Harbin Operation

Overview

The Harbin Operation was one of the secret national operations carried out by the NKVD during the Great Terror of 1937-1938; its formal basis was Operational Order No. 00593. Signed by NKVD People's Commissar Nikolai Yezhov on 20 September 1937, the order opened with the words "all Harbinites are subject to arrest", followed by a list of thirteen clarifying points. Those targeted as "Harbinites" were former employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway, re-emigrants from Manchuria, and other people whose biographies were connected with Manchuria.

Background

The Chinese Eastern Railway was built between 1897 and 1903. In the 1920s Manchuria had a large Russian population, and Russians made up a substantial share of Harbin's inhabitants. When the Soviet Union sold its share of the railway to Manchukuo in 1935, Soviet citizens employed by the railway and their families were allowed to move to the Soviet Union. Estimates of how many left differ. According to Soviet People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs data, 21,343 people entered the Union in 1935 alone, while the researcher Onegina puts the figure at around 25,000. Returnees were distributed among the railways of the Volga region, the Urals, Central Asia, the North Caucasus and elsewhere; they were not allowed to settle or register in Moscow, and they immediately came under NKVD surveillance. The first mass arrests among Harbinites took place as early as 1936, aimed at former White Guardists, employees of White counter-intelligence and members of emigre political organisations.

The order and its mechanism

Order No. 00593 was accompanied by a closed letter that declared Harbinites agents of Japanese, and more rarely Chinese, intelligence. The operation was initially allotted the period from 1 October to 25 December 1937, but this deadline was extended many times. Those arrested were divided into two categories: the first comprised "participants in diversionary, espionage and terrorist groups" and "anti-Soviet activists", who were subject to execution; the second comprised "less active Harbinites", who received sentences of eight to ten years in the camps. The order instructed that the family members of those arrested be handled under NKVD Order No. 00486 on the families of "traitors to the Motherland".

Most cases were examined outside the courts through the so-called album procedure, by the Commission of the NKVD and the Procurator of the USSR. Cases handled by the railway transport departments were sent to troikas. In mid-September 1938 the album procedure was abolished and unfinished cases were transferred to reconstituted troikas; the repressive campaign continued until mid-November 1938.

Scope of the target category

In practice the definition of a "Harbinite" covered more than the returnees of 1935: it took in those who had returned in the early 1920s, former soldiers of the White armies, defectors, and virtually anyone who had been in China. In the words of N. N. Ablazhey, "everyone who had ever been in China was arrested." Roughly half the cases were group cases, and among those arrested former railway employees accounted for 18.6 per cent, White emigres for about 28 per cent, and White Guard punitive troops, mainly Transbaikal Cossacks, for 16.8 per cent.

Character as a national operation

Nicolas Werth treats the operation as the clearest illustration that Soviet xenophobia was an ideological rather than an ethnic concept. Although most Harbinites were ethnic Russians, their cross-border ties to the Harbinites remaining in China made them the functional equivalent of a diaspora nationality, and so despite their Russianness they were classed as an "enemy group" within the framework of the national operations. In scale the operation was the third largest, after the German and Polish operations.

Scale

Estimates of the number of victims vary with the source of the statistics:

• The commission of the CPSU Central Committee that worked in 1956 counted 30,938 files opened on Harbinites: 19,312 people received death sentences and a further 10,669 received other punishments.
• N. N. Ablazhey gives 42,507 repressed and 28,348 executed over the period of the operation (September 1937 to November 1938), and, on a fuller accounting of the "Harbin line" for 1937-1938, 46,317 convicted and 30,992 shot.
• The human rights society Memorial estimates 49,470 convicted with 31,226 death sentences. English-language sources sometimes cite Memorial figures of 48,133 repressed and 30,992 shot.

Other Russian-language research gives between 30,000 and 49,000 convicted on the Harbin line over 1937-1938, of whom between 19,000 and 31,000 were sentenced to be shot.

Memory and disclosure

The first consolidated count of the operation's victims was made by a commission of the CPSU Central Committee in 1956, on the eve of the Twentieth Party Congress. Legal rehabilitation of the victims of political repression came with the adoption on 18 October 1991 of the relevant law. The text of Order No. 00593 has been declassified in Russia, whereas the closed letter setting out the detailed rationale for the operation long remained classified. In 2015, in a suit brought by the historian S. B. Prudovsky, the Russian Supreme Court held that the FSB was entitled to refuse to declassify this letter, even though the document had been opened for access in Ukraine as early as 2011. Prudovsky subsequently sought the disclosure of the names of the NKVD officers who carried out the operation.

Al Jazeera's 2017 report carries testimony from relatives including Viktor Didenko and Elena Rudiy. Didenko was born in Harbin in 1935, and his father Pavel Didenko went to work on 5 August 1937 and was never seen again. He learned of his father's death only in 1958, and the first death certificate stated that he had died of cancer in 1943; it was only in 1991 that he was notified that his father had in fact been shot in 1937. Yuliy Rudiy, who had headed the Chinese Eastern Railway in Harbin, was arrested after returning in 1937 and shot in February 1938; all charges were dropped in 1956.