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Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union
Borders in Red
shows how Lenin and his Bolshevik leadership embraced the nationality question as a way of managing diversity and institutionalized it as a means of governance. Stephan Rindlisbacher uses the making of national borders as a lens through which to examine the Bolsheviks' fundamental shift from proletarian internationalism to ethnonational federalism sui generis. Comparing how party and state managed issues of national diversity in the core regions of Soviet federalism—Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia—Rindlisbacher provides insights into their policymaking and into the roots of current territorial conflicts.
President Putin has condemned Lenin's nationality policy to be a historical mistake, and with its war against Ukraine, Russia has tried to revise borders that date back to the early days of the Soviet state. However, Borders in Red shows that the Soviet Republics were not arbitrarily divided by leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev. They were the result of long-lasting debates involving politicians, experts, and people from the border regions. The developing Soviet order was a product of trial and error.
President Putin has condemned Lenin's nationality policy to be a historical mistake, and with its war against Ukraine, Russia has tried to revise borders that date back to the early days of the Soviet state. However, Borders in Red shows that the Soviet Republics were not arbitrarily divided by leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev. They were the result of long-lasting debates involving politicians, experts, and people from the border regions. The developing Soviet order was a product of trial and error.
294 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 2025
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April 17, 2026
Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union elucidates how Lenin and the Bolsheviks addressed the question of national self-determination within the former Russian Empire, creating conditions that later contributed to the dissolution of the USSR and ongoing disputes over borders and nationality. Stephan Rindlisbacher, a historian of Eastern Europe, draws on archival sources from across the former Soviet Union to show how the Bolsheviks embraced the nationality question as a means of legitimizing their rule in imperial borderlands and winning support among non-Russian populations after the Tsarist empire’s collapse. At the same time, he highlights the inherent contradictions of this system—contradictions later criticized by Vladimir Putin as “worse than a mistake” in his justification for the invasion of Ukraine—which became especially visible after 1991.
Rindlisbacher outlines competing visions of governance in the early Soviet 1920s. Some officials, particularly within Gosplan, advocated raionirovanie (regionalization): a technocratic, administrative-territorial approach that deemphasized ethnicity in favor of economically functional regions designed to facilitate efficient planning. This vision stood in tension with a competing model centered on ethnonational territories and the principle of self-determination. Rindlisbacher argues that Lenin was more closely associated with the latter, in part because raionirovanie proved less effective as a tool for political mobilization. Lenin’s relative permissiveness toward self-determination, and his tendency to downplay the importance of precisely “where a state border runs,” reflected a broader belief that territorial distinctions would diminish within a future “union of workers” grounded in a universalist proletarian ideology.
As Rindlisbacher demonstrates, this Leninist framework generated persistent tensions. National-territorial units often produced economically irrational borders and consolidated ethnonational divisions rather than dissolving them. Subsequent efforts—particularly under Stalin—to subordinate nationality concerns to administrative rationalization and industrialization did not fully resolve these contradictions. Rindlisbacher illustrates these dynamics through case studies, including border disputes between the Russian and early Ukrainian Soviet republics in the 1920s, many of which correspond to present-day conflict zones. He also revisits the status of Crimea, arguing that its 1954 transfer to Ukraine was less an arbitrary “gift” than a response to economic imperatives, particularly the need for integrated water and infrastructure systems tied to the Dnieper. Similar inconsistencies are evident in the complex border-making processes in Central Asia.
Across these examples, Rindlisbacher situates contemporary post-Soviet conflicts within the institutional and ideological logic of the Leninist nationality project. While this framework succeeded in mobilizing support and stabilizing early Soviet rule, it also embedded structural tensions that later contributed to the fragmentation of the Soviet state.
Rindlisbacher outlines competing visions of governance in the early Soviet 1920s. Some officials, particularly within Gosplan, advocated raionirovanie (regionalization): a technocratic, administrative-territorial approach that deemphasized ethnicity in favor of economically functional regions designed to facilitate efficient planning. This vision stood in tension with a competing model centered on ethnonational territories and the principle of self-determination. Rindlisbacher argues that Lenin was more closely associated with the latter, in part because raionirovanie proved less effective as a tool for political mobilization. Lenin’s relative permissiveness toward self-determination, and his tendency to downplay the importance of precisely “where a state border runs,” reflected a broader belief that territorial distinctions would diminish within a future “union of workers” grounded in a universalist proletarian ideology.
As Rindlisbacher demonstrates, this Leninist framework generated persistent tensions. National-territorial units often produced economically irrational borders and consolidated ethnonational divisions rather than dissolving them. Subsequent efforts—particularly under Stalin—to subordinate nationality concerns to administrative rationalization and industrialization did not fully resolve these contradictions. Rindlisbacher illustrates these dynamics through case studies, including border disputes between the Russian and early Ukrainian Soviet republics in the 1920s, many of which correspond to present-day conflict zones. He also revisits the status of Crimea, arguing that its 1954 transfer to Ukraine was less an arbitrary “gift” than a response to economic imperatives, particularly the need for integrated water and infrastructure systems tied to the Dnieper. Similar inconsistencies are evident in the complex border-making processes in Central Asia.
Across these examples, Rindlisbacher situates contemporary post-Soviet conflicts within the institutional and ideological logic of the Leninist nationality project. While this framework succeeded in mobilizing support and stabilizing early Soviet rule, it also embedded structural tensions that later contributed to the fragmentation of the Soviet state.
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