Imperial Legacy, Proletarian State and Statelessness: Conflict and Entanglement of Soviet and Anti-Bolshevik Emigrant International Law Discourses 1918 – 1939

• Applicant: Tatiana Khripachenko, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561121767

The project aims to consider dialogue, clash and entanglement between anti-Bolshevik emigrant and Soviet scholarly discourses of international law. It seeks to demonstrate, that despite political and ideological differences these discourses were based on common notions and were used to describe common issues. Such an entanglement was partially the result of a common pre-revolutionary intellectual heritage and the fact that emigrant and Soviet scholars were educated at the same universities and had the same teachers. At the same time, the main factor, informing the difference of the two scholarly discourses was that the Soviet international law scholarship gradually gained “its own” state, whereas the emigrant one, by contrast, was losing it. After the collapse of the Russian empire and subsequent recognition of the Soviet Union, emigrant international lawyers found themselves in the position of stateless refugees. This led them towards universalism and abandoning their former pursuit of the interests of great powers, including Russia. In the capacity of legal experts, they sought to assure the international protection of the status of refugees and minorities through the international law organizations and above all the League of Nations. By contrast the Soviet international lawyers initially professed the ideas of world revolution and “withering away” of states and international law. Yet gradually they turned to pursue integration of the Soviet state into the international community and borrowed the ideas from pre-revolutionary imperial scholarship of international law. They also sought to cooperate with the League of Nations. The research will be focused on three case studies, which will in various ways explore the interaction of the two discourses as it reflected both common imperial heritage and “state-building” vs. “statelessness” difference. These cases are: 1) the struggle for international recognition between the Soviet and anti-Bolshevik governments; 2) imperial and post-imperial visions of international law in both scholarly discourses; 3) political and juridical clash over the new practice of Soviet citizenship and the legal status of Russian refugees abroad.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position