Frontiers of (Counter)Revolution: Bulgaria's Black Sea Borders and Their Management in the Interwar Period

• In Event: Contested Legacies of Post-Ottoman Liberation in the Balkans

Abstract

In the early 1920s, the Black Sea became a porous border between the Balkan nation-states, the Soviet Union, and the Ottoman Empire. Various legal and illegal channels emerged between the seacoasts, bringing into contact Soviet agents, White Russian émigrés, Bulgarian state actors, as well as international humanitarian and diplomatic officials. Focusing on the Bulgarian side, this paper explores how its port cities became contested spaces for political influence. The paper will show that the Balkans functioned as an extended war front caught between entangled imperial collapses, the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, and parallel refugee crises.

Author

• Charis Marantzidou, Columbia U