Gregory Afinogenov brings powerful linguistic skills (Russian, English, French, German, Latin, Chinese, and Manchu) and broad archival research (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, Rome, Leuven, and New Haven) to the study of Qing-Romanov dynasty relations up to Russia's loss of its unique position as the only European power with representation in Beijing in the mid-nineteenth century. He traces the slow regularization of contacts through a colorful assortment of spies and scholars operating in the name if not always the interests of Russia. He masters difficult details and complicated connections to assemble the most complete account of those who brought knowledge about China back home to the capital or, as he puts it, “the role of intellectuals in the European colonial project” (261). Unlike other Europeans, who considered China as a source of “theoretical and conceptual” interest (15), for Russians, China was “a foreign-policy problem to be managed” (16).
The methodology highlights knowledge as commodities involving producers and consumers. It defines the concept, “knowledge regime,” using three levels of analysis: ideas, institutions, and people to examine bureaucracies (the institutions) in terms of their goals and the texts they generated (the ideas), and their personnel (the people). For Russia, intelligence served two purposes: information gathering and “a form of ‘silent warfare’” (140) via covert action and spying. “Intellectual preeminence, commercial advantage, and territorial aggrandizement” (257) motivated both intelligence gatherers and producers.
The book traces the evolution of the knowledge regime from ad hoc connections to one “dominated by professional, disciplined academics with their eyes on Western books” (260). This occurred as Russian governmental institutions professionalized from the bureaus (prikazy) of the Muscovite period, to the colleges of the Petrine period, to ministries from Alexander I forward. In the Petrine period knowledge production bifurcated into two channels: one secret emphasizing intelligence and the other public focusing on scholarship.
The book has four parts. The first two concern the ménage-à-trois among the Romanov, Qing, and Junghar empires. The last two continue the story after the Qing destruction of the Junghars, eliminating Russia's useful buffer state (part three), followed by the globalized competition among empires with the ascent of west European powers as chief tormenters of China (part four). In the first three parts, Russia was weaker than China. An unfolding Sino-Russian cold war form the backdrop to the second and third parts. Only in the final part did Russia became the stronger power and seize territory accordingly.
In the first part covering the Muscovite period (two chapters), the Russian government relied on ad hoc intelligence gathering by Cossack and Bukharan merchant intermediaries to interact with the peoples of Siberia—of whom the Chinese were but one. The other Europeans were excluded from Beijing and so could only witness from afar Russians signing treaties, sending trade caravans, and maintaining a privileged presence in Beijing through the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission. The Jesuits alone had a similar presence. So, the British and the Dutch sought out Russian works concerning China for translation.
Whereas analogous western works focused on pure research and European book markets, the intended audience for Russian texts remained the expanding government bureaucracy, focused on practical issues arising from a shared border. These Russian texts were hybrid assemblages of available testimonies—“the voices of texts and informants from all over the Eurasian world” (63). Authorship was deemphasized; rather plagiarism was the order of the say. “The purpose of the resulting knowledge was not to showcase Russia's splendor to Western Europeans but to facilitate its control over Siberia and the enrichment of the Muscovite state” (257).
The second part (four chapters) covers the consequences of Peter the Great's regularization of governmental institutions and deployment of administrative and intelligence tools in a regional cold war in which China was both “a regional rival and an important commercial partner” (258). The Petrine reforms created formal bureaucracies and career paths within them. Foreign-born servitors disappeared. Public and secret information were segregated. The Imperial Academy of Science (founded in 1724) collected books and dealt in public information through its newspaper, Vedomosti, but its research did not circulate in Europe. Russian Ecclesiastical Mission (1715–1954) students became translators of secret information for the College of Foreign Affairs, which fell under the tsar's direct purview. Yet these experts were “neither academic sinologists nor shapers of policy” (68); most died in obscurity. Topics of interest included industrial and strategic espionage conducted by personnel of the trade caravans, described as “clumsy early modern surveillance drone[s]” (109) that failed at industrial espionage but served as an overland conduit for Jesuit correspondence during a tricky period of church politics until the last caravan in 1760.
Prior to China's annihilation of the Junghars, Russia had played the role of the balancer in Sino-Junghar fighting, reaping such benefits as the Treaty of Kiakhta (1727–28) that regularized the caravan trade. Afterward Russia faced China alone—the focus of part three (two chapters). Russia responded by expanding its intelligence network from gathering information to subverting Qing control over the frontier. It deployed spies, secret negotiators, and trade sanctions, but its military inferiority left the Qing in control and its Siberian intelligence network atrophied.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the arrival en masse in China of the great powers of Europe upended the Sino-Russian cold war in Russia's favor, the subject of part four (three chapters). Intelligence gathering no longer focusing on industrial espionage, intelligence networks on frontiers of Mongolia and Xinjiang, or on freewheeling local administrators, but turned to international diplomacy. The audience of Russian expertise on China expanded from the government bureaucracy to the European scholarly community. Sinology and Oriental studies spread through such new institutions as “the Asiatic Department of the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs, regional language schools, manuscript libraries, and facilities in universities like Kharkov and Vil΄na,” (212) and notably Kazan University, which in 1837 founded the country's first department of Chinese studies. The Russian Ecclesiastical mission, long a center of institutional dysfunction, was sidelined. In contrast to the anonymous experts of the past, prestigious personalities emerged as purveyors of public scholarship.
Although the arrival of its European rivals expanded security concerns from the land border to a vast North Pacific zone of great-power competition, Russia leveraged China's divided attentions to formalize their border on highly favorable terms. Henceforth, “Diplomacy, scholarship, and intelligence would now be underwritten by superior military force instead of substituting for it” (234).
Even more interesting than this story of institutional development and colorful personalities are the themes running through the chapters. Some have a very contemporary ring: Fears of Russian encirclement by hostile powers began early: “By the beginning of the reign of Alexander I, this sense of global encirclement had become the driving force of Russian policy toward China” (186). Russian interest in industrial espionage and inability to use it are apparently longstanding problems—Russia got nowhere with porcelain manufacturing. Indeed, its attempt to compensate for military weakness with knowledge from intelligence gathering has a long and checkered history. In the period under discussion, the “Russian Empire tried to use knowledge to bridge the gap between its conquering aspirations and its limited coercive power” but “the connection between knowledge and power was thus an aspiration rather than a reality” (5). Finally, Russian experts on China suffered from a job market limited to government employment—a problem for students of security studies in our own day. Low wages and obscurity were the result.
Some of the book's conclusions would drive the current government of China mad, such as its description of the reversal of the Russo-Chinese balance of power leaving China no longer “the opposing team but the ball” (257) or, even more incendiary: “Henceforth Russia's world-historical greatness would be vouchsafed by having China as its junior partner” (262).
Afinogenov is pessimistic about Russian's accomplishments in the intelligence field. He describes huge changes in Russians’ knowledge making without much success or guidance—with much forgotten in repeated periods of “institutional amnesia” (22). He highlights Russian intelligence's “uncertainty, its trust in high-level narratives over low-level operatives, its institutional diversity” (259) that left the producers of the knowledge in obscurity until Afinogenov's careful reassembly of the details of their forgotten lives. Yet perhaps the knowledge produced made possible Russia's huge territorial acquisitions, touched on in the book's final part. If so, this is indeed an enduring and consequential legacy that transformed Russia into a Pacific Ocean power.
