IEHC 2006 Helsinki Session 81
Andrey Shlyakhter
University of Chicago
[email protected]
Smuggling Across the Soviet Borders:
Contraband Trade and the Soviet Struggle against It, 1917-1939
(Project overview and preliminary findings)*
Introduction
“The smuggler … would have been, in every respect,
an excellent citizen, had not the laws of the country
made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.”
- Adam Smith (1776) 1
“Contraband derails the decree on the nationalization of
foreign trade, turning it into a fiction.”
A. I. Potiaev, Chief of the Main Customs Administration
and chairman of the Central Commission for Combating
Contraband (TsKB/Kb) (November 1922) 2
One of the fundamental changes enacted by the Bolshevik regime was the
establishment of a state monopoly on foreign trade. 3 Proclaimed in April of 1918, the
* I am grateful to my advisor, Sheila Fitzpatrick, the members of my dissertation committee - Ron Suny,
Richard Hellie, Leora Auslander, and Ralph Austen - as well as to Brian Boeck and Julia Fein, for their
comments and encouragement. An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Europe in Motion,
Europe at the Crossroads: A Conference on the Politics of Circulation,” University of Chicago, February
17-18, 2005; the Association for Borderlands Studies Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM, April 13-16,
2005; the Russian Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago, May 30, 2005; the 9th Istoricheskie
chteniia na Lubianke, Moscow, Russia, December 5-6, 2005; and “Une frontiere de type nouveau?
Pratiques et representations de la frontiere communiste en Europe, de la Revolution d’Octobre aux annees
1950,” Paris, May 18-20, 2006. I am grateful to the participants in these events for their comments and
suggestions (not all of which I have yet been able to pursue).
1
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, V. 2 (New York: Modern Library, 1937),
849, as cited in Gregory Grossman, “Notes on the Illegal Private Economy and Corruption,” in Soviet
Economy in a Time of Change, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1979), 844.
Such views did not prevent Smith from obtaining the post of Customs Commissioner of Scotland in 1778.
(I am grateful to Gautham Rao for pointing out to me this feature of Smith's biography.)
2
The Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), Moscow, fond (fund) 413, opis’ (collection) 14, delo
(file) 72, list (page) 27. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.)
3
The Soviet state monopoly on foreign trade was not in effect a fundamental rupture but an intensification
and solidification of wartime changes. Recent historiography has highlighted the increasing role of the state
apparatus in the wartime economy of Russia and other belligerent countries after 1914. (For a discussion of
this theme in the realm of food supply, see Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s
Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002], 26-46). Part of this accelerating
government involvement in the economy was an extension of state control over, and eventual direct
participation in, major foreign trade transactions. Soon after the outbreak of war, the Ministry of Finance
(which controlled the Imperial Department of Customs Collections) prohibited the export of certain goods
across the land boundaries of European Russia and the ports of the Black, Azov, and White Seas; the list of
proscribed exports grew over time. The Provisional Government continued this trend, so that, in the words
of one early specialist, “By the eve of the October Revolution of 1917, the State had materially increased
1
ruling barred anyone except representatives of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign
Trade (NKVT) 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 vast
borders of the Russian Socialist Federative Republic and its adjacent Soviet republics, as
the borderland inhabitants sought to provide for themselves goods which they could not
otherwise obtain during the difficult years of Civil War and the government’s requisitionbased economic policy of War Communism (1918-1921). 4 The smuggling trade
attracted members of virtually every Soviet social group and ethnicity along the country’s
vast borderline, and smuggled goods were channeled further inland as well. Although
private commerce was legalized under the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921,
entrepreneurs continued to be barred from foreign trade. Meanwhile, according to data
assembled by the government, the smuggling of goods both into and out of the country
reached unprecedented proportions; indeed, it appears that both the volume of contraband
and the numbers of people involved in smuggling during the years of War Communism,
NEP, and the early 1930s were higher than ever in Soviet (and possibly world) history.
The aim of my dissertation is to produce an economic, social, political, and
cultural history of the contraband trade in the USSR during the period 1917-1939. The
work draws on previously unstudied archival materials – mostly customs records, but
also the records of the Soviet border guard and court documents - held at the national and
regional archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Because contraband routes led into and
out of the USSR across virtually every border, I will seek to adopt a Union-wide
perspective on the problem, though at the dissertation stage I plan to examine in more
detail the Soviet Union’s western boundary, particularly its Polish segment. 5
its control over the country’s foreign trade turnover and was an active participant. These measures were
the outcome of wartime conditions, but, in a sense, they paved the way for the State monopoly of foreign
trade introduced by the Soviet Government in the first years of its regime.” (Alexander Baykov, Soviet
Foreign Trade [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946], 5-6.) However, the measures of the Imperial and
Provisional Governments were probably not intended to outlast the duration of the war; in this sense, the
Soviet state monopoly on foreign trade, which lasted until the Soviet collapse, was a fundamental change
indeed. Moreover, the Imperial and provisional governments were most concerned about controlling
exports, while the Soviet foreign trade monopoly targeted imports with equal zeal, as evidenced by the data
on intercepted contraband (see below).
4
According to one estimate, in 1918, 1919, and 1920, foreign trade turnover was less than 1 per cent of its
1913 level. Robert Lewis, “Foreign economic relations,” in R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G.
Wheatcroft, The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,
1994), 198-215, 201.
