Russia Finds Its Limits

From the 1890s until the present, Russians have lived and died, worked and played, built and destroyed in the Chinese Northeast, a region known in all languages—but Chinese—as Manchuria. Beginning with the survey for and subsequent construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Russian money and migrants poured into a location on the Amur tributary, the Sungari (Songhuajiang), where the “instant city” of Harbin soon rose. In fifteen years, an unprepossessing fishing village with a population under 100 metamorphosed into an urban conglomerate with more than 100,000 inhabitants. After 1917, émigré Harbin became the only Russian city outside the Soviet Union, and as such played a special role in Sino-Soviet bilateral relations, the delayed reassertion of Moscow’s rule over the Russian Far East, and Northeast Asia’s perception of Russia, both old and new. ¹