Stalin's Revenge

Why former Soviet borders are a mess—and why you should care

Russian officers looking at a map
Wait, what part of this isn't Russia? (David Turnley/Corbis / VCG / Getty)

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Have you ever wondered why some of the borders in Europe and Central Asia are the source of so much conflict? This is the area we sometimes call the “post-Soviet space,” a term that is now something of an insult to the people who live there. (I do it myself now and then, but after three full decades, that’s getting to be like calling the U.S. and Canada the “post-British space.”)

You probably haven’t thought much about this, and I don’t blame you.

But because these borders have led to war, civil unrest, and smaller military clashes multiple times since 1991 throughout the former Soviet empire, and as we now seem to be on the verge of the biggest military mobilization in Europe since the Nazis went on the march more than 80 years ago, it might be helpful to think about how we got here. So I’m offering this post as a brief (if overly elliptical) history lesson.

Empires collapsing and leaving messy borders isn’t a new thing. What makes the Soviet case unique, however, is that Soviet leaders nearly a century ago intentionally drew these borders to create the situation we’re living with today. They locked up nationalities and ethnic groups within bizarre administrative lines drawn specifically to ensure that the U.S.S.R. could never come apart without bloodshed.

To understand all this, we need to go back to the very creation of the Soviet Union itself. (And if you never knew what Soviet meant, you’re about to find out.)

The key thing to understand about Lenin and the other Bolsheviks is that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was, for them, about overthrowing an empire and sparking a chain reaction of communist revolutions around the world.

They really expected this. The victorious Bolsheviks were so optimistic about revolution spreading throughout Europe that they attacked Poland while they were still in the middle of fighting their own people in the Russian Civil War. Indeed, Lenin was practically giddy; as the Red Army advanced on Warsaw in 1920, he sent a secret cable to Stalin saying, “It is time to encourage revolution in Italy. My view is that for this to happen, Hungary must be sovietized, and maybe also the Czech lands and Romania. This has to be carefully thought out.”

“Carefully” indeed. The reality here is that the Bolsheviks were basically muddle-headed intellectuals whose actual political experience hadn’t gone much beyond the years they spent bloviating in cafés and at party meetings. They had no real idea what they were doing, and in the ensuing years, they charged ahead with a lot of dumb ideas—such as crowding people onto collective farms and starving millions of people.

The half-baked idea that concerns us here is their commitment to “national self-determination.” In theory, this seems like a principled position. Who could be against freedom for oppressed ethnic minorities? Lenin and his party were not imperialists, of course—God forbid! (Well, not God, because they were also atheists, but I digress.) They were committed to overthrowing a monarch and freeing people from the bonds of empire.

Sort of.

Almost immediately, this position on national self-determination bit the new Soviet leadership in the zhopa. The Bolsheviks, as it turned out, weren’t really against empires so much as they were against other people’s empires. After winning the civil war in late 1920, the Kremlin’s new bosses controlled most of the former Tsarist empire, and they weren’t about to let go of all that in the name of some rhetorical commitment to national liberation that they never meant in the first place.

Besides, the former Russian empire had dozens of nationalities in it. Were all of them going to get their own country? How could Lenin and Stalin and their comrades square “national self-determination” with the fact that they were now the masters of a gigantic, multiethnic land mass?

The solution was to create a federal system. As part of this federalism, the Bolsheviks drew lines around areas where smaller nationalities lived and called them “autonomous” regions. These regions were not large enough to be independent states, and so they were embedded in “Union Republics,” which were supposed to be free and sovereign entities at the international level, led by national authorities in each area such as the Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Belarusians, and Armenians. The mapmakers in Moscow also created new republics in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

(The smallest organizational unit in this new federal state was the soviet, which means “council,” a group of citizens who would make decisions and elect people to represent them at higher levels of authority, in the form of a republic. These soviets were of course committed to socialism. These republics then formed a voluntary—cough—super-federation. So now you know where the U.S.S.R. got its name: a group of republics composed of local and regional soviets who believed in socialism. A Union, one might call it, of Soviet Socialist Republics.)

This federal structure, including the Union Republics, was fully codified in the Soviet constitution of 1936, usually called the “Stalin Constitution” because … well, okay, I shouldn’t have to explain that one. The 1936 constitution named 11 Union Republics; four more (Moldova and the Baltics) were added by forced annexation in 1940. Inside each of these were scores of smaller administrative units and autonomous areas.

The Stalin Constitution was something Soviet experts like me had to know about back in the day, because it was the basic law of the Soviet state until 1977, when it was replaced with a revised constitution under Leonid Brezhnev called—you guessed it—the “Brezhnev Constitution.” Both of them promised all kinds of rights and emphasized the nominal independence of the Union Republics, including a right to secede.

This fiction was how Stalin, after World War II, insisted that all 15 Soviet republics be seated in the United Nations alongside the U.S.S.R. itself. This demand was so demented that the American response was a counteroffer in which every U.S. state got a UN seat as well. (In the end, Stalin got three seats, for the U.S.S.R, Belarus, and Ukraine.)

