Andrey Shlyakhter

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 Ph.D. in December 2020 from the Department of History of the University of Chicago with the comparative 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 was a finalist for the 2022 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. The dissertation informs his postdoctoral book project, Smuggled Goods, Soviet Borders: Contraband Trade and the Soviet Struggle Against It, 1917-1930. His article “Backs to the USSR: Explaining the Genesis, Growth, and Geography of the Soviet Border Guard, 1918-1939” is under peer review at the Journal of Modern History. Dr. Shlyakhter has held fellowships at Tel Aviv University, the Kennan Institute (twice), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; his scholarship has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program of the U.S. Department of State, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Business History Conference, and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

As the 2024-25 Petro Jacyk Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Shlyakhter will complete two projects. The first, “The 1926 Soviet Campaign Against Contraband: Causes, Course, and Consequences,” is a journal article (and book chapter) that uncovers the origins of a singular feature of the Soviet economy: an inconvertible currency. The effective ending of the ruble’s convertibility in 1926 constitutes one of the least understood and most consequential developments in Soviet history. Drawing on declassified documents from the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the article situates this policy in the Soviet struggle with smuggling, which reached its apogee in the 1926 campaign against contraband trade. While initially resisted by the Kremlin, the divorce of the Soviet financial system from the outside world would free Stalin to pursue an inflationary policy of forced-pace industrialization. It would also encourage the export of foodstuffs amid famine.

The second project, "Borderness and Famine: Why did More People Survive the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine's Western Border Districts?" is a journal article that seeks to answer this question, and to consider the implications for our understanding of the famine and of Soviet history more broadly. Drawing on archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, as well as witness testimonies and GIS mapping, this article reveals how the Kremlin’s security and propaganda concerns led Soviet authorities to reduce the border districts’ grain procurement quotas and to prioritize them in the distribution of food aid. Combined with the smuggling of foodstuffs from Poland, such privileging led to dramatically higher survival rates among the inhabitants of Ukraine’s “border belt” – a specially-privileged and specially-policed band of territory running along the Soviet perimeter from Finland to the Far East. These findings shed new light on the role of the Kremlin and the political police, as well as republic-level, regional, and local authorities in the Holodomor; popular survival strategies and their effect on policy; the impact of foreign threat and foreign public relations; and the making of Soviet space.