or Soviet Republic like Ukraine, should look like. First, the Bolshevik simply took the old Russian Imperial provinces to define what belongs to Ukraine. They took these provincial borders and then created the Ukrainian socialist Soviet Republic in 1919, but soon it was obvious that these old provincial borders would not work in the long term. So the border was revised several time, several times, and adapted to necessities following what they called economic dependencies. For instance, that when there were plants to refine sugar and fields to grow sugar beets, so this should be unified in the same Republic, not to make actually the productive base split between the republics, but then also unify certain industries within a republic. That this happened, for instance, in the Donbas at the beginning of the 1920s but now also coming to the 1950s and the question of Crimea, Crimea as a peninsula, is has climatic specific to specifics. It has a really arid climate in summertime, so it's not possible to grow any crops in on a larger scale. So the Communist Party and the state planning agency gospel then developed plans to construct a large scale canal system to irrigate the peninsula, and of course, this water would come from the Dnieper River in Ukraine, and yeah, discussion went that it's, in the end, easier to manage this large scale construction project to develop the peninsula within a Single Republic, and this was the main incentive why Crimea was then transferred in 1954 from the RSFSR to Ukraine. And as a side note, this is also what creates today problems on Crimea after 2014 Ukrainian authorities shot down all water connection to the peninsula. So after 2014 there was a large scale water scarcity on Crimea and in 2022 if I may say this, one of the first actions after the invasion war by the Russian forces was to secure the water connection near Kherson at this kakhovka dam to Crimea. And as you probably know, this dam blew up two years ago and drained the water reservoir. So now again, Crimea is on the dry you you see that this war disrupted existing economic connectivities and now led to a downturn in, let's say, in the agricultural sector, not to speak about all the industry in the Donbas that's now completely in shambles. So this war led to economic devastation in the whole region. So whoever wins this war has to deal afterwards with a landscape of ruins. Yeah.

A real tragedy. It's a real tragedy. But thank you for for letting us know the historical background for it, so we get to see the context for the war now. But obviously the Soviet Union was, it was a, was a massive land mass with with many different borders. And so your book tells a story of many of the borders between the Soviet republics that were created, as you said, in the 20s and 30s. And what's fascinating is that these borders were the result of intricate negotiations and long, lasting debates involving politicians, experts and people from the border regions themselves. Tell us more about this process of creating borders at that time.

Yeah. So the most stumbling aspect is that most people, even in Russia, Ukraine or Central Asia, the South carcasses, now they think that it was Stalin, personally who drew all these borders, and sometimes you have then also this sinister and undertone that Stalin actually wanted to play all the nationalities against each Other. Now, in my book, it's not such a conspiracy story. I tried to take and try to reconstruct the processes that led to what we know to or what we have as borders today and in the mid 1920s when most of these borders were actually defined Stalin was not the powerful figure that he became later. So of course, the Soviet Union is not an open democratic state, but to the core authoritarian. Nonetheless, Moscow at the center was not able to manage all the borders or micromanage all the borders on its own, so the party and state leadership tasked different commissions to actually go to the region and debate the best option, the best solution for border problems. So in fact, these local regional commissions had the most agencies, agency, they also involved experts in the West. These experts were more influential than, let's say, in Central Asia or the South Caucasus, because there regional local politicians had the opinion that they knew their own region the best. So they didn't want to depend on experts. Of course, these commissions, there also invited experts, talked with them, but they also could dismiss their opinion. And one functionary from Central Asia, yousub abdrachmanov. Today, you can find a lot of statues of him in Kyrgyzstan during a session he taught his comrades, yeah, defining the borders, I paraphrase now, defining the borders is um orders is a task for the people at the top, not for the man at the bottom. So of course, ordinary people could send in petitions to these commissions, but the commissions were at liberty to dismiss everything. So in conclusion, it was in the end, this mid layer of political functionaries who debated and decided on the borders. Nonetheless, in certain cases, regional or village inhabitants could send in petitions and tell these functionaries is, stop this bordering doesn't make any sense. We have used for a long time the forest or the pasture nearby now it's separated by border, and we lose we are running the risk to losing our means of subsistence, mostly in such cases, the commissions react. Adapted and adapted the borders. I can see this or show this for the case of Russia and Ukraine, but also for Central Asia in the South Caucasus, it was much more complicated, because there the politicians from different republics. They do not, did not really cooperate with each other, but actually try to sabotage each other. So the bordering in the South Caucasus is then a case for its own because they didn't really manage to order this diversity,

interesting. Interesting. Sounds very complicated, but I like the fact that, as you were saying, there was some public input. If it did cause some problems, and you have some in your book, you have a set of 20 detailed maps that show the process of Soviet border making. Tell us more about these maps.

Oh, yeah, that's actually my favorite part. So these map maps are not designed by me so but by Silke Dutzmann. She's a professional map designer. She works in Leipzig, nearby here, but I have never seen her. We are only in email correspondence. So I discussed for a long time what I actually want is map for my book. And yeah, she then wrote back, no, Stefan, this is not possible, so we have to do it otherwise. And together, we actually drafted and then designed these 20 maps. Because now I have to go slightly back, because in the archives I found, of course, a lot of map material, but these maps are often in a bad shape or not that well designed or over complicated to print them simply in the book. And any read you see the format of the book, it's not really big, and if a map is squeezed together on a small page, a reader can't really see what's at stake. So we had to redesign it together, of course, based on the maps I found in different archives to simplify it and make it read, readable for a bigger audience. So for most maps you see in my book, we started with three, four original maps, and we took the most important elements and then combine it to make our point, to show something, to illustrate a border making or a certain development, for instance, right at the beginning of the book, you have a general map of the Soviet Union depicting it on the first of July 1924 then first of July, 1929 and then first of July, 1975 so you can see Actually the development I tried to analyze in my book, of course, I say now try to analyze, because my book is not comprehensive. I bring case studies, and following these case studies, I try to understand this bigger change, bigger development, and this managing of diversity.

Yeah, it's great. They're beautifully done. They're very they're very crisp and clear, and they they visually represent the text that you're presenting in the the the changing of the borders, the transition. It's really, it's really well done. So kudos to the map maker.

I will gift writers to Ms. Dutzmann.

Wow. Well, so this has been it's been so great talking with you and learning about how borders were developed in the early Soviet Union. And again, as I mentioned before, thanks to a generous support from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The book is open access, so please download it and read it. And if you're inspired, you can also, as you mentioned, buy the affordable paperback as well. That's fantastic. So we encourage everyone to read Stefan's new book, borders in red, managing diversity in the early Soviet Union. It was a pleasure talking with you, Stephan,

It was my pleasure. Thanks.

That was Stephan Rindlisbacher, author of the new book, Borders in Red:Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union. His new book is open access, so you can download it and read it immediately from our website@cornellpress.cornell.edu if you'd like to read the affordable paperback, you can save 30% off at our website by using the promo code 09POD. If you live in the UK, use the 30% discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press podcast.