5
My choice of the Soviet-Polish border is prompted by several considerations. According to some
accounts, this boundary witnessed the highest volume of smuggling during this period because of the
availability of cheaper consumer goods on the other side. [(Alan Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The
Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1987), 123; Andrea Chandler, Institutions of
Isolation: Border Controls in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States, 1917-1993 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s U. P., 1998), 50. Professor Yu. G. Kislovskii of the Russian Customs Academy writes that on the
basis of the data on captured contraband, “the most active area of contraband activity in 1922 remained the
borders with Poland and Romania.” (Yu. G. Kislovskii, Kontrabanda: Istoriia i sovremennost’ (Moscow:
IPO “Avtor,” 1996))]. Such statements, however, should be treated with extreme caution, as they are
particularly susceptible to source bias. It is possible that the Soviet-Polish border witnessed more recorded
contraband activity (as measured by confiscations) during the 1920s, but the under-policed Far East may
have been more of a smuggling “hot zone” all along. Thus, specialists of the Peoples’s Commissariat of
Finance (Narkomfin), consulted by NKVT about the loss of foreign currency (valiuta) due to smuggling in
2
Smuggling was of course not a new phenomenon in the borderlands of the former
Tsarist Empire. During the last decades of tsarist rule, customs duties constituted some
14.5 percent of government revenue, second only to the proceeds from the state
monopoly on alcohol. 6 As in most other nations, therefore, smuggling potentially
threatened an important portion of state finances, but not the existing political-economic
system. After 1917, however, contraband acquired both a greater magnitude and a
fundamentally new, ideological significance. Lenin himself had used the full weight of
his authority to defend the state monopoly on foreign trade in debates with party critics of
this policy, because he viewed it as a necessary condition for socialism. 7 Smuggling
broke that condition. As A. I. Potiaev, Chairman of the Central Commission for
Combating Contraband (TsKB/Kb) – an interagency commission that included
representatives of the Cheka, the Red Army, the Commissariat of Finance, and the
Customs Administration - stated in November of 1922, “Contraband derails the decree on
the nationalization of foreign trade, turning it into a fiction.” 8
In addition to posing political, ideological, and economic challenges, smuggling
was considered a security threat, and Soviet government rhetoric and policy conflated
contraband with espionage, subversion, and cross-border banditry. While borderland
inhabitants may have considered cross-border trade a legitimate activity, the Soviet
government employed a combination of police, propaganda, and economic measures to
combat smuggling, including the internal exile of known contrabandists, anti-smuggling
propaganda campaigns, and the production and delivery of commonly smuggled goods
into the border regions. A study of the government’s struggle against contraband should
thus contribute to our understanding of the forms, methods, and growth of the Soviet
state’s control over its citizens - and borders - in the years after the Revolution (in
particular, the relative weight of “carrot” and “stick” approaches). Scrutinizing the
decision-making processes involved may help to determine the extent to which Soviet
authorities' decisions were driven by economic, political, ideological, and security
considerations, a keystone problem of Soviet political history. 9 Most directly, the study
will aim to reconstruct a textured picture of a significant segment of the unofficial
economy - that permanent facet of the Soviet experience - and gauge its scope and impact
on the Soviet economy, state, and society during the formative years of the Soviet Union.
the late 1920s, suggested that the amount of captured contraband on the Western borders needed to be
multiplied by a factor of 20 to get an estimate of the real volume, and by a factor of 30 for the Far East.
(RGAE f. 5240, op. 18, d? [This document is being xeroxed for me in Moscow]).While other evidence
suggests that at least by the end of the 1920s, the “center of gravity” may have shifted to the Far East, the
western border nonetheless retained a major share. (RGAE 5240/18/3204/77-82 ob.) Moreover, the
western border posed a particularly significant security concern to the Soviet leadership in the 1920s, and in
1925, the Politbiuro even formed a special commission devoted to the study of the western and
northwestern borderlands. (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), F
17, Tsentral’nyi Komitet KPSS, Op. 164, Dokumenty komissij Politbiuro - Komissiia PB po uluchsheniiu
polozheniia naseleniia pogranichnoj polosy Zapadnogo i Severo-Zapadnogo raionov [1925]).
6
L. N. Markov’s Ocherki po istorii tamozhennoii sluzhby (Irkutsk: Izd. Irkutskogo Universiteta, 1987), 57.
7
Lewis, 202. It is illustrative of the importance that Lenin attached to this issue that when defending the
economic liberalization of the NEP, Lenin pointed to the government’s continued control of foreign trade
along with the “commanding heights” of heavy industry and transport to argue that a revival of
“capitalism” did not pose a political threat to Soviet power. (Ball, 24).
8
See the archival citation above.
9
This line of inquiry, however, may be limited by the absence of steno grams of meetings in the archives.
3
Smugglers and Goods
“Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark Brandy for the Parson
‘Baccy for the Clerk -”
- Rudyard Kipling, A Smuggler’s Song
What was smuggled? And how did the volume and composition of contraband
change over the period under study? The answer to these questions will vary by time and
region, export or import contraband, smuggling for personal consumption or for resale
(locally or into the interior of the country), supply and demand on both sides of the
border, the price of tsarist gold coins (a major medium of exchange for import
contraband), the convertibility of the Soviet ruble, the harshness of punishment meted out
to smugglers, the success of agitprop campaigns with the borderland population, the
efficacy of border control on the Soviet and neighboring side, the attitude of neighboring
authorities to the contraband trade (which in turn depended on both political and
economic concerns), and also the season and the weather. The variety of contraband,
illustrating the (officially) unmet demand of the population even during the NEP, can be
gauged from the report “On work towards the struggle with contraband in 1927/28”
(which also includes data on the 1926/27 operational year10 ), presented to the Council of
Labor and Defense (STO), a top government planning organ, by the deputy People’s
Commissar of Trade Maksimov and the deputy chair of the OGPU Genrikh Iagoda on
February 1st, 1929. 11
The list of smuggled goods confiscated over the previous three years includes
forty-eight imported and ten exported types of commodities. Consumer goods, a fraction
of official Soviet imports during this period, predictably constituted the bulk of import
contraband (and thus of the entire smuggled goods flow). The variety of such goods was
legion: sugar, tobacco, alcohol, knives, shoes, medicines, paint, watches, hand tools,
sewing needles, silk, cloths, combs, buttons, matches, glass, pearls, etc. More
“specialized” goods were also included in the list; narcotics (mainly on the Asian
borders) and physical and medical apparatuses (mainly on the European). The regional
variety of contraband can be gauged from the example of smuggled livestock, of which in
1927/28 on the European border only 20 rubles’ worth 12 was confiscated, while on the
Asian border some 350, 400 rubles-worth of illegally imported livestock was seized.
The major item confiscated in 1926/27 were woolen cloths, of which 684, 105
rubles-worth were confiscated on the European border (in 1927/28 the value of
confiscations of this item fell to 483, 908 rubles, but rose on the Asian border, from 239,
745 to 351, 378 rubles). 13 Such data should augment our picture of both the officially
unmet demand and the actual supply of goods to the Soviet population during this period.
10
An “operational year” began October 1st and ended September 30th of the following calendar year.
RGAE 5240/18/3204/77-82 ob.
