Provisional Priamurye Government
프리아무르 임시정부
The anti-Bolshevik regime set up by a White coup in Vladivostok in May 1921, which ruled southern Primorye until October 1922. Led by the brothers Spiridon and Nikolai Merkulov and dependent on Japanese protection, it was called the "Black Buffer" by the Soviet side, in contrast to the Far Eastern Republic. In the summer of 1922 Mikhail Diterikhs took power and renamed it the Priamurye Zemsky Krai, but it collapsed with the Japanese withdrawal.
In depth
On 26 May 1921 White insurgents in Vladivostok overthrew the Primorye zemstvo government headed by the Bolshevik Vasily Antonov, which recognised the Far Eastern Republic. Power passed to a congress of non-socialist organisations of the Far East, which elected the Provisional Priamurye Government. The coup was carried out by the Kappelevtsy, remnants of Vladimir Kappel’s army, and the regime’s forces, the White Far Eastern Army, were drawn from the former troops of Kappel and of Ataman Grigory Semyonov; its highest representative body was a People’s Assembly. The Merkulov brothers who led it had both sat in the State Duma; Spiridon was, according to English sources, a former official of the Ministry of Agriculture and, according to Russian sources, a lawyer, while Nikolai was a merchant. The Japanese and American consular corps backed the regime, and Japan supported it militarily with the troops it had stationed in Primorye. Semyonov tried to take power in Priamurye later in 1921 but got no Japanese backing and withdrew; the Kappelevtsy and Semyonov’s men despised each other. Almost immediately after the coup a partisan movement, led above all by the Bolsheviks, revived across Primorye.
The regime gradually extended its territory to Khabarovsk and to Spassk, north of Vladivostok. But it could not master the partisans, and after its troops were beaten by the Far Eastern Republic’s People’s Revolutionary Army around Khabarovsk in the winter and spring of 1922, the Merkulov government resigned that summer. On 23 July Diterikhs, one of Kolchak’s generals, became ruler, combining the posts of head of government and commander-in-chief. The Priamurye Zemsky Sobor, convened that July, called on Russians to repent for the overthrow of the Tsar and proclaimed Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich tsar; Diterikhs renamed the territory the Priamurye Zemsky Krai and the army the Zemskaya Rat. The Zemskaya Rat went on the offensive on 1 September but was all but destroyed in October. As the Japanese withdrew, the People’s Revolutionary Army entered Vladivostok on 25 October; the so-called "placard government" of Siberian regionalists under Sazonov, set up at the last moment, achieved nothing. English sources treat the surrender of the Ayano-Maysky district, held by Anatoly Pepelyayev, in June 1923 as the end of the Russian Civil War.