SUMMARY:

Oksana Ermolaeva’s article discusses the creation of the Soviet-Finnish border during the first postrevolutionary decade as well as sociopolitical processes in the Soviet borderland. All forms of social interaction in the zone adjacent to the Soviet-Finnish border – population mobility, economic transactions, cross-cultural influences – are regarded as markers of domestic processes of early Soviet state-building. In the article, the concept of the border is used simultaneously as a mirror reflecting the emerging Soviet state and as a magnifying glass helping to better discern some aspects of this process. Until the late 1920s, the borderline remained not simply “porous” or “traversable,” but “situational.” Illegal cross-border traffic was caused by the new state border cutting through established economic ties and even more so by the flight of numerous borderland residents to Finland in the wake of the Civil War. Some of the refugees returned to the USSR under the terms of an amnesty that threatened to confiscate the land and property of those who stayed abroad. Families split up, delegating some of their members to return to the Soviet side to claim the family property. The separated families and whole borderland communities could sustain communication only through illegal transborder contacts. As locals, they knew how and where to cross the border while managing to avoid the border guards. Professional contrabandists, political activists, and spies relied on this local knowledge, and thus contributed to illegal transborder traffic.