The Civil War in Siberia and the Far East

Early 1918: Tsentrosibir and the Far Eastern Council of People's Commissars

Around the time of the October Revolution, the Siberian soviets held their First All-Siberian Congress of Soviets in Irkutsk, which created a central executive committee for the soviets of Siberia and the Far East: Tsentrosibir. Some 185 delegates represented 70 soviets from Tyumen to Vladivostok, and the Bolshevik Boris Shumyatsky became Tsentrosibir's chairman. In December 1917 cadets, Cossacks, officers and students rose against the soviet in Irkutsk. Sergei Lazo, leading Red Guards from Krasnoyarsk, was briefly taken prisoner in the street fighting, but after a truce on 29 December soviet power in Irkutsk was restored within days. At the Second All-Siberian Congress of Soviets, which opened in Irkutsk on 16 February 1918, 123 of the 202 delegates were Bolsheviks and 53 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, while the Right SRs were down to seven. Speaking for a Siberian Soviet Republic, the congress declared that it would not consider itself bound by any peace the Sovnarkom signed with Germany. Yet as Tsentrosibir itself admitted, local soviets often acted on their own and ignored its instructions. 1 2

In the Far East, Soviet power was built up by Alexander Krasnoshchyokov, who had returned from the United States at the end of July 1917 and joined the Bolsheviks. He became chairman of the Far Eastern Council of People's Commissars set up in Khabarovsk, and for about four months in the summer of 1918 it controlled the whole Russian Far East. The Khabarovsk Soviet's commissar for foreign affairs was the Korean Bolshevik Alexandra Kim, who in spring 1918 founded the Korean Socialist Party with Yi Dong-hwi and others and organised Korean Red Guards. But this authority was thin. Japanese battleships entered Vladivostok harbour in January 1918, and in Transbaikalia Ataman Grigory Semyonov raided across the border from Manchuria. In spring Tsentrosibir set up the Daurian (Transbaikal) Front under Lazo to fight him, and on 8 May declared Semyonov an enemy of the people. In Blagoveshchensk in the Amur region, the revolt of Ataman Ivan Gamov was put down in March; according to research by Teplyakov cited in English-language sources, more than a thousand residents died after the Red Guards took the city. Tsentrosibir and the Khabarovsk council never managed to coordinate, and Tsentrosibir complained of Far Eastern "separatism". 3 4 5 1 6 7

Soviet power in Siberia faced opponents other than White officers. When regionalists seeking Siberian autonomy and the Socialist Revolutionaries tried to convene a Siberian Regional Duma in Tomsk at the end of January 1918, the Tsentrosibir Bolsheviks who held Tomsk arrested deputies on the night of 25–26 January and ordered the Duma dissolved. Deputies who escaped formed a Provisional Siberian Government headed by the SR Pyotr Derber. It moved to Harbin in March and only settled in Vladivostok in June, leaving behind an underground West Siberian Commissariat of four SRs. On 5 April 1918 Tsentrosibir protested against foreign intervention, declared martial law in Siberia and set up a revolutionary staff, along with a military commissariat uniting the Omsk, Irkutsk and Priamur military districts and a Siberian Cheka. Yet the soviets' armed force consisted only of Red Guards, internationalist detachments and newly forming Red Army units. What they were about to face was an armed body, estimated at 40,000–50,000 men, strung out along the railway. 8 9 1

The Legion's revolt and the Siberian governments (May–November 1918)

The clash between the Czechoslovak Legion and the Bolsheviks that began at Chelyabinsk in May 1918 is covered in the parent event. In Siberia its consequences came fast. Around the time Trotsky ordered the Legion disarmed on 25 May, Radola Gajda organised a rising in Novonikolaevsk, and the Legion took railway towns such as Mariinsk, Nizhneudinsk and Kansk one after another. In Irkutsk, Tsentrosibir decided on 26 May to disarm Legion trains arriving at Innokentyevskaya station; fighting broke out at the station and 50 people were killed. A Tsentrosibir delegation made peace the next day, but fighting resumed in June. On 6 June Omsk fell to the Whites, and at the end of June Legion troops under Mikhail Diterikhs overthrew the Bolshevik administration in Vladivostok. On 6 July the Legion declared Vladivostok an Allied protectorate, and its men turned back along the railway to help their comrades fighting further west. According to English-language sources, by August about 65,000 Red troops faced some 50,000 Czechoslovaks and anti-Bolshevik Russians along the front in the Urals. 10 11 12 1 9

