Sino-Soviet relations
There is nothing like failure to ensure obscurity and oblivion, and nothing significant has been written on the Golovkin expedition, even in Russian, since 1875. For the post-war period that may largely be due to the enforced sensitivities of Soviet scholars to the delicacy of Sino-Soviet relations, for, as one of them put it in 1959, it was all a question of the penetration and exploitation of the Chinese market, and that was hardly a friendly act.