The Sino-Russian border has been contested space between two great states for nearly four hundred years. Perhaps no single study could relate its entire history, though there has undoubtedly been a recent increase in scholarly interest in the region, both by historians and social scientists. In his contribution to this growing arena, Sören Urbansky focuses on the Argun River as the “heart” of the Sino-Russian frontier, complementing earlier studies of Russia's Far East and the city of Harbin, Central Asia, and Xinjiang, and the nomads traversing the developing border. Urbansky begins with a sketch of the first three hundred years of the Sino-Russian relationship, but primarily is focused on the dramatic changes occurring across the twentieth century. While the Argun River runs through his entire text, his most detailed examination of the border emerges through the history of the twin cities of Manzhouli in China and Zabaikal΄sk (previously Optor) in Russia, a grounded perspective to relate his narrative of the methods by which the border closed.

Treated as a local history of a vast borderland, Urbansky's lively text populates the Eurasian plain with distinctive figures and daring escapades. Arkadii A. Ianechek, for example, was born in 1885 in Ukraine, but spent a portion of his lengthy career as a customs officer (for both the imperial and Soviet governments) in Manzhouli. While there, he supervised a smuggling ring operating across the border with both Russian and Chinese agents. That this ring operated during the Sino-Soviet War in the late 1920s is unsurprising, but the details Urbansky extracts from a chaotic era demonstrates the depth of the research in his monograph. Ianechek reflects one of Urbansky's key concerns, the value of smuggling throughout the history of the border. The success of Chinese authorities in the later twentieth century in nearly eliminating this economic activity is a marker of the strengthening of the border controls on the frontier.

The second recurring concern is control of the rail system throughout the region. The importance of the railways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including its role in the Russo-Japanese War, is uncovered not at the end of the line in Port Arthur but in its heartland along the Argun River. Controlling the railways remains a central issue throughout the monograph, as it continuously shifts between the two states, in times of revolution and war, communist development, and finally stability by the middle of the twentieth century. Rail workers are frequent characters in Urbansky's history, as they provide a first-person perspective on this massive expanse. This approach more often resembles anthropology than history, but it is this interdisciplinary approach that will attract readers from a variety of fields.

Following the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship in 1950, the Chinese government invested in its control over Manzhouli, supporting a massive migration into the region, increasing the city's population by more than 300 percent. Zabaikal΄sk's development was not as robust under Soviet rule. The Soviet support of female migration to Siberia had a role to play, with women such as Vera P. Zolotareva arriving to work at a new rail station, but Zaibakal΄sk remained far less developed and undermanned than its Chinese counterpart. It is not a surprise that economic development in the region was therefore dominated by China in the second half of the twentieth century, with the Soviet side of the border more engaged in smuggling (primarily alcohol) than urban development.

While much of the evidence Urbansky offers emerges at the local level, he does not neglect the geopolitical competition between two of the world's largest entities. As Urbansky argues, these borderlands allowed “local societies…to challenge, subvert, and negotiate hegemony,” concluding that “both people and states were responsible for the making the Sino-Russian border” (2). Moving between these two registers, his study offers an engaging narrative of the steady progress toward closing one of the world's longest borders. Any scholar familiar with the development of Siberia or northern China will find the broader narrative unsurprising, but Urbansky's local history provides new textures to this history. His primary focus on the twentieth century diverges from the recent studies of the earlier era to successfully bridge the gap between previous histories and social scientists’ contemporary work.