Once the Legion held the railway, Soviet power in Siberia could not hold on. By 13 June the line from Nizhneudinsk to Kansk was already in Legion hands, and on 11 July Tsentrosibir abandoned Irkutsk for Verkhneudinsk. Gajda pushed on through Irkutsk to Chita. At the end of August the Legion defeated Bolshevik forces in the tunnels at the southern tip of Lake Baikal and continued towards Vladivostok. Tsentrosibir was driven on to Chita on 16 August and then out altogether. On 28 August a conference of party, soviet and military officials at Urulga station dissolved the Siberian Council of People's Commissars and decided to give up fighting on an organised front and to fight instead "by all legal and illegal means". The internationalist detachments were supplied with arms and stores and went into the forests. In the Far East, Krasnoshchyokov's council collapsed when Khabarovsk fell to Ataman Kalmykov on 5 September. Trying to cross the taiga to Red territory, he was captured near Samara and sent to prison in Irkutsk, where he was freed only in December 1919. Lazo went underground and worked in the underground party committee in Vladivostok. 1 13 10 14 3 2

Anti-Bolshevik governments competed for the space the soviets had left. In Omsk, after a month of negotiations, a new council of ministers chaired by Pyotr Vologodsky was announced on 30 June: the Provisional Siberian Government of Omsk. One Russian general called it "a coup carried out peacefully", for the army did not want Derber's SR-dominated government. In Vladivostok the Derber government renamed itself the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia on 29 June and declared itself the central authority of Siberia, but the troops and support were with Omsk. The Omsk government adopted a declaration "on the state independence of Siberia" on 4 July and fought a customs war and border disputes with the Komuch on the Volga. Partly under pressure from the Legion, a State Conference met in Ufa on 8–23 September and created a five-man Directory, the Provisional All-Russian Government. The Directory moved to Omsk in October but relied for administration on a council of ministers in which 10 of 14 members came from the old Siberian government. How the Omsk coup of 18 November arrested Nikolai Avksentiev and Vladimir Zenzinov and made Alexander Kolchak Supreme Ruler is covered in the parent event. 9 15 8 16

Kolchak's rear: the atamans and the railway

The authority of the Omsk regime barely reached east of Lake Baikal. Grigory Semyonov, a Transbaikal Cossack, invaded Transbaikalia from his base at Manzhouli in January 1918 and was pushed back, but the British Foreign Office agreed to pay him £10,000 a month with no conditions, France also funded him, and Japan placed an intelligence officer at his headquarters. By the time the British subsidy ended he was, for practical purposes, a Japanese puppet. Having taken control of Transbaikalia in August, his men captured Chita on 6 September and slaughtered 348 of its citizens; Chita became his capital. His domain stretched from Verkhneudinsk near Lake Baikal to the Shilka River and Sretensk and to Manzhouli. When Kolchak became Supreme Ruler, Semyonov refused to submit. Kolchak considered sending troops to remove him but gave up because the Japanese protected him, and in October 1919 he instead recognised Semyonov as commander-in-chief of the Transbaikal region. Semyonov was described as a "plain bandit" who held up trains and extorted payments whatever the load and whoever it was for. The fortress that his subordinate Roman von Ungern-Sternberg built at Dauria station became known as a "torture centre" filled with the bones of the executed. 17 18

Ivan Kalmykov, ataman of the Ussuri Cossacks, took Khabarovsk on 5 September 1918 and became head of its garrison. According to Russian-language sources there were several mass shootings without trial in Khabarovsk that September, and in November some 20 more people died the same way. Alexandra Kim, arrested by Whites and Japanese troops on 4 September, was shot by Kalmykov's Cossacks. The robbery, murder and rape committed by Kalmykov's men angered many in the White movement, Kolchak among them. His men were accused of killing a Swedish and a Norwegian representative of the International Red Cross and of shelling Chinese gunboats on the Amur. Isolated in February 1920, Kalmykov secretly handed 622 kg of gold from the Khabarovsk branch of the State Bank to the Japanese command and fled into China; detained by the Chinese authorities, he was shot while trying to escape in September. Estimates of the toll vary. English-language sources say US Army intelligence held Semyonov responsible for executing 30,000 people in one year; Russian-language sources say William Graves reported 40,000. In the prison at Troitskosavsk about 1,500 people were killed between 24 December 1919 and 10 January 1920. 14 19 5 17 20

