Russian Citizenship: Borders, Numbers and Intentions

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate passed the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013.”  The bill’s opening provisions call for doubling the size of the Border Patrol to about 40,000 agents, completing 700 miles of fencing along the southern border, and expanding the use of radar and drone surveillance.  If approved by the House of Representatives, this effort, estimated to cost between 40 and 50 billion dollars, would constitute arguably the most ambitious peacetime border buildup in history.  Those unfamiliar with the politics of U.S. immigration reform may be forgiven for wondering that the proposed legislation is aimed not to secure the country from infiltration by al-Qaeda terrorists, but to turn the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants into U.S. citizens.  It thus seems a particularly auspicious time to consider Eric Lohr’s exploration of the historical relationship between another major state’s efforts to manage its physical borders, its “citizenship boundary,” and the presence of foreigners on its territory, and I am grateful to Josh and Eric for giving me the opportunity to engage with these dimensions of Russian Citizenship.

One of Lohr’s original arguments, however, is about the relative insignificance of the physical border as a demarcating line between the tsars’ subjects and foreigners for most of Russian history: in contrast to countries such as Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States, “where water boundaries facilitated a close association between the physical and citizenship boundaries,” the “physical boundary around the [Russian] empire was not central to the subjecthood boundary.”  While access to U.S. citizenship was “controlled more by Ellis Island gatekeepers than by naturalization laws and regulations,” in Russia “the site of actual control was less along its thousands of kilometers of external border than in the form of documents issued in bureaucratic offices, and inducements, sanctions, and other measures that gave certain groups incentives to migrate or change their citizenship status.”  In short, “[u]ntil the 1920s, the lengthy borders of the state were hardly relevant to controlling movement.” (1, 26-27, 177).

This is a bold claim, and Lohr marshals some compelling evidence to support it.  The figures on illegal emigration offer perhaps the starkest illustration of the porosity of the Empire’s borders: “[b]y the turn of the century, Russian officials estimated that somewhere between half and 90 percent of all emigrants left illegally,” eschewing the expensive and time-consuming process of acquiring a zagranpasport. (94-95, 239n50)  Moreover, “millions of small traders, nomads, and migrant workers were entering and leaving the Russian Empire without documented checks every year.”  At least as far as its borders were concerned, the answer to the “perennial question” about “the paradox of the Russian state” – “[w]as it weak or strong?” –  seems plain enough.  (177)

However, Lohr’s contention about the irrelevance of Imperial border controls remains problematic.  For one, they enjoyed considerably more manpower than Lohr allows (“[b]y 1827, the border guard troop strength reached 3,200, a number which grew steadily throughout the century, reaching 12,100 by 1898.”) (25)  In fact, the number of border guards had already surpassed the latter figure by the Great Reforms; by 1893, a force of over 37,000 men patrolled the empire’s European, Transcaucasian, and Central Asian borders (supplemented in the latter two regions by local auxiliaries and Cossack detachments), while variously-numbered Cossack units kept watch on the Siberian and Far Eastern frontiers.[1]  Soviet border guard officers and customs officials did not exaggerate when they complained – well into the second half of the 1920s – that substantial stretches of the border remained more weakly patrolled than they had been before the Revolution.

A more accurate diagnosis would be that the permeability of the Russian Empire’s borders to human traffic reflected institutional priorities rather than state capacity.  From its inception under Peter the Great until its dismantling by the Bolsheviks in 1919, the Imperial border guard’s stated primary objective was economic: to protect domestic industry and treasury receipts from the threat that contraband posed to both.  Indeed, in 1893 the force was placed under the direct command of Finance Minister Sergei Witte – that “powerful advocate of integration in the global economy and an open door to foreign labor, investment, and talent” (115) – who was also an avowed protectionist. Despite feeling admittedly awkward “playing the role of a military commander,” Witte involved himself closely in the organization and running of the troops that would help enforce his protectionist vision.[2]  Intercepting would-be migrants headed in either direction was simply not a priority.  The border guard’s actual military command understood this well, and its reports took care to emphasize the results of its struggle against economic contraband above all.  This ordering of priorities was not lost on the enlisted men, who were rewarded with a percentage of the value of the contraband goods they captured.

