Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia by Alfred J. Rieber (review)

Alfred J. Rieber’s most recent contribution to the study of the geopolitics of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union focuses on the personality and political views of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. The book begins with Stalin’s background in a chapter titled “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” a new iteration of Rieber’s widely praised and much-quoted article in The American Historical Review (December 2001) under the same title. The book concludes with the end of the Second World War and beginning of the peace. Yet this is not a biography of Stalin by any means. Rieber is too interested in the larger structural and cultural functions of geography for that. More than anything, it is a book about how the Soviet Union met and reacted to the challenges of maintaining and building its power as the pivotal center (à la Sir Halford Mackinder) of the Eurasian heartland. Stalin here is a Bolshevik Mackinder, attuned to the crucial importance of the mixed populations of the borderlands from the experiences of his youth in the Caucasus and aware of the difficulty of maintaining imperial control in the face of potential dangers from across the borders and from rival empires. Stalin grasped all of this while attempting to consolidate the military and political influence of the Soviet state. Rieber’s special contribution is his ability—rare among historians of the Soviet Union—to write with equal authority about Moscow’s challenges in East Asia and Central Asia, Europe (West, as well as East), and the Caucasus. Some of the most interesting sections early in the book are those that explore Stalin’s complex goals and actions in Mongolia, Tuva, and Manchuria in the 1930s.

Stalin’s “borderland thesis,” central to Rieber’s conception, was a mixture of class and national analysis, of proletarian internationalism and ethnic particularism. For Stalin, the class analysis came first, meaning, for example, that the right of self-determination meant “the right of a nation to run its own internal affairs on the basis of autonomy within a federal structure.” It did not mean the right, as Lenin advocated, “to a separate state existence” (p. 40). Rieber notes that Stalin’s background in the multinational Caucasus, the “shatterzone” of ethnicities, rendered platforms of self-determination not only unworkable but deleterious to the building of a class-based party. Stalin’s ideas on this score became the foundation of his doctrine of “socialism in one country” and his policies of “territorializing the revolution” (p. 150). The first applications of the borderland thesis came during the Russian Civil War, Stalin’s “higher education in foreign policy,” when the Bolsheviks dealt with issues of separatism in Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Muslim borderlands, and inner Asia (p. 43).

Crucial to the evolving meaning of the borderland thesis for Stalin was what he perceived as the simultaneous failure of indigenization and the weaknesses of collectivization in Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These problems were seen not just as domestic issues but as part and parcel of Polish ambitions to seize Ukrainian territory from the Soviet Union. The Piedmont principle, which the Soviets had hoped to use to attract nationalities outside the USSR, was applied not just by the Poles to destabilize the Ukraine in the 1930s but by the Japanese and Germans “to exercise a centrifugal pull on the Soviet borderlands” (p. 121). As a result, in the 1930s Stalin became increasingly involved both in the making of foreign policy and in the managing of relations with Communist parties in the borderlands.

Stalin’s policies during the Spanish Civil War, the conflict with Japan at Khalkhin Gol, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, and the wartime Grand Alliance itself were consistent, in Rieber’s view, with the borderlands thesis. “Subjugating and integrating the borderlands was for him the best guarantee of state security” (p. 200). In this connection, Rieber has very interesting things to say about the contrasting goals of the...