Graves later testified: "Semeonoff and Kalmikoff soldiers, under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people, and these murders could have been stopped any day Japan wished. ... I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks." When Kolchak handed military power in the Far East to Semyonov on 4 January 1920, real power was still divided between Sergei Rozanov in Vladivostok, Kalmykov in Khabarovsk and the Amur ataman in Blagoveshchensk, all of whom depended on Japanese money and troops. What tied the region together was the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1919 the American railway engineer John Frank Stevens headed the Inter-Allied Technical Board that administered and ran the Chinese Eastern and Siberian railways, a role that also meant keeping the Chinese Eastern Railway out of Japanese hands. Under the inter-Allied railway agreement, American troops guarded the line from Vladivostok to Ussuriysk and a section near Verkhneudinsk, and on 27 January 1919 the Legion's commander Jan Syrový declared the line between Novonikolaevsk and Irkutsk a Czechoslovak zone of operations. 14 21 22 10

Allied intervention: Japan, the United States and Britain

Intervention in the Far East began with a race. When Britain sounded out the United States about a joint intervention at Vladivostok without consulting Japan and ordered the cruiser HMS Suffolk there from Hong Kong, Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake ordered the navy to get there first. The battleship Iwami reached Vladivostok on 12 January 1918, two days ahead of Suffolk. After an armed mob looted a Japanese-owned store and killed its owner, Japan landed marines. In February 1918 the Japanese Army General Staff formed a "Siberia Planning Committee" that saw the collapse of tsarism as a chance to detach Siberia as a buffer state. In July Woodrow Wilson, citing the rescue of the Czechoslovak Legion, asked Japan for 7,000 troops as part of an international force of 25,000. After heated debate in the Diet, the Terauchi cabinet agreed to send 12,000, but under Japanese command alone. The actual deployment was several times larger: by the end of August 18,000 had landed at Vladivostok and 6,000 more had moved through Manchuria to Manzhouli, and by early November there were more than 70,000. On 18 August General Otani Kikuzo assumed command of all Allied forces. 6 13

The other contingents were far smaller. On 3 August 1918 a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel John Ward, a trade-union leader and Liberal MP, became the first Allied land force to land at Vladivostok; Britain sent 1,800 men in two battalions in all, plus a 500-strong military mission under General Alfred Knox. France sent a 500-man colonial regiment from Indochina and Canada 4,192 men. The Canadian sailing was delayed by a mutiny in Victoria of two mainly French-Canadian companies; most of the Canadians stayed in Vladivostok, and all had left by 5 June 1919. Chinese, Italian, Polish, Serbian and Romanian units came too. On the Ussuri front, at the Battle of Dukhovskaya on 23–25 August, Allied forces under a Japanese commander, supported by British armoured trains, attacked five Bolshevik armoured trains and ended organised resistance there; 600 Japanese were killed. While British, French and Italian units went west with the Legion towards the Urals, the Japanese refused to go west of Lake Baikal. By November they held every port of the Maritime Province and the main towns of Siberia east of Chita. 13 23

The American Expeditionary Force, Siberia was commanded by Major General William Graves and numbered between 7,950 and 8,763 men depending on the source. The first 3,000 landed at Vladivostok on 15–21 August, and Graves arrived in early September. He saw his mission as protecting American-supplied property and helping the Legion leave, not fighting the Bolsheviks. Proclaiming "non-interference in Russia's internal affairs" and "complete neutrality", he treated Kolchak's forces and the Red partisans alike, and in the American zone he let miners of the Suchan coalfield hold meetings. Britain's Ward accused the Americans of "protecting" Bolsheviks in a neutral zone from which they raided, and Semyonov accused Graves of helping the Reds. Graves suspected Japan of planning to annex the Amur region east of Baikal, and the Americans stayed east of Baikal partly to watch the Japanese. American-Japanese friction came close to shooting. At Evgenevka station an American sentry bayoneted a Japanese soldier and both sides levelled their guns, and in October 1919 at Iman an American corporal seized by Rozanov's troops was flogged at Kalmykov's headquarters. Some accounts hold that Japan cared less about the White drive west than about commercially dominating the nearby Russian and Chinese territories. 24 25 22 13 26

