This dissertation examines the socioeconomic transformation of the middle and lower Amur River Basin in the first half of the 20th century. Through the lenses of social, spatial, and biographical history, this project addresses the following questions: how the Amur River Basin, once a coherent geographic unit, was socioeconomically carved up along national lines; and how the left bank of the middle Amur River became an inward-looking Soviet borderland that resembled many other Soviet heartlands. I discuss this process, by which the Amur River became a hardened, highly politicized international border, through reconstructing biographies of five middle Amur River-centered, interconnected social and economic institutions: an inland shipping company, a cohort of hydrological scientists and engineers, a trans-border brewery, the local establishment of the Soviet customs service, and the state agency for social welfare. This dissertation reveals that the history of everyday socioeconomic institutions was central to understanding the Soviet state and local communities’ participation in distinctively transforming the built environment, the mode of logistics, supply chains, and consequently the human-environment relationship of the left bank in the name of realizing local and All-Union economic self-sufficiency. Underlying the state-led pursuit of socioeconomic self-sufficiency is the Soviet Union’s fascination with legibility in statecraft and socioeconomic reorientation, substantiating the socialist regime’s very modern nature.
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