| Near the projected intersection of the Chinese Eastern Railroad and the Sungari River, Russian engineers founded the city of Harbin. During the twenty years between the survey of the site in 1897 and the profound dislocations of the 1917 revolution, Harbin grew from an abandoned distillery with a minor river portage into a bustling urban center with over 100,000 inhabitants. Harbin's size and economic importance were commensurate with its de facto role as provincial capital of Russian Manchuria. After 1917, Harbin's population was doubled by a wave of immigration, and it now became the only "Russian" city in the world outside of the Soviet Union.;As a first step towards a Manchurian perspective on the history of the Russian Revolution, my dissertation provides an account and analysis of Harbin's rapid transformation from frontier town under government/company control to self-conscious, semi-independent community. I approach this question as a dialectic between policies created in Petersburg and the exigencies of local life in Harbin. This allows the Harbin case to speak to central historiographic concerns. Examinations of demography, administration and local politics in Russian Manchuria offer new perspectives on Russian technocracy, the Witte system, 1905 in Siberia and, most importantly, the bitter interministerial rivalries that imperiled every initiative from the center. Harbin, protected through most of its early years by distance and Finance Ministry backing, undertook a unique evolutionary path. A liberal nationality policy offered refuge to victims of persecution in Russia proper. The Jewish and Polish communities flourished. A belief that successful competition with the Chinese outweighed the dangers of ethnic particularism led both the local railway administration and its Petersburg superiors to tolerate both liberal and revolutionary political movements. The absence from Manchuria of repressive organs, such as the Gendarmerie, also furthered this development. Harbin's foreign location was often invoked to explain what within Russia could only be termed laxity. In a word, Harbin was the freest city in Russia precisely because it was outside the Empire's borders. |
