SUMMARY:

The article studies Soviet policies in Manchuria after the USSR took over the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) in 1924. It argues that technical specialists and top managers arriving from the USSR emulated the old imperial lifestyle and dismissive attitude toward Chinese coworkers and the general population. The author reconstructs the Soviet “political economy” at the CER, which was typical of timeservers: management pursued the economic and political interests of the USSR at the cost of ruining the railroad, while ordinary employees arriving from the devastated Soviet Union used their temporary assignment to the CER for personal profit. Management tried to marginalize the authority of their Chinese peers in order to conceal the Soviet mismanagement of the company and to exercise political pressure on the Manchurian authorities. The ordinary employees indulged their orientalist prejudices that had been formed before coming to Manchuria and were revealed there due to limited collaboration with Chinese citizens.