Over the past decade, scholarship on Xinjiang (or East Turkestan) has undergone remarkable changes. Whereas previous scholars were limited to a source base consisting chiefly of Anglo-American consular archives, published Chinese newspaper accounts, and the memoirs of exiled Turkic refugees, a new generation of historians has been able to make ample use of Chinese and Russian archives, along with rare collections of Uyghur documents preserved abroad. Of these three new source bases, however, the Russian archives clearly still offer the greatest untapped potential. Because the Soviet Union played a pivotal role in political developments within Xinjiang throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this is not a negligible lacuna.
In part for this reason, Jamil Hasanli's new study of Soviet influence in Xinjiang has been met with great expectations in the field. Focusing on the period of preeminent Soviet involvement in the politics of Chinese-ruled Xinjiang (1930–1949), Hasanli's book...