The partisan war and the collapse of the Omsk regime

The Kolchak regime's requisitions, mobilisations and punishments drove the Siberian countryside to revolt. On 3 December 1918 the government amended the criminal code "to preserve the system and rule of the Supreme Ruler", widening the death penalty and trial by military courts. In the Yenisei region General Sergei Rozanov ordered: "Those villages whose population meets troops with arms, burn down the villages and shoot the adult males without exception." A Menshevik paper quoted in English-language sources claimed that 4,000 peasants fell victim to field courts and punitive expeditions. Resistance began in December 1918. On 2 December an underground group seized the district office of Stepnoi Badzhei in Krasnoyarsk county and set up a revolutionary committee, and that month Vasily Yakovenko led a rising at Taseyevo in Kansk county. From January 1919 the Taseyevo partisan republic had a military-revolutionary staff, and its forces reached up to 15,000. At Achinsk Pyotr Shchetinkin, a former staff captain who held all four classes of the St George Cross, began armed action on 5 January 1919. In April he joined forces with Alexander Kravchenko and became chief of staff of their partisan army, which marched 700 km south through the taiga and took Minusinsk on 13 September. By November it numbered 18,000. 27 28 29 30 31 32

On the Altai steppe the partisans were led by Yefim Mamontov, a peasant-born telegraphist decorated with the St George Cross. In September 1918 he set out to help a peasant revolt at Cherny Dol against the Provisional Siberian Government, went into hiding when it was crushed, and from spring 1919 led a mounted band in the south of Slavgorod county. When Kolchak declared 18 counties of Western Siberia, including the whole Altai, a zone of military operations and sent punitive troops, commanders meeting at the village of Utichye on 7 October 1919 merged their forces into the West Siberian Peasant Red Army and chose Mamontov as commander-in-chief. English-language sources put the army at 25,000; Russian-language sources at about 50,000 in 25 regiments by the end of 1919. The partisans failed to storm Barnaul on 6–7 December, but the nearly encircled Whites abandoned the city on the night of 10 December. According to English-language sources, about 100,000 Siberian partisans had seized vast regions by autumn 1919, before the Red Army arrived, and in February 1920 some 20,000 took the Amur region. Once regular troops arrived the partisan units were disbanded or absorbed into the Red Army; Kravchenko and Shchetinkin's army became the Fifth Army's Yenisei Rifle Division in January 1920. 33 34 27 32

When the front collapsed in autumn 1919, the rear split apart. On 15 November the Legion sent the Allied representatives a memorandum condemning the conduct of Kolchak's forces, and two days later Gajda led a failed rising against Kolchak in Vladivostok; according to Russian-language sources, Graves acted as a go-between for the SR underground and the Czechoslovaks in that plot. In Irkutsk on 12 November a conference of Siberian zemstvos and town dumas elected the Political Centre, made up of SRs, Mensheviks, zemstvo men and peasant organisations. It aimed to overthrow Kolchak, prevent a Communist victory and create a democratic buffer state in Eastern Siberia and the Far East, and its rising had taken Irkutsk by 5 January 1920. As Vladimir Kappel's army approached on the Great Siberian Ice March, the Legion handed Kolchak to the Political Centre in exchange for passage east. The Political Centre transferred power to the Bolshevik Military-Revolutionary Committee on 23 January, and Kolchak was shot on 7 February. That same day the Legion signed an armistice with the Fifth Army at Kutin that guaranteed its passage to Vladivostok, in return for leaving the remaining gold with the Irkutsk authorities. 27 22 35 11 36