12
The price at which the Customs Administration sold these goods either at an open auction or to the
highest-bidding Soviet government agency. Notably, between 1926 and 1928, some 1,708 confiscations of
contraband goods, valued at 1,269,351 rubles, were carried out in the Moscow region alone, indicating that
smuggled goods reached well beyond the border areas. (Ibid.)
13
Ibid.
11
4
Naturally, these numbers require further analysis: what caused such a strong demand for
woolen cloth? What were its domestic production, import, and regional supply before
and after the Revolution? How to explain the rises and falls in confiscations of woolen
cloths and other goods? And, crucially for interpreting this data, what was the correlation
between contraband caught and the actual volume of contraband?
Measuring the actual volume of smuggling is problematic by definition. Tsarist
customs officials suggested multiplying the amount of captured contraband by a factor of
ten to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the actual volume of smuggling; contemporary
Soviet specialists suggested putting the figure at fifteen. 14 However, it was difficult to
determine whether fluctuations in the volume of contraband captured by the authorities
were due to corresponding changes in the actual flow of smuggled goods or to changes in
the authorities’ ability to fight it. Predictably, this issue became the object of interagency
disputes. Thus, at a meeting of the Ukrainian commission for combating contraband in
February 1927, the deputy chief of the OGPU’s border guard in the Ukraine 15 insisted
that in its quarterly report on the struggle against contraband, the commission adopt the
point of view of the GPU that the rise in captured contraband was “a consequence of the
better functioning of the border guard,” while the chief of the Ukrainian branch of the
Main Customs Administration (Glavnoe Tamozhennoe Upravlenie, or GTU) stated that
although the “measures taken by the UPO GPU [Administration of the Border Guard of
the GPU] were of course also reflected in the increase of captured contraband,” the
increase was actually “caused by a significant growth of contraband in general.” 16
Possibly to bypass such disagreements, the Ukrainian branch of the GTU
proposed comparing the data gathered by the Ukrainian branch of the OGPU border
guard administration about the trade turnover of Polish trade firms specializing in the
supply of contraband goods to the border areas against the volume of contraband
captured in the corresponding Soviet border areas across from where these firms
operated. 17 The OGPU had identified thirty-four Polish trading firms dealing in
contraband on the Ukrainian-Polish by October 1, 1925. The total annual turnover of
these firms was calculated at 9, 792, 000 rubles. “During the same period on the
Ukrainian-Polish border and in the rear (including Kiev) import contraband in the amount
14
M. Sobolev, entry in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, 7th Ed., (Moscow: Granat, 1927), v. 41, p. 776. How
the figure used by Imperial officials was obtained is not yet clear to me; presumably, the answer may be
found in the materials of the Imperial Department of Customs Revenues, held at the Russian State
Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg, (which is temporarily closed to researchers), or in the
materials of the Imperial Border Guard, held at the Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA) in
Moscow.
15
In 1918, the border guard was moved from the purview of the Commissariat of Trade and Industry
(NKTiP) to the VChk, the political police that was the predecessor of the OGPU (later the KGB). This
move reflected the primacy of political over economic considerations in the party leadership’s approach to
border security; Soviet customs officials initially criticized the move, arguing that the VChK’s focus on
political contraband would make it less effective in the struggle with economic contraband. (The border
guard of the Russian Federation today remains subordinate to the Federal Security Service, the FSB. For
context, it may be helpful to remember that in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, the
U.S. Customs and Border Service was also moved from the Department of the Treasury to the newlyformed Department of Homeland Security.)
16
However, the chairman of the meetings, the deputy Comissar of Trade of the Ukraine Kolomojtsev,
expressed his support of the GPU’s viewpoint, and it was adopted as the opinion of the commission.
(RGAE 5240/18/3200/90-90ob.)
17
“Contraband Foreign-Trade Turnover of the [Ukrainian] SSR in 1925/26,” RGAE 5240/18/3200, 93-124.
5
of 548, 730 rubles was captured, which constitutes 6.2 % relative to the sum of the
turnover of Polish border firms.” In addition to these registered firms, the report notes
that on the Ukrainian-Polish border there exists a “wide network of small shops (melkikh
lavochek), also selling goods to smugglers, whose turnover is difficult to account for.”
Moreover, in calculating the value of Polish goods in Soviet prices, the staff of the
Ukrainian branch of the GTU used the smallest factor (1:3), while for many popular
goods (khodkikh tovarov), the price difference (and thus the payoff for smuggling!) was
significantly greater, reaching 1:6. As a result, the Ukrainian branch of the GTU
concluded that “the percentage of captured import contraband should be considered no
more than 5%,” or 20 times less than its actual volume.18 The above calculation seems to
me generally sound, with some qualifications. 19
Since in 1925/26 some 755, 850 rubles of import contraband was seized on the
Ukrainian-Polish border and in the interior of Ukraine, the experts of the Ukrainian
branch of the GTU concluded that actually some 15, 117, 000 rubles-worth of contraband
goods (in Soviet prices; or 5, 000, 000 in Polish prices) were smuggled across the PolishSoviet border. Over the same period, the official import from Poland totaled some 2,
571, 000 rubles (in Polish prices). Thus, the Ukrainian branch of the GTU concluded, the
contraband import of goods from Poland into the Ukraine is “two times greater than the
legal one” (underlined in the original). The authors of the report noted that in the pre-war
period Polish industry was to a significant extent (60-65%) oriented towards “our”
(probably meaning the All-Imperial Russian) market, and that during the past years the
legal export from Poland has been sharply decreasing, falling from 4, 885, 300 rubles in
1924/25 to 2, 571, 600 rubles in 1925/26. At the same time, according to data from the
18
RGAE 5240/18/3200, 107-109. In addition to this calculation, based on the data of the UPO GPU about
the turnover of borderland Polish firms, the Ukrainian branch of the GTU carried out another one,
combining data gathered by the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) and the Commissariat of Trade.
