by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] One hundred years ago, on January 4, 1926, a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) signed by Mikhail Kalinin was published:
"To form the Far Eastern Territory, with its center in the city of Khabarovsk, from the provinces of Zabaikalskaya, Amurskaya, Primorskaya (including the northern part of Sakhalin Island), and Kamchatka."
Behind the bureaucratic document signed by the future all-Union elder lies an important fact.
The decree confirmed that in 1926, Moscow had finally consolidated its authority over the area from Dauria to the Bering Strait. Following the Russian Civil War, the Pacific coast remained part of our country, not becoming a sphere of influence for neighboring powers. And our neighbors had always retained this opportunity to acquire the resources of the Far East.
Perhaps the only country that, with the expectation of staying put for the long haul, managed to seriously organize an intervention in Russia, which was torn apart by civil war, was the Japanese Empire. Tokyo saw both an interest and an opportunity to recoup losses from the Russo-Japanese War (at the end of which, the empire "only" gained southern Sakhalin) and to profit from the continent.
In April 1918, Japanese and British forces landed in the port of Vladivostok "for the protection of subjects and property." More precisely, the Japanese, along with a small number of British, landed.
By the end of the year, there were 73,000 Japanese and 9,000 Americans stationed in Primorye and the Amur region. Add to this the 55,000 Czechoslovaks, but they were less subjects than instruments in the hands of serious players.
Britain and other interested parties were more preoccupied with affairs in other parts of the disintegrating empire - in the Transcaucasus, in the South and North of Russia, in Siberia.
"OUR FRIENDS ARE THE JAPANESE"
The Entente (which included Japan) de jure recognized the authority of Admiral Kolchak's Omsk government over the Far East. But de facto, Tokyo worked with its own proxy forces, primarily the army of Ataman Grigory Semyonov, who had a more than tenuous relationship with the admiral and considered Transbaikal to be his fiefdom.
The occupation was carried out with all due formality. A document survives, according to which Vladivostok and the surrounding areas were placed "under the temporary protection of the Allied Powers" for protection from "Austro-German spies" (remember, World War I was still ongoing), while Russian authorities were permitted to act "within the limits of local affairs." Japan acted as the Allied Power.
Thus, Emperor Yoshihito's loyal subjects presented their Mikado with gold, coal, timber, and fish from the Far East, as well as warehouses, railway junctions, and an ocean port for transporting these riches. The Japanese army also occupied the potentially valuable northern Sakhalin, where Russian engineers had been searching for oil reserves since the late 19th century.
The memorandum of the Japanese government of December 16, 1920 is indicative:
On the subordination of the fisheries in the lower reaches of the Amur, in the Amur estuary, to the Japanese administration and on the inclusion of the fisheries of Northern Sakhalin in the jurisdiction of Southern Sakhalin (the Japanese prefecture of Karafuto).
The figures for the economic effect are also given there: in 1918–1920, Japanese fishermen annually received products in Russian waters worth an average of 24.6 million yen—12.3 million dollars at the time (or 197.4 million dollars in 2025).
For settlements on Russian territory, banknotes for 30 million yen were printed with the inscriptions in Russian: “Imperial Japanese Government” and “1 Iyen in Japanese currency.”
Kolchak's generals could only publicly express "deep concern" about what the Japanese were doing in Primorye, as well as Semyonov in "his" Transbaikalia and Amur Region.
“Do our Japanese friends really follow the motto ‘divide et impera’ (divide and rule)?” the head of the Omsk military ministry, General Alexei Budberg, was indignant.
Behind the scenes, other conversations were taking place. Kolchak's Prime Minister, Pyotr Vologodsky, recorded the officers' mood in his diary: "It would be better to cede to Japan what she is seeking—Sakhalin, Kamchatka, fishing, the East China Road."
DEMOCRACY NAMED AFTER LENIN
However, while Hara Takashi's cabinet was calculating the benefits of fishing in Russian waters in Tokyo in 1920, significant changes were taking place in Siberia.
In January, the Red Army, having broken Kolchak's front, captured Western Siberia, while the Whites retreated eastward. In February, the supreme ruler Kolchak and his last prime minister, Viktor Pepeliaev, were executed in Irkutsk by order of the local revolutionary committee (acting on direct orders from Vladimir Lenin ).
By March 1920, the territories along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Lake Baikal were under Red Army control. This, however, did not mean the collapse of "White" or "Green" resistance. But a large-scale clash of armies was no longer on the cards. Transbaikalia, the Amur region, and the Far East were a different matter.
