For the span of a life, about sixty years at the time, Russians felt at home in Manchuria, now fully assimilated as the three Northeast provinces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During most of the Soviet period, both the railway imperialism that created the Russian enclave and later, the émigré community, never stable, ever vibrant, were off-limits as topics of historical research. But from glasnost on, studies of the “other Russia” outside Soviet borders has become its own cottage industry in Russia. One of the most important factors for Russians to feel at home was belonging to a religious community. Orthodoxy was the main one, receiving massive support from the imperial state, including a stunning wooden St. Nicholas cathedral at the heart of Harbin. Surprisingly, the second largest religious group was the Jewish community, with Catholicism a rather distant third. But Harbin hosted many other small sects and the “Christian minorities” are the chosen topic of Kseniia Rodionova’s very informative new book.

The core of the book comprises of four chapters, each devoted to a different church or sect active at Harbin. Chapter 2 focuses on the Roman Catholic Church present on the construction site from the first days in 1898. Polish engineers were numerous and so were Polish soldiers among the military units designated to protect the engineers from the wilderness they sought to tame. Interestingly, there were actually two separate Catholic communities, one following the Latin rite and the other a special “Byzantine-Slavic rite,” which allowed converting Russian and other Slavic emigres to declare their allegiance to Rome and continue with their Orthodox daily practice. The Vatican had high hopes for this recruitment scheme in Harbin, and as one of the few to recognize Manchukuo was granted all opportunity in the 1930s, even as other foreigners and their creeds were being pushed out.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 introduce Lutherans, Baptists, Mennonites, Fiftieth-Day believers, Adventists, and Methodists. None of these were very large congregations, numbering in the hundreds. Rodionova tells us the stories of these sects and, in particular, of their churches, building on the work of a generation of experts who have focused on the religious history of Harbin (E.I. Chernolutskaia, N.A. Efimova, A.A. Khisamutdinov, M.V. Krotova, I.V. Potapova, and M.B. Serdiuk). Many of these, like Rodionova, consider themselves “Far Easterners,” with a special connection to both the Priamur and Zaamur, the contemporary Russian mental map of Harbin.

Rodionova also makes effective use of materials from the famous Khabarovsk fond R-830, the BREM materials captured by the NKVD at Harbin in 1945 and later deposited in Khabarovsk. These include individual files on most Russian émigré inhabitants of Harbin, all of whom were required to register with BREM and complete a regular set of questionnaires; sometimes additional materials are also in the file, including denunciations and other reports, newspaper articles, and so on. Some of these files are included in the appendices, including a fascinating set of agent reports from someone who had infiltrated two sects on behalf of the Russian Fascist Party fighting to prevent conversions from Russian Orthodoxy (229). Other Russian and Polish archives were also consulted, but the whole western literature on Harbin is missing from both the analysis and the bibliography, a sign that we have failed to create a joint study of Russia Abroad when we had the chance.

Rodionova not only successfully puts together the many stories from disparate sources, but also has a strong thesis about religion in Manchuria; namely, religious tolerance was real and enduring. Basically, but especially for the period 1898–1932, I agree with Rodionova about Harbin’s relative tolerance compared to other Russian/Soviet cities and have even written a book describing Harbin as a “liberal alternative” (Stanford, 1999). Unfortunately, Rodionova leaves out completely from her telling of the Harbin story the most compelling evidence for her tolerance thesis—the huge Harbin Jewish community, numbering over ten thousand at its peak, many more than Poles, Catholics, or other sects. Georgii Melikhov rightly lists the nationalities in the order: “Russians, Chinese, Jews, Japanese, Poles and others” (19). This was the largest community of Jews in the whole Far East, much larger than Shanghai, and it was part of the largest community of non-Asians in East Asia, also much larger than Shanghai. Viktoria Romanova has written a fine book on the Russian Jewish communities of the Far East, both Priamur and Zaamur, so I suggest including this perspective too to strengthen the tolerance argument.