The PRC History Review Vol. 2, No. 3 (June 2017): 1 - 26. © The PRC History Group, 2017 rossing the border between Russia and China by train, marshrutka, or hovercraft had already become relatively simple by the time I began conducting preliminary research on what would later evolve into my doctoral dissertation on the history of the Sino-Russian border during the twentieth century. Though I had heard all kinds of rumors on the various difficulties of archival research in both countries I was naïve enough to believe that drawing equally upon sources from Russian and Chinese archives would not just be the most natural thing to do but also be just as easy as obtaining visas and smiling at border guards. From the very beginning of my research, I wanted to look beyond the “big politics” that formed this border and focus instead on the everyday life of the locals, practices in the borderland, and entanglements of the local communities with the wider world. It therefore seemed appropriate to begin research not in Beijing or Moscow, but in remote places with exotic names like Chita, Haila’er or Abagaitui. Quite soon, however, I realized that writing about this border would be more challenging than explaining to a Russian immigration officer why my Russian and Chinese visas were in two different German passports which, yes, were both still valid and not fake. Mastering the relevant languages was not sufficient, as one also had to deal with different “archival cultures.” How different my archival experience was in Russia and China can be illustrated in bare numbers: over the years, I consulted fifteen archives in four countries. I have researched documents in eleven Russian versus two Chinese archives, 1 as well as in one archive in the United States and one in Germany. Despite such imbalances, conducting research on the Sino-Russian border was possible and fun. In what follows I shall first discuss the different research environments in both countries, followed by an overview of sources and archives that are relevant for historical research on the Russo-Chinese border. In the second part I offer two examples of sources drawn from a Russian provincial level archive that shed new light on the Sino-Soviet split, perhaps the most delicate period of this sacred and sensitive border. In Russia, the years after 1991 have been a particularly opportune moment to study Russian and Soviet history in general, and the history of the Russia-China border in particular. 2 Numerous sources of information about central and regional policies regarding the borderlands, relationships with China, and the workings of the borderland society have been declassified. Despite some setbacks in recent years, 3 compared to China archival research in Russia (particularly in the provinces) still seems like a cake-walk. 4 In China more than in Russia, borderlands and minority issues remain highly sensitive topics in national historiography and the politics of history. Archival staff are often suspicious of foreign researchers nosing around contested borders. Because virtually all the primary sources for the region and period under study are classified at present, it seems almost impossible to write a solid regional history of China’s border with Russia based solely on Chinese sources. My list of research planned but never conducted is therefore quite long. Of all relevant Chinese archives, records in the Heilongjiang Provincial Archives in Harbin, the Hulunbei’er League Archives in Haila’er, and the Manzhouli Municipal Archives would have been the most important for my research. Research in those institutions would have been essential even though records there are far from complete. In Manzhouli, for instance, pre-war collections were confiscated by the Soviets in 1945; post-war collections were burned during the Cultural Revolution or got lost, amid fears of a Soviet attack, during a temporary evacuation to Zhalainuo’er in 1976. 5 Bearing the permission of the respective municipal Foreign Affairs Offices, recommendation letters from my home institutions as well as from scholars in Beijing and Harbin, I tried to access the archives, but failed on specious grounds. In Harbin I was even denied the chance to check the finding aids. In Haila’er the head of the archive at first doubted the authenticity of my documents, verifying them by making phone calls. In the end, although deemed furnished with proper certificates, I could only check one single inventory. The files I ordered were “not found” when my order was pulled the next day. In Manzhouli, procedures were different. Over lamb hot pot lunch, one staff member admitted that “political barriers” would limit the access to sources. Despite such obstacles, extremely friendly staff tried to do their best and set up meetings with old residents for oral history interviews. Even if my own experience was particularly negative, the Northeast seems to be a particularly difficult region for archival research in China, for Chinese and foreign scholars alike. 6 I was able to reduce the Russo-centric imbalance of my archival sources to some degree by virtue of the fact that archival records on state borders are based in at least two countries and, in my case, some Chinese correspondence Diplomacy of Shunters: The Sino-Soviet Split Seen from a Provincial Archive in Russia Sören Urbansky, Cambridge University C