Hidden Connections, Unintended Consequences: American Jews, Contraband Trades, and Soviet Borders in the 1920s
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture
The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship Admission: Free |
On a cold early spring night in 1926, one Gerchik Botvinnik was apprehended by Soviet border guards while riding in his horse-drawn cart along a Belorussian country road. Among the wads of bills that the soldiers found stuffed in his pockets were some 405 US dollars (approximately $6,000 today). An investigation determined that Botvinnik obtained the dollars earlier that night by selling saccharin that had been smuggled in from nearby Poland. Botvinnik’s case was one of hundreds of thousands of seizures of contraband effected by Soviet authorities in the 1920s in a far-reaching struggle against smuggling. But the US banknotes that financed his operations were some of the millions of dollars that American Jews sent to their Soviet brethren with the Soviet government’s own encouragement.
The mixing of these two flows—the legal transatlantic remittances and the cross-border contraband—in Botvinnik’s pockets was no accident, and no exception. Drawing on original archival research in Europe and the United States, Andrey Shlyakhter uncovers the role that American Jews played, both wittingly and unwittingly, in the contraband trade that flourished across the Soviet borders. Linking philanthropists, bankers, union organizers, seamstresses, and furriers in New York and Chicago with politicians, merchants, trappers, smugglers, and everyday consumers in the Soviet Union and its neighbors, this is a history of hidden connections and unintended consequences.
About the Speaker
Dr. Andrey Shlyakhter is an international historian of the Soviet Union and its neighbors. His research explores the interaction of economics, security, and ideology at state frontiers. Dr. Shlyakhter received his PhD from the University of Chicago in December 2020 with the dissertation “Smuggler States: Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Contraband Trade Across the Soviet Frontier, 1919-1924,” which was honored with a 2021 Ab Imperio Annual Award and is a finalist for the 2022 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Since taking his degree, Dr. Shlyakhter has been a Jacyk Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto; a Title VIII Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center; the 2021 Fisher Fellow at the Virtual Summer Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and most recently, the 2021-2022 Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellow in Eastern European Jewish Studies at YIVO, where he conducted archival research for his postdoctoral book project, Smuggling Across the Soviet Borders: Contraband Trades, Soviet Solutions, and the Shadow Economic Origins of the Iron Curtain, 1917-1932.