The guarantees of freedom, of course, were lies. The 1936 constitution came out just as Stalin launched the Great Terror, a tsunami of repression in which millions of Soviet citizens were imprisoned or executed.

But let’s talk about those borders. Ostensibly, the Soviets had solved the national problem. Karelians or Tatars or Chechens now had “self-determination”—within limits—and exercised their national freedoms under the umbrella of the Soviet state. Some of these areas were quite small. A few were cruel jokes; the Jews, for example, were given their own “homeland” in a place called Birobidzhan—which, as every Jewish person ever dreamed of, was in the middle of nowhere in Asia on the border with China. (But at least you could speak Yiddish there.)

The Jewish Homeland (Wikimedia Commons)

Other nationalities were allowed to stay closer to their traditional homes, but they could never leave the grip of the U.S.S.R. and its leaders in Moscow.

How did this work in practice? For an example, take a look at this map of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

What could go wrong? (Dimitrios Karamitros / Getty)

Notice that Azerbaijan is discontiguous. There’s a chunk of it stuck behind Armenia. And there’s a large Armenian enclave, Nagnorno-Karabach, within Azerbaijan. Each controls access to a lot of the other’s national brethren. And this is why Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting, on and off, even before the end of the USSR. Fortunately, the Russians—going all the way back to Yeltsin—have been more than happy to provide troops as “peacekeepers.”

These Soviet shenanigans are evident today everywhere in the former Soviet states. Here’s the area designated for the Ossetians, a minority group in the Caucasus.

North Ossetia in Russia, South Ossetia in Georgia

Notice the line drawn right through this “autonomous” region, with some Ossetians in Georgia and others in Russia. And, of course, the Russians for years have backed the Ossetians who wanted to unify with the Russian side, offering them Russian passports and then demanding to protect them as Russian citizens. Another set of sadistic administrative lines, another war.

And if you’re confused about the conflict over Crimea, this too was a Soviet escapade that didn’t mean very much when everyone was trapped inside the U.S.S.R. In 1954, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in a move that showed how these internal borders were mostly administrative fictions, “gifted” Crimea—which is overwhelmingly Russian—from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republic.

Who cared, right? No one was going anywhere.

Fast forward to 1991.

The Soviet Union collapsed when the leaders of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan got together and signed an agreement among themselves that effectively called the central Soviet government’s constitutional bluff after nearly 70 years.

Leaders of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belarus, 1991 (Vitaly Armand /Getty)

These leaders said, in effect: Hey, the Soviet constitution says we’re independent states, so guess what? We believe it. We are, in fact, states. And we have governments, and we don’t need the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. Or the U.S.S.R. itself.

We secede. Buh-bye.

Soon all of the Soviet republics, in a free-for-all, quickly grabbed all Soviet assets - including units of the Soviet military—and appropriated them as their own. The Ukrainians were happy to keep Khrushchev’s “gift,” including the big Soviet naval base in Crimea. As much as I blame Vladimir Putin for the instability in this region in the 21st century—and I do—the Russian beef about Crimea long predated Putin’s reign. The Russian complaint about the borders around Crimea had legitimate roots, but the Russian seizure of Crimea by force was wrong.

Why should Americans care about all this, anyway? Because the foundational order of the international system is at stake.

Every American administration (with the exception of Donald Trump’s four years of worshipping Putin) has stuck to the most important point, which is that international borders must not be changed by force. Sovereignty matters because we all agree that it matters. Membership in the United Nations and adherence to its charter should mean something. And in Europe, where the United States came to join its allies in two world wars, American policy since the end of the Cold War has been, as George H. W. Bush said in 1989, a Europe whole and free.

Putin hates all of that talk. He regrets the fall of the U.S.S.R. and he thinks that borders near Russia should be his to decide. He wants to be the ultimate arbiter of who counts as a state, and who may join which international organizations. Americans who don’t care about Ukraine itself should care—very much—that a dictator wants to redraw world maps to his liking. If they ignore such moves long enough, at some point they will find themselves living on a planet governed by rules imposed from Moscow and Beijing.

The Soviet machine that coughed up a man like Putin has given him plenty to work with. He, better than anyone, knows that Soviet borders were created so that Kremlin leaders could do exactly what he’s doing now and play the many national groups in Eurasia off of each other and maintain rule from Moscow.

Western powers, however, should never take the Russian bait about borders. Yes, some of them make no sense. Welcome to the modern world, where a lot of borders are artificial or contestable. But as the Argentinians learned in the Falklands in 1982  and the Iraqis learned in Kuwait in 1991, nations cannot just employ force at will and shake up the international map like a giant Etch A Sketch.

If we allow whoever has a big enough army in the right place at the right time to draw the maps, then there’s no such thing as law or diplomacy. There is only the right given by might, and we know how that always ends: mountains of corpses.

Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and an author of the Atlantic Daily newsletter.