Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia

On March 28, 2016, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU welcomed Alfred J. Rieber from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest for a lecture on “Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia." The talk was followed with comments by Stephen Kotkin from Princeton University.

This event summarized the main theses of Rieber’s recently published book, Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia. Conceived as a sequel to his previous work, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands, it radically shifts the focus away from a comparison of five multi-cultural, dynastic, conquest empires (Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman, Safavid-Qajar and Qing) competing for hegemony in Eurasia to the Soviet Union, the central player in the renewal of that contest in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the issues remain the same, but the cast of characters has changed. The Soviet Union was heir to much of the territory of the Russian Empire and many of its problems both foreign and domestic flowed from that hard won inheritance. But its response was radically different. Its new leaders were engaged in transforming its foreign policy as part of re-building of a multi-national state. From the outset they were obliged to enter into complex and often contradictory relations with a ring of smaller and weaker successor states, constituting the new borderlands, which had replaced the rival empires all along their frontiers. In many cases these borderland states were allies or clients of the major powers and perceived by the Soviet government as hostile or threatening.

Rieber proposed a study of how the Soviet leaders, and primarily Stalin, sought to combine the twin processes of transforming the state and its relations with the external world within the context of a renewed struggle over the borderlands. In constructing a new foreign policy, the leadership of the Soviet state and Communist Party faced in more aggravated form a set of persistent factors with which their predecessors had grappled, constituting a dynamic interplay among geography, demography and culture in the long term process of state building in Eurasia. In particular, Stalin responded to the challenges posed by the persistent factors in Russian foreign policy as a Marxist revolutionary of the borderlands. Rieber argued that Stalin’s Weltanschauung was shaped by two powerful existential and intellectual influences, his early life experiences growing up in the Georgian cultural milieu and his evolution as a professional Marxist revolutionary.

Link to written event recap: http://jordanrussiacenter.org/event-recaps/alfred-j-rieber-approaches-soviet-history-through-stalin-and-the-nationality-question/#.WYIl6tPytOE

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