Social Science Research Council

"Smuggling Across the Soviet Borders: Contraband Trade and the Soviet Struggle Against It, 1918-1933"

One of the fundamental changes wrought by the October Revolution of 1917 was the establishment of a state monopoly on foreign trade. Proclaimed in April of the following year, the ruling barred anyone except Soviet government representatives from engaging in foreign commercial transactions of any kind. Like many other plans of the nascent government, however, the state monopoly on foreign trade proved easier to decree than to enforce. Contraband trade flourished along the country’s vast borderline, as borderland inhabitants smuggled goods for their own consumption and for profit, with underground distribution networks reaching deep into the Soviet interior.

I propose to write a social, economic, political, and cultural history of smuggling in the Soviet Union as a significant component of the unofficial economy, as well as a window on the relationship between the Soviet state, society, and neighboring countries, during the period 1918-1933. The work will draw on mostly unstudied archival materials, including the records of the Soviet customs administration and border guard, court cases, and the personal files of top Bolshevik leaders, held at the national and regional archives in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. To verify my Soviet source base and obtain a view from the other side of the border, I will also examine Polish customs and border guards records from this period, held in western Ukrainian and Polish archives.

Smuggling posed a political and ideological as well as an economic challenge to the Soviet government because it undermined the state monopoly on foreign trade, which Lenin considered a necessary condition for socialism. It was also regarded as a security threat, and government rhetoric and policy conflated contraband with espionage, subversion, and banditry. While borderland inhabitants may have considered cross-border trade a legitimate activity, the Soviet government viewed it as a challenge to its power, and sought to inhibit smuggling via a combination of force, economic incentives, and propaganda. A study of the government's struggle against contraband would thus contribute to our understanding of the forms and reach of the Soviet state's control over its citizens and borders in the years after the Revolution. Scrutinizing the decision-making processes involved will help to determine the extent to which authorities' decisions were driven by political, ideological, security, and economic considerations, a keystone problem of Soviet political history. Most directly, my study will aim to reconstruct an important segment of the unofficial economy - a permanent feature of the Soviet experience - and gage its scope, modes of operation, and impact on the Soviet economy, state, and society during the formative years of the Soviet Union.