It can be hard to imagine now, but there was a time, about 150 years ago, when Americans had a favorable and amicable view of Russia, “a ‘distant friend’” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters,” as Gregory Wallance writes in Into Siberia, his engrossing account of, as the subtitle has it, “George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia”.
Russia
Harbin was a new city around the end of both the Qing dynasty and the Russian Empire. It was built to support the Chinese Eastern Railway and also became home to a sizable Jewish community numbering around twenty thousand. That community has long vanished and all that remains are the old synagogues and other buildings constructed by Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs. Why the Jews left Harbin is the most lasting consequence of the events recounted in Scott Seligman’s new book, Murder in Manchuria, a true crime narrative along the lines of Paul French’s Midnight in Peking and James M Zimmerman’s The Peking Express.
Although the stories in Paul Yoon’s latest collection range from northern Vermont and the Costa Brava to the Russian Far East, and chronologically from 17th-century Japan to more less the present day, with stops along the way in Tsarist Russia and the Cold War, they all feature protagonists who are Korean in one way or another.
When they meet, more like run into each other, on the Trans-Siberian just past Krasnoyarsk, Aliocha and Hélène are both trying to escape: he from the draft, she from a boyfriend. Aliocha, hardly more than a boy, is in a group of conscripts being sent to camp in Siberia; intending to desert, he tries and fails to sneak off the train at Krasnoyarsk.
If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China.
Philip Snow opens his engaging, and refreshingly straightforward, history of Sino-Russian relations with an observation born out ever more frequently in the opinion pages of current (at least English-language) newspapers: “Ever since they emerged from the rubble of the Second World War Western societies have looked with apprehension on either Russia, or China, or both.” Today, it’s fair to say, it’s probably “both”.
The tradition of great oral epics survived on the Inner Asian steppe perhaps as long as any other place on earth. At the dawn of the 20th century scholars managed to record bards singing stories that might have been five centuries or more in the retelling, embellishment and polishing. Jangar is one such epic, belonging to the Kalmyk people, once the left wing of Genghis Khan’s armies, now a minority people in the Russian Federation. Russian-educated Kalmyks collected these tales, and their work somehow survived the Russian Civil War and Stalin’s ferocious persecution of the Kalmyks and their literature. Translated into English for the first time by Saglar Bougdaeva, non-Russian, non-Kalmyk readers can now appreciate these tales.
At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender.
Kazakhstan, like Ukraine and Belarus, temporarily became a potential nuclear weapons power after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviets had deployed 104 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) containing more than 1400 nuclear warheads in the Kazakh steppe. These were the largest and most threatening land-based Soviet nuclear weapons, and their future control was uncertain in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Togzhan Kassenova, a senior fellow at the University of Albany, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a native Kazakh whose father was head of Kazakhstan’s Center for Strategic Studies at the time, tells the story of the diplomatic minuet between Kazakhstan, Russia, and the United States in the early- and mid-1990s that resulted in Kazakhstan’s surrender of any claim over those weapons in her new and timely book Atomic Steppe.
As China and Russia have grown closer over the past few years, Sino-Russian relations have been the subject of new attention; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown these into even higher relief. Here is a re-cap of books which cover the past and present of the subject.
You must be logged in to post a comment.