Turning to the Soviet period, Lohr observes that “[b]y the late 1920s, the state had developed unprecedented capacity to control its borders and population movements across them.” (133) The Soviet Union “created one of the most effective border systems in terms of holding its people in that any country had ever constructed.” (151)  “[M]aking great strides toward overcoming the traditionally huge gap between policy intentions and actual practices” (133) at the border, the Soviet state was finally able to achieve what its Imperial predecessor never could.  In a sense, the Soviet border authorities’ task was more straightforward, as the “old formula of ‘attract and hold’ had been reduced to ‘hold.’” (179)  At the same time, the “barbed wire, policed and cleansed border zones, enlistment of vigilantes and informants from border populations, extreme distrust of foreigners, and prophylactic operations against populations with ties abroad all point to a state with remarkably little confidence in its ability to keep its people from leaving.” (178)

There is no question that the Soviet preoccupation with border controls – evolving though it did between fiscal, economic planning, protectionist, security, propaganda, and ideological concerns – was unprecedented in human history.  There is also no question that, primarily out of security and propagandistic considerations, Soviet authorities were more worried about emigration than were their Imperial predecessors.  However, the link between the extensive measures taken to secure the Soviet border and concerns about preventing emigration was generally much less direct than one might expect.  While would-be emigrants faced increasingly daunting obstacles, and successful escapees’ accounts are replete with harrowing stories of near brushes with the border guards, the secret Politburo and STO (Council of Labor and Defense) deliberations about securing the border and the attendant correspondence with the OGPU reveal little concern about emigration as such.

Instead, decisions to reinforce the border guard in the 1930s were motivated by explicit security considerations: suppressing Ukrainian peasant rebellions in the wake of collectivization and preempting Polish intervention; safeguarding a growing number of border-area military installations; and, from the murder of Leningrad party organization chairman Sergei Kirov in December 1934 through the purges of 1936-38, an increasingly aggressive prophylactic effort to seal the border from a mix of real and imagined foreign/fascist/Trotskyite and sundry spies and saboteurs and prevent them from linking up with their domestic coconspirators.  Indeed, the only mention of emigration that I have found in connection with a decision to bolster the border guard was in a March 1930 petition from Iagoda to the STO requesting reinforcements in an ultimately futile attempt to prevent the massive flight of Central Asian nomads with their livestock (fleeing famine, over 200,000 Kazakhs crossed over into Xinjiang alone).  To be sure, the myriad Soviet border security measures implemented over the course of the decade made emigration increasingly difficult if not impossible; but “holding its people in” was not their raison d’être.

With respect to foreigners in the USSR, Lohr finds that 1926 marked a watershed in the institutionalization of Soviet xenophobia; that year, in “a general campaign against foreigners,” the NKVD sought to “uncover the true citizenship status of all people living on the territory of the RSFSR and to re-register all foreigners in the country.”  In the process, “thousands of individuals who appealed to keep their foreign citizenship were forced to relinquish it … It became much more difficult for foreigners to remain in the country.” (154, 165).  Lohr argues that this administrative ‘tightening of the screws’ was engendered by the Kremlin leadership’s growing conviction – first prompted by Pilsudski’s seizure of power in Poland in May 1926 and magnified by a series of foreign policy crises the following spring and summer – that the Soviet Union’s capitalist neighbors were preparing for military intervention.  The connection between foreign threat and stepped-up surveillance of foreigners seems straightforward enough, although one wonders whether the NKVD’s registration drive may have had something to do with the All-Union Population Census (carried out in December 1926), which also sought out detailed data on foreigners in the country.  More problematically, 1926 actually witnessed the sharpest increase in the number of foreign citizens legally entering the Soviet Union during the decade:

Foreign Citizens at OGPU Border Crossings, 1924-1928

Sources: S. Korsunovskii, “Migratsiia naseleniia cherez granitsy SSSR v 1927 godu,” Statisticheskoe obozrenie № 11 (1928), 94; idem, “Migratsiia naseleniia cherez granitsy SSSR v 1928 g.,” Statisticheskoe obozrenie № 10 (1929), 106.

Indeed, 1926 also saw the peak net balance recorded, attributable almost entirely to Chinese migrants, 23,962 of whom legally entered the USSR that year, while only 8,059 left.[3]  How did this influx proceed in the face of the NKVD’s “general campaign against foreigners”?  (Alternatively, did it have anything to do with motivating that campaign?) While most Chinese migrants, like their prerevolutionary predecessors, never naturalized, their example suggests that the Soviet authorities’ attitude towards allowing foreigners into the country had more in common with the Imperial administration’s patchwork, “separate deals” approach that Lohr so masterfully untangles in the book’s earlier chapters than he allows for the Soviet period.  Clearly, further research is needed to flesh out the contradictory policy currents (e.g., central vs. regional, economic vs. security) at play here, with close attention to the different nationalities involved.

