Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Sören Urbansky

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Sören Urbansky Camille Neufville (bio) Sören Urbansky, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 367 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-691-18168-4. Sören Urbansky's book reconstructs the three-century-long history of the perpetually mobile Sino-Russian border, the longest land border between two of the biggest and most powerful multiethnic empires. Urbansky shows that it was never simply a boundary line, but an area that demarcated nomadic and sedentary populations, two powerful states, and later two national cultures. He speaks of the making and unmaking of the border, as, in his own words, "the evolution of the border dividing the two largest Eurasian empires entailed a gradual process of brokering: between diverse groups of the local borderland society, between the different political powers claiming sovereignty over the boundary and adjoining territories, and between political metropoles and peripheral borderland populations" (P. 2). To demonstrate how the borderland evolved, the author anchors his study in a particular place, the Argun River basin, which is divided today by the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and Mongolia. [End Page 238] This vantage point allows for a truly microhistorical approach to the subject. Urbansky pays tribute to the study of societies and spaces on both sides of the border within the longue durée, interested not only in the central governments' policies regarding the border but also in policies and concerns at the local level: "The present work thus examines how central authorities tried to establish control at the state boundary and in the frontier zone and borderland, how local people strove to subvert such efforts, and how, sometimes, they became agents of state powers themselves or fell victim to its abuses" (P. 3). In doing so, the book fills a certain historiographical void. In their studies, although Sarah C. M. Paine and Bruce Elleman have largely mapped the history of Russo-Chinese diplomatic relations and thus the process of establishing and adjusting their mutual border, the social and cultural history of border regions has remained virtually unwritten.1 Urbansky's well-informed and people-centered book fills this void. The ambition to re-create the voices of borderlanders – as much through a rich iconography as through the extensive use of private sources and oral history – creates a vivid picture of what life on the borderlands once was. Urbansky's command of both Russian and Chinese allows for the astute reading of archival sources from both sides of the border. His travels to local archives in Russia testify to his deep commitment to his inquiry as well as granting readers stunning and moving descriptions of local places and people.2 The lack of a parallel study in Chinese regional archives is the result of their growing inaccessibility due, partly, to the sensitiveness of subjects such as borderlands and ethnic minorities. Urbansky compensates for this disbalance by reading newspapers, interviewing borderlanders, and consulting railway passengers statistics. In the first chapter, Urbansky takes readers through a sweeping history of the two hundred years separating the first Sino-Russian treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR), in the 1890s. He delineates three phases in Sino-Russian relations up to the twentieth [End Page 239] century, starting with the first contacts, predominantly commercial and military, followed by the delimitation of a common border – from the end of the fifteenth to the first third of the eighteenth century. The second phase, which he characterizes as a "balance of powers," opens with the 1728 treaty of Kiakhta. Following the treaty, this border town became the center of a flourishing cross-border trade. The third phase began after the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. The Russian Empire joined European powers in forcing Qing China to submit to unfair treaties. This latest phase, seen from the borderland, was also one of brutal integration of frontier territories into provincial administrative systems in both the Russian and Qing empires. The first chapter also presents the heterogeneous frontier society that included...