Soviet Legacies in Russian (B)order-Making and (B)order-Crossing

Abstract

This article explores discourses and practices that have shaped border regimes in different times at Russia’s western frontier, focusing on the interplay between state power, border management, and individual lives. Using a “comparative temporalities” approach, it analyses border control processes in the early Soviet period, during the Cold War, and during the Russian war on Ukraine. It assumes that current Russian border policy has visible parallels with systems dating back to 1920s Soviet border policy and to the Cold War (the adoption of police-style management of transborder mobility). It posits that the comparative temporalities approach reveals an alternation between ‘fluid’, ‘semi-transparent’ Russian borders and more impenetrable barriers. Stricter exit border controls are usually reintroduced after periods of border liberalization and laxity related to regime change, e.g., after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and after the demise of the USSR in 1991. Initially, increasingly authoritarian and repressive control of citizens’ mobility was accompanied by confusion and an increasingly arbitrary application of new, ‘politicized’ markers as local border authorities strove to implement new restrictions under increased state pressure. Then, borders were once again hardened and placed under stricter control. This intensified repression and helped create zones of instability at the borders.