Upcoming Event: Andrey Shlyakhter, "Jew, Tailor, Smuggler, Spy: How Transnational Jewish Networks Needled Holes in the Soviet Frontier—and Helped Stitch it Shut"
Abstract: Whether condemned or celebrated, the relationship between Jews, capital, and borders has often been framed as follows: the first help the second erode the third. However, my research on contraband trade across the Soviet frontier in the 1920s uncovers a more complex dialectic. Jews benefited from an imperfectly functional border: porous, but present. In turn, their ability to leverage the border catalyzed its reinforcement rather than its erosion. On the one hand, Jews on both sides of the new border rendered its restrictions into a resource: contraband trade (primarily in sartorial items) turned local peddlers and draymen into international merchants, and backwater shtetls into bustling entrepôts. My research reveals how prewar Jewish relationships facilitated extraordinarily elaborate, trust-based transactions. Moreover, it uncovers the transatlantic Jewish networks that nurtured this traffic through the millions of US dollars sent to the former Pale by relatives and friends in the New World (especially New York needleworkers). At the same time, my findings show how contraband trade prompted Soviet authorities –including political police officials who hailed from the same shtetls –to securitize the frontier. Meanwhile, the centrality of Jews to contraband trade exposed Jewson both sides of the border to charges of corruption, disloyalty, and even espionage, fueling the fires of future persecutions.
Andrey Shlyakhter received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2020 with the dissertation "Smuggler States: Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Contraband Trade Across the Soviet Frontier, 1919-1924." He is currently the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellow in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he is working on his first book, Smuggling Across the Soviet Borders: Contraband Trades, Soviet Solutions, and the Shadow Economic Origins of the Iron Curtain, 1917-1932.