2023 Theses Doctoral

Revolutionary Frontiers: British and Soviet Missions and the Making of National Borders in the Russian Civil War

Coggeshall, Sam

This dissertation examines the construction of new national borders in the former Russian Empire after the First World War, between Soviet and British imperial intervention. This forgotten process of border-making had enormous consequences for the shape of the Soviet Union and the 20th-century international order.

Through an interdisciplinary approach combining diplomatic, intellectual, military, and material histories, incorporating government documents, memoirs, and personal papers, this work puts the formation of the Soviet Union in international context and connects it with the on-the-ground development of new ideas about the nation-state. The contingent decisions and everyday practices of local Soviet and British officials drew borders around national territories and imagined national spaces in ways that still shape Eastern Europe and Eurasia 100 years later.