The final stage was as cruel as the Siberian winter. In December 1919 a detachment Semyonov sent to Irkutsk took 31 hostages aboard an icebreaker on Lake Baikal and on 5 January clubbed them to death one by one with a wooden mallet before throwing them overboard. Kappel's army and their families, about 30,000 people, bypassed the rising in Krasnoyarsk and crossed frozen Lake Baikal towards Chita; Kappel died of frostbite and pneumonia on 26 January. The pursuing Fifth Army was commanded by Genrikh Eiche. But the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, anxious to avoid a clash with Japan, ordered it not to advance beyond Irkutsk. The last Legion train passed through Irkutsk on 1 March, and the legionaries left Vladivostok in 36 sailings by September 1920. In all 67,739 people were evacuated with the Legion, including 56,455 soldiers and 3,004 officers; 4,112 legionaries had been killed in Russia. Shchetinkin and Mamontov sat as judges on the Extraordinary Revolutionary Tribunal of Siberia that tried Kolchak's ministers in May 1920. 17 36 11 30 33

The Far Eastern Republic and Japan: 1920

Freed from prison in Irkutsk, Krasnoshchyokov crossed the front line in January 1920 to Red Army headquarters in Tomsk and persuaded Lenin to create a buffer state in the Far East so that the Allied troops could withdraw without loss of face. The Political Centre had made a similar proposal, and Russian-language sources name Ivan Smirnov and Krasnoshchyokov as the authors of the idea. Lenin and the Moscow leadership overrode local Communists who believed their roughly 4,000 members could take power themselves: with some 70,000 Japanese and American troops present, proclaiming Soviet power might be a provocation, and in the west war with Poland was coming. On 18 February the Politburo approved the buffer, which Moscow saw as a kind of "Brest-Litovsk in the east" that would give it breathing space. On 6 April a constituent congress in Verkhneudinsk proclaimed the Far Eastern Republic. Krasnoshchyokov wrote its constitution in English before it was translated into Russian, and became head of government and foreign minister. Despite its appearance as a multi-party democracy, the republic depended from the start on Moscow's financial, diplomatic and military support and was directed by the party's Far Eastern Bureau. 3 37 38

A different path was tried in the Maritime Province. A rising in Vladivostok on 31 January 1920 ousted Kolchak's representative Rozanov and installed a Primorye zemstvo government, a coalition in which the Bolsheviks Sergei Lazo and Pyotr Nikiforov held the upper hand. Lazo won over the officer cadets on Russky Island by going to them alone and unarmed and making a speech. The Japanese declared neutrality on 4 February, but as the Vladivostok government fell under Bolshevik control and moved to proclaim Soviet power, they struck at revolutionary forces across the Maritime Province on 4–5 April. Lazo was arrested by the Japanese that night and at the end of May was handed over with his comrades Lutsky and Sibirtsev to White Cossacks and killed. The widespread story that he was burned alive in a locomotive firebox is treated as a legend in the latest history of the Russian Far East, which cites records that he was shot under another name at Egersheld and his body burned there. The partisans scattered by the Japanese attack could not strike back for some time, and the plan to build the buffer around Vladivostok collapsed. The last American troops had already left on 1 April, and Japan was now the only occupying power. 2 38 7 24

The worst tragedy of the period took place at Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, a gold-mining town at the mouth of the Amur. In January 1920 several thousand partisans under the anarchist Yakov Tryapitsyn besieged the town, which held a Japanese garrison of 350, about 450 Japanese civilians and some 300 Whites. After a truce on 28 February let the partisans in, arrests and executions of residents began; when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on 12 March, four days of fighting ended with the garrison wiped out and the consulate burned. Up to 500 partisans also died. In late May, as Japanese reinforcements approached, Tryapitsyn's headquarters executed the remaining 129 Japanese prisoners and other inmates, drove the population into the taiga and burned the town; Russian-language sources say only 35 of 1,165 residential buildings survived. Death tolls differ. Japan's delegate told the Washington Conference that more than 700 Japanese had been killed, while an estimate by the Sakhalin authorities cited in English-language sources put the region's losses, including deaths from hunger, at 10,000–15,000. Tryapitsyn was tried by a partisan court at Kerbi in July and shot. Japan used the incident to justify occupying northern Sakhalin, though Russian-language sources point out that the occupation began on 22 April, before the May executions. 39 7 37

