Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Urbansky S�ren (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 578 between economic growth and levels of democratization (p. 508). This is a welcome addition to the teaching resources available for Russian and Eurasian history which deserves to be widely used. New College, Oxford Alexander Morrison Urbansky, Sören. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2020. xiii + 367 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95; £34.00. Focusing on the 70,000-km2 -wide Argun River basin that once united western Manchuria with Transbaikalia in Siberia, Sören Urbansky’s borderland history compellingly shows that the territory, cut in two by the international border since the early eighteenth century, needs to be studied as an entangled unit of analysis. The book is both a transnational and regional history, covering a long period spanning from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Its main narrative is the longue durée trajectory of the studied region from ‘an open interimperial frontier into a division of bordered lands’ (p. 2). Today, the state boundary separates provinces that are largely monolingual, with solid Russian and Han Chinese demographic majorities. Prior to the twentieth century, the cross-border region’s much smaller population was instead a cultural, religious and linguistic kaleidoscope of Cossacks, Russian Old Believers, Manchu bannermen, Buriat Mongols, Tungus and Solons. Despite the fact that the Russian archives are currently much more easily accessible than those in China, Urbansky’s command of both Russian- and Chinese-language archival and oral history sources allows him to provide a balanced and nuanced analysis of the two halves of the borderland. His shrewdly crafted and space-centred history manages to reconcile ‘empirecentered narratives with indigenous and local notions of territoriality [by embedding] the micro-history within the macro-history’ (p. 271), and by emphasizing the interplay between state agents and the autonomous agency of the borderlanders. The latter at times prompted and at times hindered the state-driven border-making processes. For long periods, zonal and lineal notions of the border coexisted, as the region was simultaneously a remote and sparsely populated ‘frontier’ and a delimited ‘borderland’ shaped by the increasing ability of imperial centres to project their power to the periphery. Modern transport infrastructures were powerful tools that connected entangled borderlands with the heartlands of the empires that shared them. The Chinese Eastern Railway, built in 1903 by REVIEWS 579 the Russians, increased the cross-border human and economic traffic and concentrated much of it on its axis. One of the book’s narrative threads follows the two railroad settlements of Zabaikalsk (previously known as Otpor) on the Russian side and of Manzhouli on the Manchurian side, from their humble beginnings as frontier settlements to their propaganda function as gateways into enemy territory following the Sino-Soviet split. The railroad made settler colonization easier for both empires. The Mongol nobleman Zorigt Baatar E. Tokhtogo (1863–1912), who violently opposed increased Han settler colonization on nomad lands and was used by the tsarist empire as a resource in inter-imperial competition, embodied ‘the type of “detachable men” that were caught between two competing empires both regarding him as their subject’ (p. 100). Rebels did make use of the border, but it was nomads, smugglers, gold diggers and marmot hunters who were the everyday border crossers. Urbansky sketches the activities of some of these actors, as well as the stories of refugees from increasingly aggressive state-building policies, especially after the onset of Stalinism. Themoretheborder‘thickened’,themoreitbecamenecessaryforindividuals to be linked to state institutions such as consulates or customs in order to smuggle goods successfully. The parallel border militarization in the USSR and Manchukuo during the 1930s, together with the demographic restructuring brought about by forced population movements, was a historical watershed that put an end to open borderlands. The elimination of ‘a cross-boundary “border culture”’ (p. 274) had a lasting legacy. When, during the 1950s, the border separated the two closely allied Communist regimes in China and the USSR, cross-border interactions among the borderlanders remained minimal. The state boundary had been firmly built not only on the...