Breaking the Ice. "Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files" by Mara Moustafine. [review]

Abstract

Harbin is a city in north China. In the 1920s it was a city of Russians: workers and their families associated with the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), effectively a Russian colony in Manchuria; Jews who had fled from Tsarist persecution (discriminatory policies were not practised in Russian Manchuria); 'Whites' driven out more recently by the Bolshevik victory. Mara Moustafine was born in Harbin, in 1954: on her father’s side half-Russian Orthodox and half-Muslim Tatar, on her mother's all-Russian Jew. "Secrets and Spies" is Moustafine's first book. It records her search for the missing chapters of her family story.