Even so, the buffer state achieved its purpose. The Japanese army command recognised the Far Eastern Republic on 11 May, and Soviet Russia soon recognised it too. After talks at Gongota station that began on 24 May, the Japanese expeditionary force and the republic signed the Gongota Agreement on 15 July, creating a neutral zone between Verkhneudinsk and Chita. Under constant pressure from partisans, the Japanese could now leave Transbaikalia without losing face, and they completed the withdrawal on 15 October. Deprived of his patron, Semyonov's "Russian Eastern Outskirts" fell to an offensive by Eiche's Fifth Army, the republic's People's Revolutionary Army and the partisans. On 22 October the People's Revolutionary Army and partisans entered Chita, and Semyonov escaped to Manchuria by plane. Around the same time the Japanese withdrew from Khabarovsk as well. At a conference in Chita from 28 October to 11 November, representatives of five regional governments in Transbaikalia, the Amur, the Maritime Province and Sakhalin confirmed their union and moved the capital to Chita. A constituent assembly elected from 9 January 1921 adopted a constitution resembling that of the United States on 27 April. Its majority consisted of 92 Communists and 183 deputies of the allied peasant majority faction. 3 38 37 17

1921: the "black buffer" in Vladivostok and Ungern

On 26 May 1921 a White coup took place in Vladivostok with the connivance and protection of Japanese troops. Its main force was the Kappelevtsy, Kappel's former troops who had survived the Great Siberian Ice March. The Primorye zemstvo government led by the Bolshevik Vasily Antonov fell, and a congress of non-socialist organisations chose Spiridon Merkulov to head a Provisional Priamur Government. He and his brother Nikolai Merkulov, Vladivostok businessmen and former State Duma deputies, stood at its centre. The Soviet side called it the "black buffer". Soon afterwards Semyonov, Kolchak's designated successor, arrived in Vladivostok and tried to proclaim himself commander-in-chief, but failed when the Japanese withheld their support; the Kappelevtsy and Semyonov's men despised each other. By September Semyonov had left Russian territory for good. Talks between the Far Eastern Republic and Japan at Dairen from August to November broke down over 17 Japanese demands, which included disarming fortresses and the fleet, free navigation on the Amur and Ussuri, an 80-year lease of northern Sakhalin and abandonment of the "communist regime". 37 38 40 41 17

There were tensions inside the Far Eastern Republic too. Krasnoshchyokov was accused of legalising the SRs and Mensheviks, drawing them into the coalition government and overstressing the republic's independence from Moscow. His supporter Eiche, commander-in-chief of the People's Revolutionary Army, was removed first, and Krasnoshchyokov himself was recalled at the end of 1921; English-language sources date his removal from office to April and say tuberculosis was the official reason but that local Bolsheviks objected to his leadership style. On 28 June the People's Revolutionary Army tried to disarm Ilya Pak's United Sakhalin Partisan Detachment, and in the resulting Amur incident between 118 and 400 Korean partisans were killed, many of them drowning in the Zeya. Meanwhile Ungern, who had broken with Semyonov in August 1920, led his Asiatic Cavalry Division into Mongolia and drove the Chinese out of Urga in February 1921, a story told in the Mongolian event. In May–June Ungern advanced on Troitskosavsk in Transbaikalia and was defeated on 11–13 June; on 18 July he raided Soviet territory again with about 3,000 men, but few locals joined him. In August a unit commanded by Shchetinkin took custody of Ungern, who had been seized by a Mongol prince, and after a six-hour trial in Novonikolayevsk he was executed on 15 September. 4 3 38 18 30

In autumn 1921 the Priamur regime tried to expand before the Japanese left. General Viktorin Molchanov's White Insurgent Army first struck the partisan bases around Suchan and Anuchino in early November and scattered them, then opened its main offensive on 30 November, advancing north along the railway and the Ussuri River. The republic's People's Revolutionary Army had just demobilised two age groups without yet receiving new conscripts, and had only about 1,200 infantry and 280 cavalry at the front. In December the Whites took Khabarovsk, extending their territory by 600 versts. As they retreated from Khabarovsk the Bolsheviks blew up the station, a church and a hospital and shot 22 prisoners; even V. A. Maslennikov of the Far Eastern Bureau called it "unnecessary destruction". But the Whites had failed to procure winter clothing. On 28 December some 1,000 White infantry and 500 cavalry were stopped at In station west of Khabarovsk by People's Revolutionary Army troops backed by an armoured train, losing 300 dead, the army's first victory. The Whites fell back to Volochayevka and dug in, while behind them partisans sabotaged the railways and disrupted White mobilisation and supply. 42 43 40 7

