ABSTRACT
It was previously assumed that the Bolsheviks renounced all Russian territorial concessions in China. Perhaps the earliest historian to make this claim was Victor Yakhontoff, who in 1931 stated: "Russia actually renounced all special rights, privileges and concessions." 1 Other scholars later agreed, with Morris Rossabi concluding: "The Sino-Soviet treaty of May 1924 . . . ended the Soviet Union's special privileges in China." 2 Soviet scholars, not surprisingly, also supported this view, with Georgi Arbatov writing: "We changed our relations with Asian countries, too. Among other things, we renounced all the tsarist governments' colonial claims in Asia." 3
