It comes as an unpleasant surprise that, rather than a history of “the Sino-Russian border,” the author and his publisher actually offer a study of one section of the border in question, that running along the Argun River. This is not at all a history of the border between China and Russia, which, the author tells us, stretched for as long as 12,000 km during the rule of the Qing dynasty (when it included Outer Mongolia), and which still measures about 4,200 km. The Argun is only the border between the two countries for the relatively short span of 944 km (8–9). Since the other borders—along the Amur (Heilongjiang) and Ussuri rivers, let alone the land border which existed in Xinjiang during the tsarist and Soviet eras—are hardly mentioned in the book, the subtitle amounts to a serious misrepresentation of its contents. A History of the Argun Border would have been the honest choice.

In most areas of business, discovering that a product description does not match the product entitles you to ask for your money back. Not so, of course, in academic publishing. Once your expectations have been adjusted to reading over three hundred pages on the border between the Russian Transbaikal province and the Hulunbeir region of Chinese Inner Mongolia, you get the subject treated in exhaustive detail. The author has read widely in both primary and secondary sources, including the Russian regional archives and the local press. The bulk of his sources are in Russian, with a more limited use of Chinese and occasionally German materials; he has also conducted interviews, mostly in the Russian town of Zabaikalsk. That town (formerly called Otpor) and Manzhouli, the Chinese city on the opposite side of the border, have never been studied as extensively in any language. They are interesting places, and the interaction between them is even more so. One wishes that the author had overcome the temptation to fill his book with every fact and statistic he unearthed on Zabaikalsk and Manzhouli and their surroundings, rather than focusing more on the people on the ground, whom he calls “borderlanders.” This would have been a more challenging task than a commented chronology of the two towns, but the rewards would have been richer, too.

The eight chapters progress from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Chapter 1 presents the ethnic profile of the populations on both sides of the Argun in the last decades of tsarist and Qing rule: mostly Russians, Buriats, and Cossacks on the Russian side, and Mongols on the Chinese (Oirats are misspelled as Oriats here and in the index). Chapter 2 is about agriculture, trade, customs, and smuggling; the latter remains a recurring theme. Chapter 3 is a history of Manzhouli and of Hulunbeir up to the 1920s. The minute chronology of Manzhouli is extended to the following decade in Chapter 4; here findings from the Chita archive enliven the narrative, fleshing out the cross-border connections that otherwise tend to be obscured when the author adheres to the conventional mode of political history. Chapter 5 covers the Sino-Soviet conflict over control of the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929, the occupation of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia by Japan in 1931, and the ramifications of these events in the militarized Argun borderland up to the collapse of the Manchukuo state in 1945. Chapter 6 brings us to the 1950s, when the establishment of Communist rule in China initiated “friendship” with the Soviet Union; the chapter describes how this political sentiment was played out on the Argun border. The very long Chapter 7, documenting Zabaikalsk (with some glances at Manzhouli) during the Sino-Soviet rift, is exceedingly cluttered by the indiscriminate marshalling of summarized archival files and translations from Soviet newspaper articles on the goings on at that small border station, with a focus on propaganda. The brief Chapter 8 chronicles the reestablishment of economic cooperation between Manzhouli and Zabaikalsk in the 1980s, and it culminates in the plundering of Chinese freight wagons by Zabaikalsk residents soon after the disintegration of the Soviet system.

Urbansky romanticizes spontaneous cross-border mobility while viewing closed borders, which only allowed limited and formalized contact between the residents of the two countries, as a restriction of the natural human impulse for communication. On page 211, he contrasts the visit of a Soviet delegation from the Chita region to Manzhouli and Hailar in 1958 with an imagined “accidental and informal meeting between a lonesome Chinese trapper and a young Cossack woman of the 1900s.” As he sees it, after 1949 “people on the Argun were separated and isolated. Only from the mid-1980s onward did subtle signs of reconciliation bring hope” (217). But whose hope is this? There is no evidence that inhabitants of the border region (with the obvious exception of the few individuals with relatives or friends on the opposite riverbank) spent the intervening decades in hopes for the border's reopening, or for reunion with their Chinese or Russian neighbors. Quite to the contrary, Urbansky shows that the people on the Soviet side accepted the official discourse of border protection, while many of them simply abandoned the militarized and poorly supplied border region in the 1960s and 1970s; as for the residents of Chinese Inner Mongolia, they were terrorized by Maoist political campaigns in the same years (224–28). Imagining that these people should have wished to move freely between Russian and Chinese territory means imposing a liberal worldview on populations that would not have subscribed to it. Having lived through Manchukuo and the Communists, these border dwellers, by then largely ethnic Russians and Chinese, hardly remembered or missed “the bygone open interimperial borderland” (230). Indeed, once the state borders reopened, mutual hostility and suspicion surfaced (268–70).

The book's intended audience is unclear. The breezy writing does not assume prior knowledge: “the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the political upheaval in China that was intended to bring about a return to revolutionary Maoist beliefs” (212). Historians of modern China will find too little that is new or noteworthy in this book, which isn't what it purports to be—and what it is disappoints. Readers with a special interest in northern Inner Mongolia will benefit from the attention it pays to Hulunbeir. More than anything else, this is a history of the Russian Transbaikal border with China. Readers with enough patience to wade through Beyond the Steppe Frontier might situate parts of the story it tells within the comparative framework of border studies.