The data of the TsSU about the actual consumption of manufactured goods by the inhabitants of border
districts was compared with the Ukrainian Commissariat of Trade’s data about official deliveries of
manufactures to the borderlands. The difference, “not covered by the deliveries, and made-up apparently
by contraband,” was compared against the volume of captured contraband manufactures. The customs
officials thus determined that the percentage of captured contraband manufactures relative to the actual
volume of imported contraband manufactures equaled about 7 %. However, “because the carrying of
manufactures across the border, as a more bulky object, is considerably more difficult and its discovery is
easier” than that of other contraband goods, the report concludes that “there is enough evidence to suppose
that the average percentage of captured import contraband relative to its actual import can not be more than
5%,” as in the other calculation. (Ibid, l. 109) It is unclear to me how the TsSU gathered the data on the
consumption of manufactures; presumably, however, the respondents’ tendency here would have been to
under-report their actual consumption, which would mean that the real difference between official
deliveries and actual consumption may have been even greater, thus making the percentage of contraband
captured even smaller and reinforcing the GTU’s point. On the other hand, the above calculation assumes
that the difference was made up entirely by contraband from across the border, disregarding the possibility
that manufactured goods may have also been brought illegally to the borderlands from the interior. I have
not seen evidence of this latter process – the days of widespread meshochnichestvo of the Civil War years
were behind – but it remains at least a theoretical possibility.
19
For example, I do not know how exactly the OGPU calculated the turnover of Polish borderland shops.
It is possible that the Polish firms sold goods not only to smugglers but to local Poles as well, thus deflating
the cross-border turnover. On the other hand, the calculation assumes that all of the contraband captured in
the interior of Ukraine originated in Poland, which is a priori doubtful given the flows across the Romanian
border and the Black sea; but this would make the amount captured even smaller, buttressing the GTU’s
point.
6
journal Vneshniia Torgovlia (Foreign Trade), cited by the authors, the percentage of
manufactured goods in Poland’s legal export has also declined, from 24% in 1924, to
20% in 1925, and during the first two months of 1926, to 12% of total export. 20 “It is
therefore natural that Poland, with the unceasing crisis in sales,” sum up the authors of
the report, “is tremendously interested … in the development of contraband trade
turnover with us. Taking into account that Poland borders not only the Ukrainian SSR,
but also the Belarussian SSR, with which the contraband turnover is also large, it
becomes clear that all this illegal turnover with the USSR constitutes a significant part of
Poland’s total foreign trade turnover … Therefore, in addition to a host of political
considerations, with a well-developed illegal export and import, Poland is little interested
in establishing with us normal trade relations, and does not see a need for trying
especially hard to establish with us a trade treaty.” 21
This bold conclusion, placing the contraband trade at the center of Polish-Soviet
economic and political relations, naturally requires further substantiation in Polish
archives. It also invites the question – how much can we trust the calculations presented
by a Soviet government institution that, as any other, has a stake in underscoring the
importance of its own work? In the Soviet Union (as elsewhere), emphasizing the
magnitude of the problem (in this case, a large volume of contraband) could be a way to
lobby the center to direct more resources to one’s apparat and locale. However, it seems
probable that the figure of five percent postulated by the Ukrainian division of the Main
Customs Administration as a measure of contraband captured relative to its actual volume
does not unduly exaggerate the real volume of smuggling. An independent assessment
by the Ukrainian Commissariat of Trade, “On the method of determining the volume of
import contraband by the Ukrainian Branch of the Main Customs Administration”
concluded that in calculating the percentage of captured contraband, the Ukrainian branch
of the GTU actually “minimized the total volume of contraband imports, thereby
exaggerating the percentage of confiscations.” 22 In other words, the Commissariat
accused the Customs Administration of seeking to burnish its contraband-fighting record
by minimizing the real volume of contraband. While this potential bias will also need to
be kept in mind when analyzing this kind of data, it also suggests that Soviet customs
officials had a disincentive to exaggerate the real volume of contraband. 23 As noted
above, the percentage of confiscations relative to the real flow of contraband varied with
time, sections of the border, type of goods, and other factors.
Who were the smugglers? In 1922, the Pskov district commission responsible for
combating contraband on the Estonian and Latvian borders reported that the smugglers in
its district can be broken down by their “social position” as follows: “20% kulaks, 30%
middle peasants, and 50% poor peasants; moreover, some 65% of contrabandists are
20
Vneshniia Torgovlia, No. 1 (15 June 1926), p. 20, as cited in ibid, p. 112.
RGAE 5240/18/3200/112.
22
RGAE 5240/18/3200/109, 125. (underlined in the original)
23
RGAE 5240/18/3200/109. Moreover, the report cites a separate investigation, carried out by the Kiev
representative of the Comissariat of Trade, who studied the contraband trade in the Shepetovsk region, on
the Polish border to the west of Kiev. That study determined that “contraband manufactures in the border
districts constitutes two-thirds of its total turnover,” while “according to the calculations of the [Ukrainian
branch of the] GTU the entire mass of contraband manufacture constitutes only one-quarter of its
turnover.” Ibid, 109.
21
7
minors, 30% are women, and only 5% are [grown] men.” 24 The surprisingly high
proportion of women and minors might be explained by their being perceived as less of a
threat by the border guards, or the expectation of greater leniency if caught. 25 It also
suggests that participation in smuggling served to increase the significance of women and
children in the local economy. 26 According to another official report for 1923, only
“slightly less than 100%” of the peasants on the Western borders of Belarussia engaged
in smuggling and selling contraband goods. 27 While peasants and corrupt border guards
all participated in the trade, Jan Olin, the head of the Western customs district (and
responsible for policing contraband along the entire Belarusian-Polish and part of the
Latvian border), maintained that smuggling was chiefly inspired by the mainly Jewish
“merchant element,” even in areas far removed from the border. 28 One of the chief aims
of my dissertation will be to establish, to the extent possible, the ethnic, social, gender,
and age makeup of the smugglers, as well as the underground commercial networks that
sustained and inspired the contraband trade. 29
24
RGAE 413/14/81/139. Here one must note that the Soviet division of people into classes was frequently
arbitrary. (See Sheila Fitzpatrick “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia.”
Journal of Modern History 65, декабрь 1993, стр. 745-770.) However, for lack of other data we are forced
to rely on this, albeit with a caveat.
25
This is indeed how Ukrainian customs authorities explained the phenomenon, noting that in 1925/26
there was “a series of cases of confiscating contraband from under-age (under 14 years) peasant childrensmugglers, who are used by their elders and parents thanks to their unpunishability, because according to
the law, they do not carry the actual responsibility, because they do not own any property, and monetary
fines cannot be transferred from them onto the property of their parents or those substituting for them.”