1922: from Volochayevka to Vladivostok

Vasily Blyukher, military commander of the Far Eastern Republic from 1921, took personal command of the campaign against the Whites east of the Amur from December. The Whites had fortified 18 km between the Amur and Tunguska rivers in front of Volochayevka station, centred on the hill of Iyun-Koran, with trenches, ice ramparts and wire five or six rows deep. The People's Revolutionary Army was reinforced with 1,000 Communists and local partisans and, according to English-language sources, had 7,600 men, 30 field guns and two light tanks against 4,950 Whites with 13 guns. The first assault, launched on 10 February 1922 in severe cold of −30 °C and deep snow, failed. According to Russian-language sources the army lost 480 men killed, wounded and frozen that day, along with both tanks; short of wire-cutters, soldiers hacked at the wire with bayonets and rifle butts. Pavel Postyshev, who had worked in the Far East since the Tsentrosibir days, sat on the Eastern Front's military council. Blyukher regrouped for a day and attacked again on 12 February, taking the hill around noon. Molchanov retreated, and the People's Revolutionary Army entered Khabarovsk on 13 or 14 February. On 21 March it reached Ussuri station, south of which lay a "neutral zone" controlled by the Japanese. 44 43 45 42 46

The decisive change came from Tokyo. Facing the human and economic cost of the intervention, domestic opposition and diplomatic pressure from the United States and Britain, the cabinet of Kato Tomosaburo announced on 24 June 1922 that all troops would leave Russian territory by the end of October. Losing their Japanese shield, the Whites in Vladivostok adopted rules for convening a Zemsky Sobor two days later. Some 230 delegates gathered in a Vladivostok theatre on 23 July; Communists and other "internationalist" socialists were barred. The Sobor resolved to hand supreme power to the Romanov dynasty, and on 5 August abolished the Merkulov government and elected Mikhail Diterikhs temporary dictator. Diterikhs took the archaic title of "Zemsky Voyevoda" and renamed his army the "Zemskaya Rat". But the chamber of commerce and private firms refused donations, men liable for mobilisation fled to Harbin, Korea and the countryside, and Japanese diplomats refused to supply ammunition. An offensive towards Khabarovsk in early September also failed. Ieronim Uborevich, who on 17 August 1922 became the republic's war minister and commander-in-chief of the People's Revolutionary Army, called on White soldiers to go home rather than sell their honour to foreign capitalists. 13 6 40 41 47

On 4 October the People's Revolutionary Army launched its last major operation, the Primorye operation. Its strike group had 10,000 men, 288 machine guns, 24 guns, three armoured trains and three aircraft, backed by 5,000 men of the Transbaikal division and 5,000 partisans. Diterikhs had 12,800 infantry and 2,700 cavalry but had to divert up to a third of them against the partisans. The army stormed the Spassk fortified district on 8–9 October and destroyed the main force of the Zemskaya Rat around Monastyrishche on 14 October. When it reached the outskirts of Vladivostok on 19 October, up to 20,000 Japanese troops were still in the city. When the Japanese threatened to halt their evacuation if any clash occurred, the army pulled back a few versts and waited. On 20 October Diterikhs and about 7,000 soldiers and family members left from Posyet on Japanese transports. Meanwhile a group of Siberian regionalists proclaimed an "autonomous Siberia" government that did nothing but put up hand-written posters and was nicknamed the "poster government". On 24 October at Sedanka the Japanese signed an agreement to clear Vladivostok by 4 p.m. on the 25th. 48 40

