Gamsa , Mark Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 577 both soil and rock that had a negative temperature and was frozen continuously for at least two years. He called it ‘vechnaia merzlota’. The alternative systems approach was advanced by Sergei Parkhomenko. He explained frozen earth as a climate-induced geological process in which ice was central and he questioned Sumgin’s concept of ‘eternal’ (vechnaia) in the context of geological time. The struggle between the two was intellectual, personal and institutional. Sumgin’s conception prevailed at the time, because it met the Soviet regime’s need for an understanding relevant to engineers ‘conquering nature’ to build socialism and it resonated with Bolshevik political culture. In the adult stage, discussed in chapter five, there were two significant developments. During and after the Second World War, North Americans who needed an understanding of frozen earth for construction in Alaska and Canada drew on Soviet work, in particular that of Sumgin. Vechnaia merzlota was translated, inaccurately, as ‘permafrost’, a term which has become eternally frozen in the Anglophone lexicography. This is doubly unfortunate since, after Sumgin’s death in 1942, Soviet scientists, and their American counterparts, revived the more sophisticated systems approach, rendering ‘permafrost’ a mistranslation of an contested theory. Chu’s analysis shows sensitivity to language, both in the Russians’ originals and the Americans’ translations. The latter improved after they hired Inna Poiré, a scientist of Russian origin, but she was not able to replace the term ‘permafrost’. Nor have Russian scientists reached consensus on replacing the mellifluous vechnaia merzlota. The life of ‘permafrost’ has generated the material for a fine, well-researched, clearly-argued and deeply-thoughtful book. It is primarily a work in the history of science. While scientists’ deliberations take centre stage, it makes an importantcontributiontothegrowingfieldofRussian/Eurasianenvironmental history. The book’s brief discussion of indigenous knowledge of frozen earth suggests an avenue for further research. The book has contemporary relevance as the life of frozen earth is entering a new stage: thawing. This is due to global warming and large volumes of methane are being released into the atmosphere. UCL SSEES David Moon Department of History, University of York Gamsa, Mark. Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2021. x + 383 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $90.00. This exquisite study, based on a vast array of sources (from state to private archival documents, from oral history to literary works) in all the relevant languages, has two narrative threads. The first is a history of Harbin from its SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 578 foundation (1898) to the Cultural Revolution in China, focused on the social and cultural interactions within its diverse population. In 1966, Red Guards razed Harbin’s Orthodox Cathedral to the ground. By then, the Russophone presence in the city, from a peak of 185,000 in the 1920s, had dwindled to a couple of thousand, many elderly or married to Chinese. Not only does Mark Gamsa indelibly put Harbin on our mental map of cities at the margin of empires, such as Thessaloniki, Baku, Riga, Trieste or Hong Kong; he also investigates the memory of the city among the Harbin diaspora around the world, showing that ‘it is the myth not the reality of the cosmopolitan past that becomes enshrined in nostalgic memory’ (p. 233). Gamsa explores this past by weaving the book’s second narrative, the biography of Baron Roger Budberg (1867–1926), another Baltic German noble who left a trace in modern northeast Asia. Like Ungern-Sternberg, he was also a cultural trespasser of a kind. Unlike the infamous warlord, however, Budberg wore a medical gown, not a military cloak: he ran the Chinese Eastern Railway’s hospital for sexually transmitted diseases, and was later the Harbin city prison’s physician. During the 1910–11 plague epidemic, he worked in Fujiadian, Harbin’s ‘Chinese town’, where Europeans did not often venture. Gamsa is refreshingly uninterested in being collocated within any of the fashionable historical sub-disciplines. However, his work would easily fit a connected and transnational history branding, especially as, through Budberg’s biography, he sketches a prosopography of a Baltic German noble family dispersed onto five continents by war...