Grigory Mikhaylovich Semyonov

Semyonov's rule in Transbaikal proceeded alongside mass terror. From 1918, when his forces consolidated control of the region, to their collapse in 1920, killings carried out in his name were recorded as a leading case of the White Terror. Russian-language accounts state that the number of people executed by Semyonov's units in Transbaikal is unknown, and that different sources give different figures. In his report, the American general William Graves held Semyonov's troops responsible for the murder of 40,000 people. US Army intelligence estimated that he executed 30,000 in a single year, and in US Senate hearings Graves and Charles Morrow testified that Semyonov, by a deliberate campaign of murder, rape and plunder, cost the lives of 100,000 people. Because the figures range from 30,000 to 100,000, no single one can be presented as settled fact; each must be attributed to its source.

Large detention and execution sites were established in Transbaikal. The largest prisons were at Dauriya station and at Makkaveyevo; at Dauriya were quartered troops of Baron Ungern, nominally subordinate to Semyonov, and at Makkaveyevo the commander was Tirbakh. In August 1919 a temporary prison was created at Troitskosavsk (formerly Kyakhta) to hold political prisoners from prisons across the Urals and western Siberia. Executions of its inmates were carried out by Cossacks from Semyonov's detachments, and the mass killing of about 1,500 prisoners between 24 December 1919 and 10 January 1920 became known as the Troitskosavsk tragedy. On 1 and 5 January 1920 alone, 481 people were shot. In July of the same year at Adrianovka station, Semyonov's punitive detachments shot about 3,000 captured Red Army soldiers; the American eyewitness Charles Haskell Morrow wrote that prisoners filling whole railcars were unloaded, led to large pits and shot with machine guns, and that the peak of the executions was the killing in one day of prisoners held in 53 railcars, more than 1,600 people.

The brutality also operated at the level of individual commanders. Baron Ungern, Tirbakh, and the punitive detachments of Chistokhin and Filipin were notorious for cruelty. Vlas'yevskii, once head of Semyonov's personal chancellery, testified that Ungern spared neither women nor children and wiped out whole villages, and that Tirbakh held summary courts at Makkaveyevo. Of such methods Semyonov himself said that in the conditions of an incipient civil war, all softness and humanity had to be discarded.

These killing records were an object of international investigation from the civil-war years. In 1921 Semyonov sought aid in the United States and Canada, was arrested in New York and held six days in a federal jail, and in the same period the US Senate received a report on the occupation of Siberia, Semyonov's record, and his ties to the Japanese military. Posthumous assessments also diverged. On 4 April 1994 and 26 March 1998 the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court reviewed the case, terminating proceedings on the charge of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda for absence of a criminal element, while leaving the rest of the verdict in force and finding the defendants not subject to rehabilitation. The legal finding on responsibility for the killings thus stood, and the hanging was carried out in Moscow on 30 August 1946.