(RGAE 5240/18/3200/96).
26
I am grateful to Leora Auslander for suggesting this possibility. Children have actively participated in
contraband in other places and times. See, for example, T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in
Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792-1802 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 148,
for a discussion of little smugglers trafficking between German territories during the French occupation.
Smuggling thus demonstrates how periods of crisis can lead to a greater role for – as well as the possible
exploitation of - “weaker” members of society.
27
RGAE 413/14/139/14ob.
28
RGAE 413/14/139/14ob, 17. The allegedly high participation of Jewish merchants in the contraband
trade probably reflected their generally high representation in borderlands commerce. It also reflected a
possible continuity from Tsarist times – at least in officials’ perception. An article of the Customs Code in
effect until 1917 stipulated that Jews involved in contraband, in addition to the regular court-imposed
punishment, were to be exiled beyond 100 versts (a verst is roughly equal to a kilometer) from the border
for at least a year. (For examples of this law put into practice during the early 1900s see Gosudarstvennyj
Arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [GARF]1263/1/7/17-18.) After the establishment of the Bolshevik regime,
such discriminatory legislation was abolished - professional smugglers were exiled regardless of nationality
- while Jews became disproportionately represented among the top officials of the customs administration
and border guard. (This observation is based on my current impression after nearly a year of working with
the documents of these institutions; in the future I hope to verify this with statistical evidence.) No longer
was an Imperial Russian government persecuting Jews in the name of the treasury, but Jews hunting Jews
in the name of communism.
29
Underground credit operations were almost certainly run during the 1920s by “clandestine and rapacious
private usurers” to who even legitimate Nepmen turned for funding when state credit became unavailable.
(Ball, 36).
8
Fighting Smuggling: Why and How?
“I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief.
He robs nothing but the revenue - an abstraction I never greatly cared about …
I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to
day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their
illicit countrymen - townsfolk or brethren perchance - whistling to the
sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who,
under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil
warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their
detestation of run hollands, and zeal for Old England.”
- Charles Lamb, The Last Essays of Elia (1833)
With the end of the Civil War, the reestablishment of (official) foreign trade, and
the transition to the New Economic Policy, the Soviet government resurrected the system
of customs duties, although now recast under the state monopoly of foreign trade.30 As
under the tsarist government, therefore, smuggling threatened this portion of state
finances. A certain N. Arseniev, author of an article “On Contraband,” published in the
newspaper Ekonomicheskaja zhizn’ in 1924, calculated the loss in customs revenue
caused by smuggling in 1923 at 21, 434 gold rubles, which made up over a third (36.3
percent) of the 59, 116 gold rubles collected. 31 Of course, Arseniev’s calculation is
problematic, because it assumes that all or almost all of the goods smuggled across the
Soviet border would have otherwise been legally imported and exported, which seems
highly unlikely under the state monopoly of foreign trade. But it seems plausible that the
loss of customs revenue, especially from imports, figured in the minds of Soviet party
and government officials as one reason for fighting contraband. 32
Even more prominent in contemporary Soviet discourse, however, was the notion
that contraband interfered with the fledgling Soviet state’s unprecedented attempts at
economic planning, the golden key that promised to take an already backward country
ruined by war and revolution into modernity and beyond. “Whereas in the capitalist
countries and in prewar Russia smuggling was seen as a phenomenon that interfered with
fiscal interests,” wrote Vladimir Ivanovich Vujtik, head of the Ukrainian branch of the
Main Customs Administration, in 1926, “under the conditions of the Soviet economy it
constitutes an organized and quite dangerous factor in the undermining of the monopoly
of foreign trade and a violation of the planned bases for its realization, with all the
attendant consequences.” 33 Vujtik did not delve into what these consequences were, and
in fact they are highly debatable. 34 The unequivocal statement (frequently repeated to
30
Unfortunately, the history of official Soviet foreign trade and tariff policy has yet to be written.
N. Arseniev, “O kontrabande,” Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, 13 February 1924..
32
This must have been true of the customs officials, at least, and probably Narkomfin people as well.
Whether or not the top government and party leaders were really concerned about the loss of customs
duties I do not know.
33
RGAE 5240/18/3200, 93.
34
The welfare effects of smuggling have been the subject of a theoretical debate among economists,
although no theoretical analysis of smuggling under a state monopoly on foreign trade has yet been
produced. See Jagdish Bhagwati and Bent Hansen, “A Theoretical Analysis of Smuggling,” The Quarterly
Journal of Economics (QJE), Vol. 87, No. 2 (May, 1973), 172-187; H. Peter Gray and Ingo Walter,
“Smuggling and Economic Welfare: A Comment,” QJE, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Nov., 1975), 643-650; and
Bhagwati and Hansen, “A Theoretical Analysis of Smuggling: A Reply,” QJE, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Nov.,1975),
31
9
this day in the Russian literature on the subject) that “contraband caused great harm to the
economic interests of the USSR” simply ignores the problem. 35 It seems likely that
contraband simultaneously interfered with Soviet efforts at planning and complemented
them, meeting consumer demand unmet by the state’s own foreign trade apparatus. 36
Whatever the real effect of contraband on Soviet production and trade may have been (a
question I will explore in the dissertation), leading customs and border guard officials at
least appeared to believe that it was detrimental. Given that fighting contraband was their
raison d’etre, this is hardly surprising. Whether officials in the Trade Comissariats,
VSNKh, and Gosplan, 37 not to mention the Politbiuro, genuinely shared this concern,
remains to be seen.
There is little doubt, however, that Politbiuro members and leading government
officials were, not unreasonably, concerned about the depletion of the country’s reserves
of valiuta 38 (foreign currency) and gold through its smuggling abroad. Possibly the
major cause of this outflow was the use of valiuta and gold as a medium of exchange for
imported contraband goods. “Smugglers purchase goods for cash: for American dollars,
gold coins of old [i.e., tsarist] minting,” stated the authors of the 1927 report on
smuggling across the Ukrainian-Polish border in the 1925/26 fiscal year, cited above.
