Smuggler States: Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Contraband Trade Across the Soviet Frontier, 1919–1924

Abstract

What happens to an imperial economy after empire? How do economics, security, and ideology interact at the new frontiers? Who governs the border? The eastern borders of Poland, Latvia, and Estonia comprised much of the interwar Soviet state’s western frontier—the focus of Moscow’s revolutionary aspirations and security concerns. These young nations paid for their independencewith the loss of the Imperial Russian market. Lodz, the “Polish Manchester,” had fashioned its textiles for Russian and Ukrainian consumers; Riga had been the empire’s busiest commercial port; Tallinn had been one of the busiest—and Russians drank nine-tenths of the potato vodka distilled on Estonian estates. Eager to reclaim their traditional market, but stymied by the Soviet state monopoly on foreign trade and impatient with the slow grind of trade talks, these countries’ businessmen turned to the porous Soviet frontier. The dissertation reveals how, despite considerable misgivings, their governments actively abetted this traffic. The Polish and Baltic struggles to balance the heady profits of the “border trade” against a host of security concerns, the dissertation argues, profoundly shaped state policies and everyday lives on both sides of the Soviet frontier. My dissertation forms a first book, the initial part of a larger study of contraband trade across the early Soviet borders. A planned second bookwill focus on how smuggling and the struggle against it both reflected and shaped the Soviet experience, from the frontier to Moscow. However, the dissertation looks at the Soviet frontier from the other side. It uncovers how contraband trade was seen and managed from Warsaw, Riga, and Tallinn; supplied from Lodz and the American South; financed from London and Antwerp; and administered and practiced from the towns and shtetls lining the western side of the Soviet frontier. The payoffs for taking this distant detour fromMoscow are bothmethodological and substantive.