Sergei Georgiyevich Lazo

Semyonov's Advance and the Creation of the Daurian Front

In January 1918, Ataman Grigory Semyonov, backed by Japan and the Allies, crossed the Manchurian border into Transbaikalia. His objective was to seize the Transbaikal Railway and sever the Russian Far East from Soviet Russia. As Semyonov's forces captured towns and Cossack settlements on their approach to Chita, the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets (Centrosibir) dispatched an urgently formed detachment from Irkutsk and, in February 1918, entrusted its command to Sergei Lazo. Thus the Daurian (Transbaikal) Front was born.

Lazo's Headquarters in a Freight Car at Andrianovka Station

Lazo's front command was housed in a single freight car halted at Andrianovka station, roughly 200 kilometres east of Chita. Inside the car, lit through openings cut in place of windows, stood a small table, a portable typewriter that Lazo worked himself through the nights, and a modest shelf of military books. As a commander, Lazo was indistinguishable from his soldiers in dress and manner; he personally patrolled the front line, talked with the troops, and led political meetings. With the Red Army only beginning to take shape as a regular force, his units were a motley collection: worker Red Guards from Irkutsk, Chita, and Vladivostok, former Imperial Army soldiers who had sided with the revolution, and cavalry from the poorer Cossack settlements. Lazo imposed strict discipline to weld these elements into an effective force while earning the personal trust of individual soldiers. It was his headquarters that took in a fourteen-year-old boy, orphaned and scarred by Semyonov's men, and assigned him to the 1st Argun Cavalry Regiment.

The Onon River Crossing: The Turning Point of the Front

In May 1918, Lazo's forces went over to the offensive. The first major engagement was the recapture of Olovyannaya station on the River Onon. Semyonov's men had blown the bridge and occupied the high ground on the right bank, pinning the Red advance under artillery fire. Lazo gathered his commanders and planned a night operation: a detachment of Far Eastern sailors would climb onto the wrecked bridge spans under cover of darkness, set up a light machine gun, while the 1st Argun Cavalry Regiment crossed the river to outflank the enemy from the rear. At the signal flare, the sailors opened fire and stormed the first trench line; the Argun cavalry swept through the enemy positions from behind. Within hours Semyonov's forces abandoned the Onon River line and retreated.

From Left SR to Bolshevik: A Political Turn Completed on the Battlefield

It was on this front that Lazo's political identity was definitively settled. He had entered the revolution as a Left SR in 1917, but Lenin's speech at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets that summer had already moved him deeply, and in the field he was already acting in concert with the Bolsheviks. The experience of the Daurian Front (a direct confrontation with counterrevolutionary forces backed by multiple imperialist powers, and the lived reality of party organization among workers and soldiers at the front) drove him to formally join the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in the spring of 1918. By summer Lazo's forces had pressed Semyonov's men steadily back to the Manchurian border, securing, for a time, Soviet power in Transbaikalia. The autumn of 1918 brought Kolchak's wider offensive and the collapse of Soviet control across Siberia, forcing Lazo underground, but the military and political experience he had gained on the Daurian Front became the foundation for his later role as commander-in-chief of the Primorye partisans and as the organizer of the Vladivostok uprising.