“Because 5.000.000 rubles-worth of contraband (in Polish prices) has been brought in to
us from Poland, for which the smugglers paid in valiuta, we conclude that in 1925/26 the
export of valiuta from the Ukrainian SSR to Poland alone in payment for contraband
goods reached around 5,000,000 rubles.” 39 As a working hypothesis, I would suggest
that the concern about the depletion of foreign currency figured in the minds of party and
651-657. Of course, one must also take into account such non-economic results of smuggling as the
damage done to popular respect for the law and the smuggling of “bads” such as narcotics in addition to
“goods.” (Gray and Walter, 643).
35
A. I. Nikolaev, et. Al. Na strazhe granits otechestva. Istoriia pogranichnoj sluzhby. Kratkij ocherk.
(Moscow: Granitsa, 1998), 340; Yu. G. Kislovskii, Kontrabanda: istoriia I sovremennost’ (Moscow: IPO
Avtor, 1996), passim.
36
Indeed, it seems likely that the “planned” nature of the Soviet economy has been substantially overrated.
Thus, analyzing the documents of the Commissariats of Light and Heavy Industry in the 1930s, A. M.
Markevich concluded that “in the 1930s, the ‘general’ commissariat plans … were not officially approved,”
which resulted from the “priority of everyday management over planning in the USSR.” (A. M. Markevich,
“Byla li sovetskaia ekonomika planovoi? Planirovanie v narkomatax v 1930-e gg,.” in Ekonomicheskaia
istoriia. Ezhegodnik. 2003 [Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004], 20-54; 41, 42.) Evgenia Belova had earlier
reached a similar conclusion on the basis of Gosplan materials (E. B. Belova. “Stikhiia plana: praktika
raboty Gosplana SSSR v pervoi polovine 30-x godov,” in Ekonomicheskaia istoriia. Ezhegodnik. 2001
[Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002], 579-606.) Unfortunately, the studies of Markevich and Belova only deal
with planning in production and capital investment. The problem of Soviet planning in the realm of trade
(both domestic and foreign) remains to be studied. However, I have not yet found evidence that contraband
was viewed by officials of the Trade Comissariats (outside those in the customs administration) as a serious
threat to its planning efforts.
37
VSNKh, an acronym for the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy, was the body in charge of
planning industrial production; Gosplan was the chief economic planning agency in the USSR.
38
I use the Russian term because the English translations, “foreign currency” or “foreign exchange,” do not
convey the emotional cachet that the word carries with Russians. Although I am not sure when valiuta
began to acquire such significance; I would hypothesize that this process began with the February
Revolution and accelerated through the growing years of instability that followed it. The Soviet
government’s periodic efforts at extracting valiuta from the population doubtless served to increase its
emotional value.
39
RGAE 5240/18/3200/112.
10
government leaders as the most significant economic reason for combating economic
contraband, one that assumed particular urgency with the leadership’s turn to rapid
industrialization. 40
However, the Soviet struggle against economic contraband was not motivated
entirely, perhaps not even primarily, by economic considerations. Security concerns
figure prominently in contemporary discussions of the problem, particularly in
documents produced by the OGPU, as well as by top party leadership. Given its purview,
the OGPU’s emphasis on seeing smuggling primarily as a security threat is not
surprising; and the security agency had real, not phantom reasons to be concerned. I have
found some evidence that Romanian intelligence employed economic smuggling as a
cover for its espionage operations on Soviet territory during the late 1920s, and there is
reason to think that this practice began much earlier. It seems likely that this was also
done by the Polish, Estonian, and Latvian governments as well, though I have not yet
found archival documents to substantiate this claim. 41 Certainly, both the
Razvedupravlenie (intelligence directorate) of the Red Army and the OGPU itself
extensively used smuggling as a cover for espionage activity in neighboring states until
the mid-1920s, and could be expected to assume that the enemy was doing the same. 42
Because Soviet authorities were concerned about spies and saboteurs crossing the border
in addition to - or in the guise of - smugglers, measures taken to secure the border against
the former inevitably impacted the latter, even if these were borderland peasants
completely unconnected to espionage. Security factors – perceived and real threats from
across the border and the measures taken to counter them – heavily affected the flow of
contraband goods into the USSR, and must be factored into any estimate of the latter.
Sometimes if not always a corollary to security concerns were political
considerations. Soviet authorities in the 1920s, like their counterparts in the immediate
postwar years, were painfully aware that the exposure of the population to superior
material conditions on the other side of the border could only damage popular support for
the Soviet system. Writing in February of 1924 to the Central Committee of the
Ukrainian Communist Party regarding the pressing need for the development of a viable
trade network in the borderlands, the chairman of the OGPU in the Ukraine, Vsevolod
Balitskii, argued: “The above facts, in addition to their economic significance, have a
large political one, as the borderland population of Ukraine sees, on the one hand, on its
40
On anti-smuggling measures due to foreign currency concerns see Yurii Goland, “Currency Regulation
in the NEP Period,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 46, No. 8 (1994), 1251-1296, 1280.
41
For a case involving Romanian espionage intertwined with smuggling activity, see Otraslevoj Derzhavnii
Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeki Ukraini (ODA SBU), f. 5, d. 5380, volumes 1-3. Without providing any citations,
Yu. G. Kislovskii alleges that the “Polish defenziva, Romanian siguranca, the intelligence services of other
western countries variously stimulated contraband activity, viewing it as a powerful means of undermining
the Soviet economy.” (Kislovskii, 101).While this claim seems to me far-fetched, it seems likely that
contraband was indeed used as a cover for espionage on both sides of the border. Of course, this requires
further substantiation in the archives of the respective countries.
42
Indeed, this practice soon became massively abused by the OGPU’s secret agents, for whom spying came
to serve as a pretext for lucrative smuggling activity rather than vice-versa. Reporting to Leon Trotskii
(then Chair of the Revvoensoviet, the Soviet equivalent of the Chiefs of Staff) on the condition of the Red
Army forces in the Ukraine and Crimea, their commander demanded “to completely liquidate ‘goods
camouflage’ (the legal smuggling of goods) on the border, corrupting as it does both the military
detachments and all the functionaries in the border zone.” Tsentral’nyj Derzhavnyj Arkhiv
Gromadiianskikh Ob’ednan’ Ukraini (TsDAGO) 1/20/1311/61.
