Friendship under lock and key: the Soviet Central Asian border, 1918–34

Abstract

This paper addresses early Soviet efforts to secure ‘under lock and key’ its over-5000-km-long Central Asian border with Iran, Afghanistan and Xinjiang. The state sought to build relations of trust and friendship between border dwellers and guards – the pogranichnye voiska – to increase security and to demonstrate the emancipatory nature of the Soviet Union. However, these goals were compromised by the region's geographic extremity, basmachi raids and existing flows of people, goods and flocks across the state border. As a result, the early state pursued a contradictory set of policies in order to discourage indiscriminate crossings and to project an image of friendship – however limited in practice – across the border. Secret police circulars and reports from the Communist Party's Central Asian bureau testify to the difficulty and contradictions of crafting friendship on the border in the Soviet Union's first two decades.

Keywords:

• border troops
• Soviet Central Asian border
• Soviet–Afghan relations

Acknowledgements

I thank Madeleine Reeves, the anonymous reviewers, Yuri Slezkine, Robert Crews, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Elizabeth McGuire, Brandon Schechter, Andrew Kornbluth and Mirjam Voerkelius for their comments and encouragement in shaping this paper. The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES) at University of California, Berkeley, provided funding for my research in Dushanbe. Thanks also to Curran and Khurshed for their company and planning on the border.

Notes

Pogranichnik, No. 24, 1940, p. 40.

The pursuit of trust and friendship was both a strategy of state building and nation building, because on the Soviet border, the two goals were inseparable. The OGPU believed that in order to assist the border guards in their efforts against contraband and border violations – that is, to increase state capacity – the local population needed to participate in or buy into the Soviet project – that is, recognize itself as part of a new Soviet nation and that of their own new national republic. Thus an increase in state capacity was impossible without a sense of a new, broader, national identity. This is analogous to the process of ‘double assimilation’ that Francine Hirsch describes in Central Asian nation making, a process in which local actors were to identify with the larger Soviet project by identifying first with their local titular nationality. In this case they were also asked to become helpers or assistants in state capacity, and in so doing increase their loyalty, trust and friendship, all in order to identify themselves as Soviets; see Hirsch (2005, p. 14).

‘Granitsa na zamok’ was already a prominent OGPU border slogan at the first Party conference of the OGPU's border force, Ukrainian okrug, from 22–29 August 1923, chaired by Feliks Dzerzhinskii. RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii), f.76, op. 3, delo 309, pp. 1–17.

Although Red Army detachments and customs officials also patrolled the borders, neither achieved the cultural prominence of the pogranichniki because they were often not trained specifically for border patrols, were less likely to be Party members, and thus did not have the same burden of ideological transformation of local peasants.

See these authors' contributions in Dobrenko and Naiman (2003). Quotes from Dobrenko, ‘The art of social navigation’, (p. 186) and the editors' introduction, (p. viii).

For more on the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet nationalities policy, see Hirsch et al. (1994).

See Massell (1974), Michaels (2003), Edgar (2004), Northrop (2004), and Kamp (2006). Edgar's attention to the border is the notable exception.

See Sahlins (1989). The expression ‘acting out’ comes from a conversation with the author.

RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 309, li. 1–17, 17.

Pogranichnyie Voiska SSSR (henceforth PV), 1918–1928, Doc. 146.

PV, 1918–1928, 8.

RGASPI, f. 62, d. 67, li. 12–15.

RGASPI, f. 62, d. 67, li. 12–15.

For useful summaries of the basmachi movement see Khalid (2007, pp. 54–55) and Haugen (2003).

For detailed accounts of the basmachi endgame, consult Ritter (1985, 1990).

