SUMMARY:

From the very beginning of the Trans-Siberian railway’s construction, the Finance Minister S. Iu. Witte, had highlighted the decisive importance of colonization to the venture’s eventual success or failure. In analogous fashion, the question of settlement was intimately related to the building of the Trans-Manchurian Chinese Eastern Railway (CER). The eventual result of a convoluted intra-bureaucratic process was a community of Jewish migrants living in China’s Northeast, where the railroad bridged the Sungari. Granted religious freedoms in the hope that they would generate freight for the CER, the Jews shared the city with the railway technocrats, who lived on the hillside overlooking the city blocks that covered the riverside flats where opium poppies had grown until the 1890s.
The 1913 municipal census data reveals the actual dimensions of Harbin’s sizeable Jewish community. In Siberia, only Irkutsk had more (6,100 in 1909). However, taken as a percentage of Russian passport holders, Harbin’s 5,032 Jews added up to 11.5%. In Irkutsk, they were only 5.6%. In addition to schools that simply ignored the numerus clausus of Imperial Russia, Harbin had several synagogues, a burial brotherhood, cheder, cemetery, mikva, old age home, Talmud Torah, Jewish Women’s Charity Committee, and library. Population data shows a stable community in terms of age structure and sex ratio. Totals from the metric books of the Jewish community provided by the Heilongjiang Provincial Archive also corroborate this conclusion.
The Finance Ministry’s continued defense of this anomaly in the bleak and anti-Semitic atmosphere of pogrom Russia posited a relationship between state and society fundamentally different from the status quo in European Russia. In the Far East social organization and initiative were, by and large, regarded as allies of the state. Furthermore, life in the borderland allowed interethnic strife to be absorbed by international competition. In essence, the Jews of Harbin were hailed as the Cossacks of the twentieth century, where cavalry raid had been replaced by trade war and stockade had given way to stock exchange.
So how “imperial” was Harbin, after all? At first glance, it is doubly imperial, both as a contiguous piece of the Russian Empire in its final days and as the cutting edge of Russian imperialism in its attempt to subjugate and even annex a(nother) large chunk of northeast China. On careful archival examination, however, we find that Witte’s devious methods and Kokovtsov/Khorvat’s able defense actually led to the creation of an urban environment, both politically and socially far from the norms of the Russian Empire, just a bordercrossing away. Harbin’s Jewish community was one of the chief beneficiaries of this liberal alternative, owing its existence and prosperity to rules of play that Siberia and European Russia would never see. Until 1950, minyans would meet at Harbin.