11
own territory the absence of a developed network of cooperative and private trade or high
prices for goods, and on the other hand – conveniently organized, with the assistance of
the authorities of contiguous states, cooperative and private traders, with a good
assortment of goods and lower prices.” 43 Smuggling was thus seen as damaging popular
support for the Soviet system. Needless to say, it could also erode popular respect for
Soviet power (what State cannot control its own borders?) and Soviet law. 44
Neither economic nor security nor political factors by themselves, however,
suffice to explain the drive and persistence of Soviet anti-smuggling efforts. To be sure,
the state monopoly on foreign trade was the ultimate protectionist measure, designed to
promote domestic industry and lift Russia out of its “colonial” dependence on Western
industrial goods. It was also seen as the necessary foundation for a planned economy,
itself a tenet of Bolshevik ideology. Smuggling was an obvious obstacle to both goals.
Yet I would suggest that the Bolsheviks’ visceral distaste for private trade, which many
had to swallow during the years of the New Economic Policy, provided the real
emotional fuel for the struggle against contraband. As Alan Ball has put it, “the existence
of a private economic sector seemed at best an obstacle to the attainment of socialism and
at worst a corrupter of the Revolution’s ideals.” 45 I would hypothesize that throughout
the 1920s, fighting smuggling served as an outlet for those ideologically committed party
members who, frustrated by the ever-changing definitions of speculation, could at least
combat illegal trade whose borders were clearly (and physically) demarcated. 46
While the smuggling was viewed as an ideological, moral, political, and security
threat as well as an economic one, the causes of the contraband trade were understood to
be primarily economic. “Trade deserts” in the borderlands that left their inhabitants with
little choice but to smuggle, better-quality and cheaper goods just across the border,
combined with a near-absence of certain desired products on the domestic market to
inspire and sustain the contraband trade. Soviet officials recognized early on that
smuggling could not be prevented by police measures alone, especially while limited
resources made the establishment of impermeable borders impossible. “It is necessary to
undertake an analysis of what … is brought into our country as contraband, what is the
market for the sale of this contraband, for what price it is sold here, and to propose
measures: 1) to ourselves deliver goods from abroad for specific [border] districts; 2) to
43
TsDAGO 1/20/1908/26 ob.
Indeed, lower-level, local party authorities were prone to view contraband as a moral ill, which, together
with drunkenness and sexual debauchery, stood in the way of establishing order (and thus control) in the
Soviet borderlands. (See the confidential reports by borderland Ukrainian obkom (regional) party chiefs to
the Politbiuro of the Ukrainian Communist Party during the early 1920s, in the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyj
Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoj Istorii [RGASPI], fond 17).
45
Аlan Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: the Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press
1987), 33 (?).
46
At least as much as by ideology, however, Soviet border guards and customs officials were motivated by
considerations of economic self interest, in the form of a percentage of confiscations paid out to the official
or soldier responsible for the capture. Correspondingly, as the chief of the Kharkov customs office
observed in 1924, when such premiums were not forthcoming, this had a negative effect on officials’
contraband-fighting zeal: “The experience of the last years of the customs administration as well as of other
administrations has demonstrated that ceasing the disbursement of premiums leads to a ceasing of
contraband seizures by even by communists.” Tsentralnij Derzhavnyj Arkhiv Vysshikh Orhganiv Vladi ta
Upravlinnia Ukraini (TsDAVO) 341/5 (sekretnaia chast’)/6/38ob. Ideology and economic self-interest thus
pointed in the same direction.
44
12
capture the market with our own products, by lowering the overhead costs and other
measures,” wrote Felix Dzerzhinskii, the head of the OGPU, on March 23rd, 1924. 47
Dzerzhinskii’s predilection towards an economic solution is both understandable and
intriguing; as simultaneously chairman of the VSNKh, he might have been more
skeptical of the state’s manufacturing capacity, but evidently Dzerzhinskii was optimistic.
“The participation of the VSNKh in this work is all-important (arkhivazhno),” he wrote
to Avanesov, the deputy Comissar of Foreign Trade, earlier that day. 48
A year later, in March 1925, the Council of Labor and Defense (the Sovet Truda i
Oborony, or STO, a top government planning body) directed the VSNKh to develop a
centralized plan for the production of commonly smuggled goods with their subsequent
delivery to the border areas. 49 In March 1928, the STO instructed the Commissariat of
Trade to take measures “towards the intensification of the delivery of goods of
contraband nomenclature into the border districts” and to further the “development of the
network of consumer cooperatives” in those districts. 50 In the absence of market
indicators, the data on captured contraband goods could be used as a gauge of demand.
Thus, in October of the same year, the Central Asian Committee for Combating
Contraband determined that based on the amount of captured contraband, the demand for
aladzha, a fabric native to the region, stood at around 150,000 rubles, and also resolved
that because “the dominant form of consumer contraband are cheap necklaces, prayer
beads, and small ornaments of Czechoslovak and Japanese manufacture, the meeting
considers it necessary to establish the production of silicate objects of the Czechoslovak
type with an ensuing delivery into the border districts. Based on the data on captured
contraband, to consider the sale of this kind of goods guaranteed approximately up to
200, 000 rubles per year.” 51 How well the VSNKh and other economic planning organs
responded to such demands remains to be seen. However, the example suggests that at at
least some Soviet officials pressed for the production of goods whose consumption was
officially discouraged (i.e., prayer beads) in order to ensure that they would not be
smuggled. 52
47
F. E. Dzerzhinskii i okhrana granits Sovetskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1967), 116, as cited in Yu. G.
Kislovskii, Kontrabanda: istoriia i sovremennost’ (Moscow: RTA, 1996), 120.
48
F. E. Dzerzhinskii i okhrana granits Sovetskogo gosudarstva, 116-117.
49
Pogranichnye voiska SSSR, 1918-1928. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 391.
50
RGAE 5240/18/3204/26.
51
RGAE 5240/18/3204/42.
52
In another example of propaganda and policy working at cross-purposes, in February 1926, the Crimean
Committee for Combating Contraband approved the publication of an appeal to the populace that would
“illuminate the harm of contraband, as undermining production in the USSR.” The appeal stated that
“foreign capitalists,” working in concert with smugglers, flood “our market … with various goods, mainly
intended for the well-to-do … stockings, scarfs, neckties, different cloths, powder, haberdashery, wines,
spirits, etc., and in the majority of cases, various defective items (vsiakii brak)… Beware of the smuggler,
who plunges a knife into the back of workers and peasants… Long live the monopoly on foreign trade.”
