I met Sören Urbansky years before I ever read anything he wrote. It was in a remote village in Russia that few people had ever heard of, never mind visited. A real explorer, I thought – the least “urbansky” person I had ever met. Already back then, the subject of his exploration – history of the Sino-Russian frontier – struck me as wild and fascinating. That's because Urbansky was not just going to the archives (though he did spend time in the unknown archives in the most obscure of places) but because he was also talking to the people who lived along the border. He was recording their stories. What a strange book might result from that, I thought, before wishing him good luck in his unusual endeavours.

The book turned out as I expected. It's a brilliant cross between a Lonely Planet Guide for the place you never wanted to visit and a serious academic study of life in imperial borderlands. It's an interdisciplinary cocktail of history, politics, economics, sociology and anthropology, the kind of thing you thought you would write if you spent another 15 years in graduate school.

The approximate plotline is as follows. Sometime in the 17th century, the expanding Russian and Qing empires came into an uneasy contact along the Argun River, which runs leisurely through the middle of nowhere. What followed was the emergence of porous borderlands that were characterized by an ethnic and religious mix. Here were the nomadic Mongols, the Cossacks, the Han Chinese. They settled. They farmed. They traded. They occasionally intermarried. There was an astonishing fusion of languages and cultures, and the border regime was known chiefly by its absence: unenforceable and unenforced. “Seemingly borderless world,” Urbansky calls it (p. 33).

He then recounts how things began to change in the late 19th century. The real harbinger of change was the construction of the railroad across Manchuria, an important element in Russia's imperialist pursuits (p. 39). With that, the border station of Manzhouli acquired a new significance as the key entrepot for Sino-Russian traffic. The border – hitherto more of an imaginary construct than a physical barrier – began to take shape. One important development in 1910–1911 helped hasten the process of border formation: a plague. The disease originated near Manzhouli and quickly spread along the rail network. “In scientific circles and in Russian public discourse,” Urbansky writes, “the Chinese migrant workers were depicted as the major transmitter of the disease. … Social interpretations of the disease reaffirmed metaphorical borders between classes as well as ethnic groups and lent a cast of inevitability to the construction of physical boundaries” (p. 84).

Urbansky then recounts the upheaval in the borderlands following the collapse of the Qing empire and the Russian revolution. Refugees, revolutionaries and soldiers moved to and fro. The local Mongols vied for independence, but if in Outer Mongolia they were broadly successful, their efforts in what became Inner Mongolia were frustrated, partly because Russia failed to provide its backing to the movement. The chaos did not last. By the late 1920s, the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin managed to consolidate control in Manchuria and even tried to impinge on Soviet economic interests there, leading to the border conflict of 1929. The Soviets struck hard and Zhang sued for peace. The conflict became a pointer to the predominant theme of the following years: militarization and further solidification of the border control regime. The open steppe, Urbansky writes, was placed “under lock and key” (p. 150).

The border was not completely impenetrable. Urbansky shows how it was still possible to engage in smuggling operations. But unlike in the old days, when anyone could smuggle contraband across a poorly manned frontier, by the 1930s, such operations became the preserve of the privileged like the wife of the Soviet Consul in Manzhouli Lidiya Zimina who, in true Communist fashion, made a fortune from embezzling transit revenue (p. 135).

The border opened up just a little bit in the 1950s, the height of the Sino-Soviet “friendship.” But Urbansky argues that this friendship existed more on paper than in reality. People met in strictly regulated circumstances, paid lip-service to their brotherly relationship and got on with their separate lives. The multi-cultural, multi-lingual dwellers of the former borderlands melted away in the crowd of new Chinese and Soviet arrivals that built their very difficult lives along a border that no longer united as much as it divided.

The situation worsened in the 1960s, with the Sino-Soviet split, which in due course led to a build-up of armed forces. By the 1980s, the Sino-Soviet frontier was the most militarized border in the world, a place where locals practically never met but only eyed one another from afar. Only with the beginning of the Sino-Soviet normalization did the border tensions subside.

Borders, Urbansky argues, are made both by people and states, and the Sino-Russian border is no exception. The book helps us understand how this process works in practice, certainly how it has worked in transposing the Sino-Russian border from the make-believe world of cartography to reality on the ground. The silver lining is that the long and unhappy process of border solidification is not a linear story. States come and go. Tanks and barbed wire succumb to rust. Borders open up and dissolve in the intermingling of people: traders, tourists, adventurers, students, contrabandists and lovers. When the state is not there to enforce conformity, the locals get on with their lives, and the borderlines fade and wither away.