Stalin and his enemies appeared to agree about one source of his identity as a political man. ‘I am not a European man’, he told a Japanese journalist, ‘but an Asian, a Russified Georgian.’ Trotsky cited Kamenev as expressing the views of the Central Committee in 1925: ‘You can expect anything from that Asiatic’, while Bukharin more pointedly referred to Stalin as the new Ghenghis Khan. Although they employed the term Asiatic to mean different things, their point of reference was the same. Stalin was born, raised, educated, and initiated as a revolutionary in a borderland of the Russian Empire that shared a common history and a long frontier with the Islamic Middle East. In this context, borderland refers to a territory on the periphery of the core Russian lands with its own distinctive history, strong regional traditions and variety of ethno-cultural identities. In a previous article, I sought to demonstrate how Stalin as a man of the borderlands constructed a social identity combining Georgian, proletarian, and Russian components in order to promote specific political ends including his vision of a centralised, multicultural Soviet state and society.