(RGAE 5240/18/3199/497-503). At the same time, on the directions of the Ukrainian division of
GOSPLAN, the Ukrainian branch of the VSNKh was developing a detailed plan for the production of silk
stockings to offset the demand for this popular object of contraband. (TsDAVO 337/1/2403/1-32). Perhaps
the Crimean Committee officials were simply unaware of the production plans underway in Khar’kov.
Even if they were, they might not have seen a contradiction between satisfying the demand for luxury
goods in the interests of preventing smuggling while seeking to coax the population into rejecting such
“bourgeois” wares. A prominent example of such a bifurcated approach was the massive Soviet production
of alcohol, a major source of government revenue during by the early 1930s,* alongside official campaigns
13
Even if caused by local market anomalies (albeit in many locales throughout the
USSR), smuggling was understood to be damaging the welfare of the Soviet state as a
whole, whether in the realm of planning, treasury, or security. This made it qualitatively
different from other crimes, such as speculation, whose pernicious effect could be
confined to the local level. The belief that even local-level smuggling harmed the
interests of the entire Soviet state (by disrupting planning and production, draining away
hard currency and gold, and providing a cover for espionage) helps us understand why
Soviet authorities would sometimes choose to direct disproportionate economic resources
to combat contraband. Thus, a committee on the development of consumer cooperative
shops in Turkmenistan resolved that “although the border district, [while] having no more
than fourteen percent of the entire population of the TSSR, is serviced by the cooperative
system more intensively than other districts of this republic, nevertheless the proposed
opening of thirty-four more cooperative distributors on the border … is considered
undoubtedly desirable and necessary.” 53 That this was deemed expedient even at the cost
of channeling resources away from more needy regions of the republic suggests that in
this case local economic concerns came second to political, ideological, security or
Union-level economic considerations. Of course, the contraband trade and the dangers
stemming from it were probably not the only factor in this decision; broader
considerations, such as raising their standard of living of borderland inhabitants to ensure
their loyalty, were probably at play as well, for the same host of political, ideological, and
security concerns. This was also the logic behind a July 1925 petition by the Transport
Section of the Cooperative Union of Ukraine and Crimea to the Cooperative section of
the Ukrainian division of Gosplan. Arguing that the Transport Cooperative “services a
relatively large stretch of the borderland,” and is forced “by socio-political considerations
… to conduct trade in the borderland districts that does not justify itself economically,”
the cooperativ asked for 200, 000 of the 1, 000, 000 rubles allocated by the Council of
People’s Commissars for bolstering consumer and agricultural cooperatives in the
borderlands. 54 Whether or not “socio-political considerations” rather than managerial
flaws were the real reason for unprofitable trade, the petition suggests that Soviet officials
were learning to emphasize the “border-ness” of their institutions as a justification for
additional resources. In so doing they could capitalize on a new feature of state policy.
What had begun as an attempt to stem the contraband trade by meeting the demand for
against drunkenness. (*Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and
Consumption, 1917-1953 [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004, 164]).
Notably, rhetoric such as that above was not only intended for mass consumption. Even as Soviet
officials recognized that contraband was caused by unsatisfied demand for goods at home and directed
production to satisfy that demand, a circular letter to all the Soviet trade representatives in Persia, marked
“absolutely secret,” stated that “our enemies, not only in the interests of material profit but often out of
political considerations as well, apply a maximum effort to the task of undermining our economy, direct to
us absolutely unnecessary goods and various rubbish (khlam) with the aim of pumping out foreign
currency and expensive export goods.” (Emphasis added, RGAE 5240/18/3204/71.) The perception that
some goods were unnecessary even if there was an obvious demand for them may have had its roots in the
concept of “Taylorism in Consumption,” in vogue during the Civil War, whose adherents advocated the
rationalization of consumption along “scientifically determined” lines. (Hessler, 62).
53
RGAE 5240/18/3204/45.
54
TsDAVO 337/1/2990/1.
14
smuggled goods had turned into a far-reaching campaign to transform the borderlands
into reliable bastions of Soviet power. 55
One might expect that state policy towards smuggling bore some resemblance to
state policy towards private trade, going from a “soft-” to a “hard-line” approach at the
end of the twenties. If up through 1927 taxation was the state’s main weapon in
controlling the Nepmen, in 1928-1930 it came increasingly to rely on “administrative
measures” that included levying arbitrary fines, closing businesses, and sometimes
arresting the owners. 56 Accordingly, one might hypothesize that this approach went hand
in hand with a decline in the delivery of consumer goods to the borderlands and a turn to
more stringent border controls together with more repressive measures as the primary
means of fighting smuggling; this might have resulted simply from a lack of consumer
goods as much as from a renewed militancy. Indeed, at the conclusion of the report by
the Commissariat of Trade to the STO on the increase in the number of shops and the
delivery of deficit goods in the border regions of the entire USSR during 1927/1928,
Maksimov, then vice-Comissar of Trade, stated “Thus, for the time being, the systematic
struggle against contraband via the intensified delivery of manufactures does not, in light
of objective conditions, appear possible, and the sporadic increase of deliveries to the
border districts cannot yield positive results. This obliges us to completely rely on noneconomic [i.e., police] measures in the struggle with contraband, as the most effective in
the given circumstances.” 57 Yet in spite of such concerns, the policy of increased
delivery of goods to the borderlands seems to have held into the 1930s. Thus, in 1931, the
per-capita delivery of major types of consumer goods into the border districts of Ukraine
was more than double that in other parts of the republic.58 The smugglers of the 1920s
had unwittingly prevailed on the Soviet government to meet the borderland inhabitants’
demand for smuggled goods.
55
The many other dimensions of this policy, including investment in education, health care, infrastructure
and the border control apparatus, as well as the deportations of social and ethnic groups deemed unreliable,
will be addressed in the dissertation. On the evolution of Soviet policy towards the borderlands, see Terry
Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001). 312-316.
56
Ball, 73.
57
RGAE 5240/18/3204/58-60. It is of course possible that Narkomtorg officials may have simply been
trying to offload a larger share of the responsibility for combating contraband onto the OGPU.
58
TsDAGO 1/20/4309/25+ob.
15