This interesting book purports to be a double biography of Harbin and one of its inhabitants, Roger Budberg. The example provided as an analogy is Alan Bullock's double biography of Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin (244). Budberg was also quite a character and Mark Gamsa has done a remarkable job of sleuthing him out. Born to Baltic German nobles in Russian service, Budberg took his nobility seriously, although he was a third son and would have to make his own way. For fourteen years, he studied at Tartu, took a medical degree and practiced women's medicine. His parents were unhappy with this choice and cut off support. He was named Privatdozent in January 1903 and seemed on his way to a university career, when something untoward happened leaving him looking for a wet nurse for a baby girl. Within a month, he had fled to the Russian interior “to improve his Russian” (49) and shortly thereafter he moved further, to war in the Far East.
The Russo-Japanese war was neither successful for the Russians, nor Budberg. The Budberg connections allowed him to try out his pet idea, floating hospitals, but this was a failure, although the barges became billets. Budberg accused those who had tried to block his idea of corruption (51–52). A relative in the high command freed the troublesome Budberg from his duties, giving him “the leisure to explore China” (53). He seems to have learned a smattering of spoken Chinese and to have bought a Chinese boy “to be his servant” (52). Although Budberg insisted that others did not understand China, there is no evidence that he was ever literate in Chinese. At war's end, he was not decorated. By 1906, he had settled in Harbin and would stay there for twenty years, sending some letters and postcards and writing memoirs that misrepresent his military service and maybe much more (50).
A year later, in October 1907, aged 40, he married a 14-year old. Gamsa conjectures that “Budberg took her from a brothel” (87). Three years later, he published expertly on “how a woman sold into prostitution could become free…” (95). His “work” with prostitutes also caused Chinese society to “brusquely” turn away from him (110). His wife died at age twenty-seven and his daughter at age twenty-five. This rare case of intermarriage at Harbin did not end well for the Chinese side of the bargain.
Roger Budberg was an unabashed antisemite. He disliked Jewish doctors and thought that Jewish prominence at Harbin smacked of “conspiracy” (109). He referred to Georgians, Armenians and Persians as “criminal nations.” The Japanese were “the most horrid people in the world” (108). In short, filled with racial prejudices, the baron had come to China to buy people on the cheap and live out his fantasy of “sinicization.” When his wife of thirteen years died, he immediately wanted to marry up, possibly a Manchu noblewoman, like Roman Ungern von Sternberg did (296), but Budberg could not afford it. The “friend” who was supposed to arrange the marriage declared Budberg “mentally ill” (162). Shortly afterwards, he died. His father would be the last Budberg buried in the family cemetery.
As a biography of Roger Budberg, the book succeeds with fresh genealogical detail about the Budberg clan as well as a very careful reading between the lines of Budberg's own letters home and limited scholarly output. I think this will be the definitive biography of a rather repulsive character.
As a biography of international Harbin, the book is less successful. Harbin was a mix of nations from its founding as a city in 1898 until 1954 when Mao Tsetung sent the Russians home. At best, the story of cross-cultural Harbin intertwines with Budberg's life for the first half. The second half requires an eye for the increasing influence of China and Japan, but there is not a single Japanese source in the book and limited material in Chinese. There are also numerous minor inaccuracies and omissions, especially about the complex international relations that make this book inappropriate for undergraduates. Non-chronological treatment is also confusing at times. There is nothing on the city's economy. Specialists will, however, draw much eclectic material about Harbin from Gamsa and enjoy the author's often insightful ideas about cross-cultural contact and more. If a second edition is contemplated, I would recommend that University of Toronto Press rename the book after Budberg.
