When Russia acquired Siberia, its leaders possessed little knowledge about the geography and peoples of the longest land frontier in the world. This book examines the process by which they sought to acquire that knowledge from the seventeenth throughout much of the nineteenth century. The narrative is constructed on the theoretical frame of “the knowledge regimes” developed by John L. Campbell and Ove Kay Pederson in The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton, 2014).A knowledge regime is a mechanism drawing its energy from a variety of sources ranging from institutions to individuals and shifting its practical application over time to accommodate new requirements for those in power. The advantage of adopting such a mode of analysis is that despite its origins in contemporary politics and anthropology, it makes sense out of a highly diversified and often confusing set of data collected in ways that appear initially to be haphazard and uncoordinated. At the same time, it seeks to avoid representing the intelligence gatherers as unified in their techniques and goals. The addition of the terms “spies and scholars” seeks to locate the main actors in this quest for information. A variety of sub-themes emerge in the telling. One is that although Russians and Europeans engaged in a mutual exchange of information about China, they ended up inventing different “Orientalist” models that suited their particular concept of what it means to be civilized.Afinogenov organizes his material around groups and institutions involved in gathering knowledge, beginning with the collection of texts and the earliest contacts with China through merchants and diplomats. These texts circulated in Europe and helped to shape the European image of Qing China. Under Peter the Great, the consummate centralizer, a systematic gathering of knowledge took place with the more specific aim of linking knowledge to the pursuit of imperial interests. The institutions that ran this operation were the College of Foreign Affairs, the Academy of Sciences, the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, and the Moscow–Beijing Caravan. Yet the recurrent problem plaguing Russian institutions soon surfaced. In the absence of Peter’s guiding hand, institutional squabbling and a failure to coordinate the various sources of information led to a failure to gain maximum advantages for the state from these scattered activities.The eruption of a regional crisis in the mid-eighteenth century forced a major shift in the nature and aims of information gathering. The great struggle of the Qing and the Jungar Khanate over China’s western borderlands spurred the Russians to create a spy network linked to a stronger impulse to impose Russian hegemony on the contested region. This strategy inaugurated what Afinogenov calls a cold war between Russians and Chinese in Sinkiang. By the early nineteenth century, their muted competition had spread to Mongolia and Manchuria where the boundaries had long been established and fixed. The Russians strengthened their administrative institutions in eastern Siberia to cope with the perceived need for greater security, and they increased their secret probing of the unstable situation on the frontier. A tense stability ensued.Afinogenov then shifts the scene to the North Pacific, enabling him to claim global significance for the Russian advance in knowledge and expansion. He invokes “securitization” theory to explain the rivalry between Russia and the Western maritime powers. In the shadows of conspiratorial thinking, a new intellectual climate had come to the fore by the time of Alexander I: A “sense of global encirclement had become the driving force … of Russian policy toward China” (186). But once again intelligence failures betrayed exaggerated ambitions. New methods were necessary. The discipline of Oriental studies, a “modern” approach, replaced the outmoded practices of the eighteenth century. Enter the controversial figure of Father Iakinf (Bichurin), one of the many colorful figures who enliven these pages. Although he had a few useful ideas, his behavior was so outrageous that he was thoroughly discredited, giving way to another emissary of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing. Better behaved, the latter’s ideas still smacked of the eighteenth century; his mission and students produced little of significance. Readers will judge these and other so-called sinologists as supplying a narrow base on which to construct a new discipline.In the final chapter, the scene shifts to the annexation of the Amur region. The central figure is Nikolai Murav’ev (Amurskii), the well-known proconsul of empire. Afinogenov attributes his success to a “mastery of the knowledge regime” (235). Nonetheless, he also maintains that geographers and ethnographers, not Orientalists, laid the intellectual groundwork. Were these spies acquiring covert knowledge? As Afinogenov would have it, Murav’ev was keen not so much for concrete intelligence as for a relationship with China based on the mutual advantage of protection from British imperialism. Such protection proved unrealistic; coercive power replaced “soft power.” “As the Russians moved back into the territory that their ancestors had left behind in 1689, they had more power but not much more knowledge” (255).Afinovenov based his book on a wide range of archival sources in London, Paris, and Moscow, as well as an extensive reading of printed sources. He has a tendency to over-interpretation informed by a social-science discourse and exclusive categorization of the knowledge system. He also tends to press his claims for originality by discounting the work of his fellow toilers in the field. The book’s main contribution is to tell a fresh story of the multiple, disjointed, and often secretive aims of an imperial impulse as it penetrated different sections of the Russian–Chinese borderlands. Readers might wish to consider how this picture corresponds to similar relations between information and expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia.