Early in 1741, the Kalmyk khan Donduk Omba directed a letter to the tsarist cabinet minister A. I. Osterman. In it, he requested that grain be delivered for sale to a large number of Turkmen who had migrated, under pressure from the aggressive military campaigns of Nadir Shah of Persia, to the harsh and inhospitable Mangyshlak Peninsula on the northeastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The two expeditions dispatched as a result of this request, under the leadership of obscure figures named V. Kopytovskii and G. Tebelev, were the first official contacts between the tsarist government and the Turkmen in more than two decades. Kopytovskii and Tebelev's reports concerning their missions, archived after they were written, were published in 1939 in the Soviet journal Krasnyi Arkhiv. The core of this volume is a translation of these two reports by Claora E. Styron; it is complemented by a useful background essay by S. Peter Poullada assessing the previous two centuries of Russo-Turkmen contacts and explaining the crucial geopolitical shifts occurring in Central Eurasia during the eighteenth century. Supplemented by an excellent map and several handsome color plates, the volume is an addition to the small set of primary sources on Central Asian history available in English translation best represented by Scott Levi and Ron Sela's Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (2009) and Timur Beisembiev's The Life of Alimqul (2003). The two texts on offer, Poullada avers, offer useful primary data on a frontier encounter about which little is known; moreover, they are fine examples of “mid-eighteenth-century imperial discourse” (xviii), offering a window onto the mentalities and ideologies of tsarist imperialism during the period.

Poullada's background essay is rich and thoughtful. Building on the interpretive frameworks developed by Michael Khodarkovsky in particular, and using Russian- and Persian-language sources judiciously, he notes three recurring themes in the reports: securing an oath of allegiance, establishing terms of trade, and freeing Russian captives (69). He goes on to argue that these fixations were already well established among tsarist officials from their earlier dealings with the Kalmyks and Kazakhs of the steppe, and that the reports represent an inflection point, the beginning of prolonged direct (rather than sporadic) contacts between Russians and Turkmen that led, more than a century hence, to annexation. The narrative of the essay is devoted to historicizing this inflection point. Poullada does so deftly, rightly insisting on the multilateral character of the economic and political relationships that shaped Russia's Caspian frontier and the population of Mangyshlak, and carefully tracing the resulting ebbs and flows in contacts between Russians and Turkmen. Styron's translations, then, are impressively smooth, extracting maximum readability from the often tortured syntax of eighteenth century Russian. Both undergraduates interested in the Russian Empire but without sufficient language proficiency to work with original documents and scholars of other empires interested in comparative work could benefit from consulting this volume.

Yet the volume is marred by enough careless errors that one can only recommend its use by non-specialists with caution and supervision. Two such mistakes merit particular mention. Krasnyi Arkhiv, the archival journal where the reports were originally published, is described as “the official journal of the NKVD” (xxiii). This is at best a seriously misleading way of stating the situation, which is simply that the Soviet Union's Main Archival Administration was, for a time, under the auspices of the NKVD. Most glaringly, in terms of the volume's usability for serious historical study, Styron's translation of the longer Kopytovskii report regularly gives “Kazakh” as the translation of “kazak,” whereas in context the word clearly refers to Cossacks. This error results in such absurdities as Kopytovskii counting “three Turkmen from the Kazakhs” (103) in his retinue, and “the Kazakh Grigorii Nikitin” (107) going out to converse with Turkmen elders. This is an understandable mistake, but should have been caught at some point in the process of publication of peer review, as it leads to a substantial misrepresentation of the makeup of Kopytovskii's mission and the relationship between emissaries of the tsarist state and the ethnic groups populating Mangyshlak.

These reservations aside, Poullada and Styron's collaborative volume remains a useful addition to the all-too-small set of translated primary sources on Central Asian history. The translations open new perspectives on one of the most obscure parts of the Russian Empire's frontiers. The errors, however, are enough to substantially limit its utility; in that sense, this volume is an opportunity missed.