Nikolayevsk incident
니콜라옙스크 사건
The mass killings of 1920 at Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, at the mouth of the Amur, in which partisans under Yakov Tryapitsyn killed the Japanese garrison and residents and thousands of Russian inhabitants and burned the town. In the narrow sense it refers to the execution of Japanese prisoners and the remaining detainees in late May, after the March fighting with the Japanese; Japan used the incident to justify its occupation of northern Sakhalin.
In depth
Occupied by Japanese troops since September 1918, Nikolayevsk held at the start of 1920 a garrison of 350 men from the Japanese 14th Division, about 450 Japanese civilians and some 300 White troops. In January 1920 Tryapitsyn’s partisans (3,000 according to Russian-language sources) besieged the town, took the Chnyrrakh fortress on its outskirts and began shelling. Under a truce of 28 February the partisans entered, but they soon began arresting and executing the wealthy and influential from lists drawn up in advance. Before dawn on 12 March the Japanese attacked the partisan headquarters; in the fighting that followed most of the garrison was killed before the last Japanese surrendered on the 15th. In late May, as a Japanese relief force approached, Tryapitsyn’s command evacuated the inhabitants to Kerbi, executed the 129 Japanese prisoners and the other detainees, and blew up and burned the town and the fortress. Russian-language sources say only 35 of 1,165 residential buildings survived. On 7 July Tryapitsyn and his staff were arrested at Kerbi, and they were shot on the 9th.
The death toll is still disputed. The Sakhalin authorities, as cited in English-language sources, put losses across the region at no fewer than 10,000–15,000, counting those who died of hunger and privation; the trial verdict and Bolshevik documents spoke of half the population killed. At the time Japan exaggerated its own losses and left out the thousands of Russians killed, so the incident was long misremembered as a "massacre of the Japanese". From the 1920s to the 1950s the Soviet Union treated its essence as the shooting of Japanese prisoners in breach of the Geneva Convention and laid all the blame on Tryapitsyn, who was branded an "anarchist". Many historians today regard the burning of a whole town and the killing of thousands as cruelty without parallel in that war. Japan used the incident to occupy northern Sakhalin, where it stayed until 1925, although Russian-language sources point out that the occupation began on 22 April 1920, before the May executions.