In Spies and Scholars, Gregory Afinogenov examines knowledge—the ways it was produced, distributed, wielded, and limited—as a driving force undergirding the history of diplomatic, commercial, and political relations between the Russian and Chinese empires. In Russia, espionage and scholarship formed the twin pillars of a knowledge regime that went hand in hand with an ongoing state project to advance Russian interests with respect to China that were constantly evolving in response to changing geopolitical conditions on both the regional and global levels.

In addition to providing a thorough and nuanced account of the significance of knowledge circulation in the history of Russo-Chinese relations, Spies and Scholars might also be read as a case study of the changing functions and values of knowledge in the Russian Empire. Taking “knowledge to be a kind of commodity” (p. 6) with a protean array of producers and consumers, Afinogenov draws attention not just to the persistent role of state interests in the gathering and handling of intelligence, but also to the many individual actors on whose very particular expertise and labor those tasks depended. The overall approach is thus bottom-up rather than top-down, and for good reason: crucially, Afinogenov emphasizes that “the Russian bureaucracy that faced China was fragmented rather than centralized, opportunistic rather than methodical, and chaotic rather than panoptic” (p. 16). Accordingly, the bureaucrats, merchants, missionaries, and administrators who made up the network of individuals variously charged with building Russian knowledge about China were beholden to several disparate institutions that did not always share the same goals.

Among the extensive array of archives on which Afinogenov has richly drawn, the majority are Russian, and his investigation of the complicated web of communications between the spies and scholars of this study and the institutions to which they were answerable—the Governing Senate, the Holy Governing Synod, the College of Foreign Affairs, and the Academy of Sciences—is at once motivated by and reflective of the disjointed nature of the imperial Russian bureaucracy itself. Afinogenov thus reveals patterns in the transmission and withholding of knowledge that are of relevance not only to the Russo-Qing dynamic, but also to the everyday workings of the imperial Russian information infrastructure writ large.

Organized chronologically as well as thematically, Spies and Scholars traces Russo-Qing relations from their emergence in the seventeenth century to the 1860 Treaty of Beijing, under which Russia annexed the land north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri. Eleven chapters arranged in four parts chart the evolutions of imperial Russia's knowledge regime and its interactions with the shifting geopolitics of Russia, China, and Europe. Throughout, Afinogenov produces colorful portraits of the individuals involved in the knowledge-making apparatus, ranging from early China specialists such as I. K. Rossokhin to the learned but dissolute monk N. Ia. Bichurin (Iakinf), and culminating in the scheming exploits of N. N. Murav'ev, also called Amurskii. As the narrative progresses in its treatment of the entanglements of knowledge and power from Muscovy to post-Petrine Russia and into the nineteenth century, its scope first expands from the hybrid texts that typified the intelligence-gathering practices of the Muscovite frontier to the attempts of various eighteenth-century institutions to pursue the building of Russian knowledge about China alongside religious, academic, and commercial aims.

The book's second half begins with the Qing conquest of the Junghar Confederation in 1755–57 as an event that transformed intelligence into a matter with immediate and dire stakes for Russian power in the Inner Asian region. Though Russia's covert dealings on the eastern frontier did not yield the decisive results hoped for, the decades that followed would see a recalibration of the very concept of knowledge that recast its possibilities in light of Russian competition with other world powers. Afinogenov identifies this as the impulse for the development of an academic sinology in nineteenth-century Russia that conceived of itself according to European standards and thus in many ways repudiated its own roots. By 1860, “intellectual preeminence, commercial advantage, and territorial aggrandizement wove together into a vision of global supremacy, in which the Qing Empire was increasingly not the opposing team but the ball. Knowledge—parallel transnational economies of secrets and of academic prestige—lay at the heart of this vision” (p. 257).

This aspiration to global supremacy necessarily placed Russia in competition with Britain and, to a lesser extent, France, the Netherlands, and the United States; but in fact, Europe plays a main role in Afinogenov's study long before the nineteenth century. Europeans formed the main readership of Muscovite texts about China that wended their way—surreptitiously and with stops and starts—across Eurasia along the Siberian Route from Beijing. It was likewise Europeans who made up the Jesuit contingent in Beijing with whom Russian academicians corresponded via caravan, and whose supposed influence at the Qing court Catherine the Great would later seek to leverage. Afinogenov thus correctly reminds us that “Western Europeans served as a bridge between Beijing and Moscow just as much as Moscow served as one between Europe and Beijing” (p. 122). By the time Russians were preparing to approach Beijing in the capacity of a world power, they had largely adopted the conventional European view that China was characterized by a “backwardness and failure to modernize economically and militarily” (p. 212). One piece of this puzzle that is mentioned only obliquely, however, is the effects on the imperial Russian knowledge regime of a similar Orientalizing tendency that Europeans had long applied to Russia itself, particularly in the Muscovite period, but by no means limited to it.

This minor concern aside, Spies and Scholars is a beautifully written and extensively researched study. Afinogenov has provided a fascinating, important, and new perspective on the mechanisms of knowledge circulation underpinning the complex relationship between the Russian and Chinese empires as well as the global dynamics of imperial power. This volume will surely be of great interest and indispensable utility to students and scholars of Russia, China, empire, and the history of knowledge.