At 4 p.m. on 25 October 1922 the advance units of the People's Revolutionary Army entered Vladivostok on the heels of the departing Japanese. Anti-Bolshevik leaders left with the Japanese, and according to Russian-language sources American observers reported that the army restored order and was welcomed by the population. The next day Lenin telegraphed the chairman of the republic's Council of Ministers that, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, the Red Army had reunited with the working masses of Russia the citizens who had endured "the heavy yoke of Japanese imperialism". The Siberian intervention was over, though Japan occupied northern Sakhalin until May 1925. So was the republic's purpose. In autumn 1922 its authorities dissolved the Menshevik organisations and put SRs on trial, and on 27 October passed a law allowing administrative exile for a wide range of acts against the republic. The republic's government dissolved itself, and on 15 November the republic entered the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as the Far Eastern Region. The People's Revolutionary Army was renamed the Fifth Army on 16 November. 48 38 37 6

The last expedition in Yakutia and historical assessments

Even after Vladivostok fell, fighting continued in the north. In September 1921 about 200 insurgents under Cornet Korobeinikov rose in the Maysky district of Yakutia, and in March 1922 Yakut intellectuals at Churapcha set up a Provisional Yakut Regional People's Administration and a Yakut People's Army. Russian-language sources trace the revolt to resentment among the well-off after the Bolsheviks freed poor dependants bound by debt and redistributed property. According to English-language sources the insurgents even took Yakutsk on 23 March. On 30 August 1922 a volunteer force under Anatoly Pepelyayev sailed from Vladivostok and landed at Ayan on the Sea of Okhotsk; sources put it at about 750 or at 553 men. Pepelyayev planned to take Yakutsk and Irkutsk and form a new Provisional Siberian Government, and marched not under the imperial tricolour but under the white-and-green flag of the Siberian autonomy of 1918. But by the time he reached Nelkan at the end of October, Vladivostok had fallen. In February 1923 Ivan Strod's unit stopped him at Sasyl-Sasyg, and Pepelyayev surrendered at Ayan on 17 June 1923, in what was the last siege of the Civil War. He spent 13 years in the camps and was executed in the Great Purge in 1938. 49 50 51

Assessments of the Allied intervention are mostly harsh. American sources say Wilson's intervention failed by every measure: the Eastern Front was not re-established, the supplies stockpiled in Russian ports were not saved, no popular non-Communist government was created, and even the Legion's extraction owed little to Graves's small force. Army Chief of Staff Peyton C. March called the Russian expeditions "a military crime". The Americans lost 189 men in 19 months. The historian Benson Bobrick wrote of Graves: "In the whole sad debacle, he may have been the only honorable man." Russian-language sources, by contrast, also record that Graves accused Semyonov in 1922 and lost the resulting libel case. For Japan the Siberian expedition was a deeper wound. English-language sources variously give casualties as some 5,000 dead from combat and disease, or as 1,399 killed and 1,717 dead of disease, and the cost exceeded 900 million yen. In the Diet the army was accused of misrepresenting the size of the forces sent, misappropriating secret funds and supporting figures such as Ungern, and the intervention shattered wartime unity, setting army against government and faction against faction within the army. 24 25 22 13 6

In Soviet and Russian historiography, 25 October 1922 was the "liberation of the Far East". The Maritime Province celebrated it as a holiday in Soviet times, and in 1995 the regional duma declared it again "Primorye Day and the day of the liberation of the Far East from foreign interventionists and White Guards". Views of the Far Eastern Republic differ. Russian-language sources describe it as de jure an independent democratic state but de facto a puppet buffer of Soviet Russia, while also seeing its mix of market and plan as anticipating NEP a year later. The buffer avoided direct war with Japan and secured the withdrawal of foreign troops, but its multi-party system was wound up once the Communists' aims had been achieved. The Nikolayevsk incident long remained two separate stories. The Soviet Union treated Tryapitsyn's personal arbitrariness and the execution of Japanese prisoners as the essence of the affair, while Japan declared national mourning and used it to justify occupying northern Sakhalin. A number of recent historians regard the massacre of thousands of Russian residents and the burning of the town by Tryapitsyn's band as cruelty without parallel in that war. In a region where the White terror of Semyonov and Kalmykov, Red partisan terror and Japanese punitive operations overlapped, the Civil War lasted longer than on any other front. 48 38 39 7