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 453, 15 April 1925; Doc. 454, 12 May 1925. The families are identified as Gazimalekin, Iavan and Karliuk Tajiks, and being from the Isan Khodzha clan. For a detailed study on population transfers in Tajikistan, see Botagoz Kassymbekova's article from this volume, ‘Humans as territory: forced resettlement and the making of Soviet Tajikistan, 1920–1938’.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 453, 15 April 1925; Doc. 454, 12 May 1925. The OGPU reports erroneously use the Turkic term aksakal, to describe all Central Asian village elders, even in Tajik-speaking Eastern Bukhara.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 455, 23 May 1925; Doc. 461, June 1925.

It would be illustrative to know the fate of these former basmachi leaders during periods of greater state strength, such as collectivization or the purges. It is more than likely they were among the emigrants or were the first to be arrested as wreckers.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 453, 15 April 1925; Doc. 454, 12 May 1925.

PV, 1918–1928, Docs 442, 445, 455, 457.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 448, 31 January 1925.

PV, 1929–1938, Doc. 156, 19 July 1931.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 383, 13 October 1921.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 1346, li. 9, 23.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 1346, li. 14.

All citations for this episode from RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 1346, li. 11, 21, 28.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 1346, li. 19.

The general number is from Edgar (2004, pp. 214, 217). The estimate on Russian emigration is from RGASPI f. 62, op. 2, d. 131, li. 35.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 2740, li. 44.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d., 3134, li. 23. Unfortunately this and other reports do not give accounts as to the fate of those seized on the border.

Pers. comm. with Vera Vesela, Institute of International Relations, 19 August 2010.

The study found that black karakul sheep fetched 10 roubles in the Turkmen SSR but 22 in Afghanistan. Therefore household incomes were 92% higher; see Edgar (2004, p. 216).

See Edgar (2004, p. 218). Similar border terms were offered in Tajikistan. See for example, RGASPI f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 16–23.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 24.

A road-side inn favoured by trading caravans, found throughout Central Asia.

A Turkic word for village, used in error here by Soviet officials to describe settlements in the Tajik-speaking countryside, where ‘qishlok’ was the common word for village.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 119–127.

PV, 1929–1938, Docs. 267, 268, 745.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 479, 10 December 1925.

Personal correspondence with scholar Vera Vesela, Institute of International Relations, 19 August 2010.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 494, Apr. 1926. The author indicated that 20% of the population smoked opium, which produced a 15-ruble per pound profit in Tashkent over its price in Persia.

PV, 1918–1928, Doc. 517, 3. November 1927

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 2740, li. 2.

PV, 1929–1938, 17–18.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 119.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 128–138.

PV, 1929–1938, Doc. 223, September 1936.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 13–15.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 128–138.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 2740, li. 1–11. By 1931 the 389 km-long Kazakh portion of the border was not included in the Southern Central Asian border, thus making a comparison of troop density more telling than troop numbers. In 1930 there were 378 armed conflicts (294 successfully resolved), 36 Soviet deaths and 55 wounded, 624 ‘enemy’ deaths and 99 wounded, 9608 ‘border violators’ captured. Compare with 1931: 693 armed conflicts (552 successes), 123 Soviet deaths and 86 injured, 1328 ‘enemy’ deaths and 219 injured, 15,269 ‘border violators’ detained. Unfortunately the meaning of these labels is not explained further.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 16.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 17.

Ibid.

RGASPI, f.62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 16–23. For a similar example of the general breakdown of Party work and emigration on the Turkmen border, see RGASPI, f. 62, d. 2740, li. 24–26.

RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3037, li. 2–6.

Whereas ‘speaking Bolshevik’ often entailed using new words to describe old phenomena, it often entailed using new words to describe the fictive or the ideologically imminent. However, among former basmachi fighters, ‘enemies’ really might be ‘enemies’. For more on ‘speaking Bolshevik’, see chapter 5 in Kotkin (1995).

PV, 1929–1938, Doc. 250, October 22, 1938 and Pravda, 1 April 1939.

Or ‘sviashchennye’ and ‘neprikosnovennye’, as described in the introductory article of the first issue, Pogranichnik, No. 1, 1939, p. 56.

Pogranichnik, No. 24, 1940, p. 40.