Combating smuggling in post-revolutionary Russia: strategies, specificities and enduring legacies

By approaching ‘smuggling’ both as an operational category of mobility control and as an analytical lens, this article contributes to the existing historiography on the administration of crossborder mobility in the aftermath of the collapse of the Russian Empire. It examines how various Soviet agencies interpreted conditions along the borders, assessed the outcomes of their ‘struggle against smuggling’ in the 1920s and managed contraband in practice. The article argues that the Soviet state’s approach to smuggling was profoundly contradictory, with these contradictions stemming in part from the regime’s politically transformative pathos. Situating the analysis within several comparative contexts, the study further identifies the key features of what may be termed Russian ‘smuggling authoritarianism’ in its formative phase as a part of the so-called ‘Eastern border controls’ regime. Its defining characteristics include a distinctive discursive and bureaucratic culture imbued with political universalism in diversity management and a tendency towards the production of the ‘performative illusion’ of effectiveness; the application of double standards in the treatment of smuggling; and the leading role of the Soviet political police in the instrumentalization of contraband for regime objectives. The politically and ideologically transformative effects of these practices became intertwined with the systemic, long-term criminalization of governance in the sphere of economic border control. The early Soviet state’s entanglement with smuggling left enduring legacies, reflecting a cyclical pattern in Russian border governance shaped by recurring waves of political authoritarianism.