In Governing Post-Imperial Siberia and Mongolia, Professor Ivan Sablin of St. Petersburg's Higher School of Economics attempts a new narrative of Buryat and South Siberian history in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Sablin's research is based on a strong foundation of geographical information systems data, which positively influenced both his conception of Buryat ethno-nationalism and his presentation of an extremely turbulent period of history. As may be seen from the dates selected in the title, which extend from the Khalkha Mongolian declaration of independence from the Qing in 1911 to the proclamation of the Mongolian People's Republic in 1924, Sablin also has ambitions to bring Khalkha or “Outer” Mongolia and southern Siberia's Buryats into a single view. It must be said, however, that the coverage of events in Mongolia is rather cursory, and mostly serves as a contrast with the much more detailed picture of southern Siberia.

In addition to a thorough reading of the secondary literature, Sablin's work is based directly on a massive body of archival sources kept in the State Archive of the Republic of Buryatia, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (the old Communist Party archive), supplemented by archives of the United States and Japanese governments, which were both active in Siberia from 1919 to 1922. He also made great use of period maps in defining the relational space.

Some of the conventions of this work take a bit of getting used to. Sablin's transcription system may be useful in assigning one Latin letter to one Cyrillic one, but many readers will have a hard time immediately recognizing, for example, Trockij as Trotsky. Similarly, while the decision to list the archival documents separately in the bibliography is to be applauded, the division to divide not just the notes, but the bibliography as well into nine parts, one for each chapter, makes it harder to grasp the sources in a glance.

Sablin begins his history with an introduction and two chapters that both set the scene in southern Siberia in the years before the Russian Revolution and introduce his geographical conceptualization of this very complex area. His key conceptual move (see p. 6) is to define relational spaces in the Baikal area—governance structures, waterways and communications, mineral and agricultural resources, ethnicities, social estates, land use, religious networks, and educational centers—and through mapping to show how each one defined a different set of boundaries, none of which was hegemonic over the others. As he writes, “No boundary or division imagined and institutionalized in one of the many relational spaces which overlapped in the region was relevant for all or even some other spaces” (p. 60). Some of these boundaries were conceptualized in terms of group identities, which could be mobilized by global claims, but the resulting claims were entangled and overlapping (p. 8). Thus pastoral versus agricultural land use did not map neatly onto Buryat versus Russian ethnic space, and neither matched the service categories (peasant, Old Believer, Cossack, etc.). This situation, which Sablin calls transculturality, created contradictory responses in imperial and post-imperial governance: both a desire to reduce the complexity by making one relational space hegemonic over the others (governance through homogenization)and to accept the heterogeneity and use it to extend one's influence (governance through heterogeneity) (pp. 9–10). The latter mode dominated Russian interest and intervention in Mongolia, which in the period covered was transnational, rather than international (p. 157). That is, it involved extensions of particular relational spaces within Siberia into Mongolia, rather than an interaction of a centralized Russian or Soviet government with a centralized Mongolian one.

Sablin illustrates these relational spaces and the resulting states and autonomies (real and projected) in seventeen original maps with a limited number of consistent scales to enhance comparability. (A list of the maps and their page numbers would have been helpful.) Many of these maps present information virtually inaccessible even in previous Russian-language cartography, let alone English. Unfortunately the black-and-white format and the small size of the maps limit their utility.

The next five chapters give a narrative history of autonomous and state-building movements in the Baikal, together with their links to Khalkha Mongolia and the Hulun Buir area, itself at the intersection of Inner Mongolian and “Manchurian” relational spaces. Sablin sees these movements as diverse attempts to align the different relational spaces in ways that took account of the region's transculturality. Perhaps due to this strong geographic foundation, Sablin negotiates with exceptional clarity the extraordinarily complex networks and linkages that prevailed in a period that was largely stateless. This narrative will undoubtedly become the standard work on events in Buryat lands during the Russian Revolution. Sablin concludes that the structures of Buryat autonomy and the Mongolian People's Republic “had no definitive authorship” (p. 5). Certainly, the idea that these governments represented anything like the application of a specific nationality or autonomy “policy” cannot be sustained in light of this detailed narrative.

In sum, Governing Post-Imperial Siberia and Mongolia will be essential reading for anyone interested in the Buryats, the Baikal area, the Russian Revolution in Siberia, the history of ethnic autonomy in Russia, or the history of Soviet Russian foreign policy in Mongolia and Hulun Buir. In light of the hardcover's price, it is thus fortunate that e-book versions can be purchased more reasonably. And one would hope that Sablin might someday find a way to present the full range of his impressive cartographic work.