Russia's repeated “pivots” to the east, or “cycles of interest and disinterest” (8), have consistently been overly optimistic and unsuccessful, and generally a distraction from “the reality that its interests and its capabilities are anchored in the West” (12). This remains the case even recently, concludes Chris Miller. To compete with the west, Mikhail Gorbachev once visualized a socialist world successfully imitating Chinese reform and the export-oriented Asian economies. Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine since the taking of Crimea in 2014 assumes the expansion of economic and technological exchange with China.
The author describes misplaced optimism and subsequent disappointment through biographic portrayals of figures such as Aleksandr Baranov, who worked for a leading Siberian fur trader determined to expand the trade to Alaska; Nikolai Rezanov, a noble with the support of high imperial officials interested in the expansion of Russian influence in California; and Georg Anton Schaffer, a German physician in the imperial service who explored trade with Hawaii. These efforts, however, were abandoned by more skeptical voices in St. Petersburg. The window for “hatching exorbitant plans for empire” (43) was closing quickly, writes Miller, because of the challenge posed by the west. “Russia after the Napoleonic Wars was consumed by its European responsibilities” (42). Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus absorbed the attention of Russia's tsars and imperial elites more so than Siberia, where “fur trappers set the agenda,” or the distant Far East, where few Russians and other imperials subjects lived (53). Nicholas I and his Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode were conservative and careful in their instincts, emphasizes Miller, again focused on the west and the prospect of revolutionary change that it sometimes threatened.
Nikolai Muravev, appointed governor-general of Eastern Siberia in 1847, by contrast feared “inactivity” more than change, “lest rivals gain at Russia's expense” (59). China in decline was an opportunity for imperial Russia, and Muravev promoted Russian settlement, the development of the Siberian economy, and the seizing of the Amur River. Nikolai Przhevalsky, explorer and adviser to the military, similarly offered a vision of aggressive Russian expansion in the East that captivated the imagination of many among educated society. By the 1880s, however, his ideas faced skepticism from officials alarmed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander III in 1881 and convinced that events in Europe were more significant for Russia than Asia. His “memos to officials urging further conquest were politely ignored” (106). Minister of Finance Sergei Witte's interests included the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway from 1891. Russia's costly loss to Japan in 1905, however, diminished any enduring enthusiasm about industrial development and trade in the Far East, and instead meant accommodation and retreat in the last years of the imperial era.
Socialists such as Mikhail Borodin maintained hopeful ideas about Russia's special mission and purpose in the East, redeploying these ideas in “communist garb” (164). Even further, socialists were comfortable with imperialism, explains Miller, and quick to address traditional geopolitical concerns. By the 1930s, however, the Soviets repeated the cycle explored by Miller throughout the book: disillusionment with the East yet again (evident in the adoption of only a “defensive orientation” toward Japan) while far more preoccupied with Europe (186–87). Only with the defeat of Japan and the weakness of China did Soviet ambition and optimism return after 1944. “Tsar Nicholas II's territorial dreams had suddenly reemerged,” he writes (200). High hopes reappeared in the Soviet Union in the form of the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s, and Nikita Khrushchev's outreach to the Global South in the era of decolonization. The “Great Friendship” between the Soviets and Chinese was soon overtaken by territorial conflicts along the long border, however, and the Soviets found themselves confronted by a painful collaboration between the United States and the PRC.
The author is an excellent synthesizer of secondary source literature, fluid writer and engaging biographer. The archival support for the book might be further developed, perhaps with attention to a particular problem or bureaucratic entity that would serve as a test case for his cyclical theme. Archival material pertaining to foreign policy, broadly defined, for the imperial era includes collections on foreign faiths, border commissions, settler colonialism, Orientalism and ethnography, and borderland administrators who sometimes served in both the western and eastern provinces of the empire. For the Soviet era, the author might focus on an administrative body such as the International Department of the Central Committee or the Asian section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This book will prove useful and stimulating in both undergraduate and graduate courses on Russia's relationship to the world.