It is true that the number of foreign citizens leaving the USSR grew much more quickly than the number of foreigners legally entering the country during 1927 and 1928.[4]  Indeed, Lohr reports that the NKVD estimated in September 1928 that there were only 80,000 foreigners left in the country, or “less than one-twelfth the number in 1913.” (166, 262n151)  However, this is a rather puzzling estimate, given that only a few months earlier, Soviet authorities began considering the resettlement of some 80,000 non-citizen Koreans alone away from the border areas. (166)  Indeed, the December 1926 population census had found some 370,700 foreigners residing on Soviet territory, including some 92,300 Persian subjects, 84,000 Koreans, 81,800 Chinese, 25,900 Turkish, and 46,000 Greek, as well as another 31,700 citizens of other European countries and 9,000 other ones. Given the figures on legal border crossings in both directions, it is unlikely that these numbers had dwindled so quickly in the intervening months.[5]

Moreover, while there is evidence that membership in a nationality with cross-border ties (e.g., Polish) increasingly became a liability after 1926[6], other data indicate that even as the OGPU rapidly expanded the scale of its policing activities, its prosecutions of foreign citizens fell off sharply in 1927 and 1928 – just when, following Lohr’s trajectory, we would have expected them to rise:

Citizenship of Individuals Tried by OGPU Tribunals, 1926-1936

Source: O. B. Mozokhin, Pravo na repressii.  Vnesudebnye polnomochiia organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti.  Statisticheskie svedeniia o deiatel’nosti VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB SSSR (1918-1953), 2^nd expanded edition (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011), 380, 387, 394, 400, 406, 414, 427, 432, 443, 456.

To be sure, even at the absolute nadir of OGPU prosecutions of foreign citizens in 1934, their small share of the total population ensured that foreigners remained more likely to be targeted than Soviet citizens.  Nonetheless, the dramatic drops in prosecutions of foreign citizens in 1931 and 1933-34 are hard to square with the picture that emerges in the last chapter of Russian Citizenship of the Soviet regime’s inexorably accelerating xenophobia.  At least before 1936, even as foreign ties and ethnic links with the abroad were invariably more likely to land a person in trouble than the year before, foreign citizenship was not.  While it typically brought OGPU surveillance, a foreign passport also gave its owner a measure of protection that his or her co-ethnic Soviet citizens did not enjoy.

Although Lohr never mentions the establishment of a state monopoly on foreign trade in April 1918 – arguably the most important policy decision in terms of limiting the free flow of capital and people across the Soviet borders – the specter of economic autarky hangs heavy over the final chapter and Conclusion of Russian Citizenship.  “By the end of the 1920s,” Lohr argues, “the Soviet Union had decisively embraced an autarkic path of development.” (173)  This constituted “a distinctly Soviet decision,” one that was “primarily political rather than economic.” (10, 168)  “Autarkic rapid industrialization not only went against Russian historical traditions,” he continues, “but also was unprecedented in the global history of industrialization.  It made little economic sense … Yet, this is precisely what happened,” as Stalin “embraced an autarkic model of economic modernization.” (168, 177)

However, as Michael R. Dohan demonstrated in his seminal 1976 article, “The Economic Origins of Soviet Autarky, 1927/28–1934,” “Soviet planners did not intend to restrict trade during or after the First Five-Year Plan.”  The final version of the foreign trade section of the plan, publicized in June 1929, actually called for exceeding the prewar level of exports and imports by 1931/32. Soviet foreign trade in fact “expanded rapidly between 1927/28 and 1931,” and its subsequent collapse was prompted not by Stalin’s sudden embrace of autarky, but by a host of “[u]nexpected changes in both the capitalist and domestic economies during 1930-32,” including sharply reduced agricultural output due to collectivization, slumping world prices for major Soviet exports due to the Depression, loss of export markets due to trade barriers, and the inability to borrow at desired levels due to the need to pay off short-term foreign loans and a “sudden reduction in the availability and rising real cost of foreign credit.”  Soviet paeans to self-sufficiency merely made a virtue of necessity.[8]  Indeed, as Lohr himself later concedes, “Stalin’s autarky was established in the 1930s, when the world as a whole was restricting immigration, imposing tariffs and trade barriers, and in other ways reversing the globalizing trends of the prior half century.” (184)  Such a less voluntaristic, more contextual explanatory approach, so enjoyable throughout the rest of the book, would have made for an equally compelling ending.