Ataman Semyonov's troops remained a viable fighting force. They could, moreover, always retreat to Mongolia or Manchuria and advance again in Transbaikalia and Dauria. It was not for nothing that the lands occupied by Semyonov were called the "Chita Cork."
Primorye had its own unique atmosphere: a coalition "zemstvo" government, including Bolsheviks, ruled in Vladivostok until the spring of 1920. Meanwhile, the White Far Eastern Army, composed of Semyonov's Cossacks and the remnants of Kappel 's Kolchak army, stood along the Ussuri railway. And all this was in the presence of a thousands-strong Japanese contingent.
Under these circumstances, Moscow adopted a plan that was later considered one of Lenin's brilliant decisions. Although in fact, the idea was proposed by experts in the region: Ivan Smirnov, chairman of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, nicknamed the "Siberian Lenin" (executed in 1936 as a member of the left opposition), and Alexander Krasnoshchyokov, an international socialist figure and Trotsky associate who had lived in the Far East (executed in 1937).
They proposed creating a "buffer"—a Far Eastern republic dependent on the RSFSR, but de jure "bourgeois," with a parliament, a multi-party system, and the proclamation of rights and freedoms. The creation of a democratic, independent state was approved by a decision of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), and a special Far Eastern Bureau (Dalburo) of the party was created to oversee it.
Krasnoshchyokov carried the project on his shoulders, as Lenin noted, “it was almost he who organized everything.”
In April 1920, the Far Eastern Republic was officially proclaimed at a congress of workers and partisans in Verkhneudinsk, now Ulan-Ude. After the Semyonovites were driven out of Chita, the capital moved there.
Krasnoshchyokov became chairman of the government (the government in the Far Eastern Republic was something like a collective president), head of the executive branch—the Council of Ministers—and minister of foreign affairs. People's commissars in the Far Eastern Republic were called ministers, in the old-fashioned way.
In general, the republic was unique. The Bolsheviks in the People's Assembly formally shared legislative power with the Socialist Revolutionaries, the "minority peasant faction" (in Soviet Russia, these were called kulaks), and even the Cadets.
The Far Eastern Republic's economy resembled the New Economic Policy (NEP), which would only be introduced in the RSFSR in 1921. The food tax system was replaced by barter, and then by traditional taxation.
The flag of the republic—red with a blue square in the corner—resembled the flag of the Chinese Kuomintang.
The commanders of the People's Revolutionary Army (PRA) of the Far Eastern Republic, appointed by the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, were renowned Red Army commanders— Genrikh Eikhe and later Vasily Blyukher. The PRA successfully defeated the White rebels and Semyonov's Cossacks.
At the same time, in July 1920, the republic conducted negotiations with the Japanese general Yui Mitsue at the Gongota station in Transbaikalia, in which the “Russian Eastern Borderland,” that is, the same Semyonov and his “government,” almost became a third party.
The White-Red reconciliation never came to fruition. However, under the Japanese-Far Eastern Gongotō Accords, the Far Eastern Republic pledged that "the buffer state will not make communism the foundation of its social system," declared that it would not allow the Red Army into its territory, and guaranteed "the personal inviolability of Japanese citizens and respect for their rights within its sphere of influence."
In fact, the Japanese, not without difficulty, acknowledged that neither they nor their protégés Semyonovites could any longer hold Transbaikalia by military means, and they curtailed their presence there.
TERRORIST TRYAPITSYN AND DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER LAZO
Overall, the "buffer" did help avoid a frontal clash between the Reds and the Japanese. Perhaps the only "unpleasant" incident was the Nikolaev Incident and the story of Sergei Lazo —the same man who, according to a popular Soviet-era version, was burned in a locomotive firebox by "Japanese White Guards" (!)
The two incidents are connected, but in a strange way.
In January 1920, the port town of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, where two detachments were stationed—a Japanese force of 350 bayonets and a White Guard force of 300—besieged a 3,000-strong "conditionally Red" detachment led by anarchist Yakov Tryapitsyn. This detachment would later also be conditionally subordinated to the NRA FER. The partisans slaughtered the Whites, expropriated the property of the "bourgeoisie," and maintained neutrality with the Japanese until March.
After some conflict (it was believed that the garrison commander, Major Ishikawa, started it), 700 Japanese were killed and a hundred were taken hostage. When it became known in May that the Japanese were sending an expedition to Nikolaevsk, Yakov Tryapitsyn ordered the prisoners killed and the city destroyed.
In July 1920, 27-year-old Tryapitsyn—by then already commander of the Okhotsk Front of the People's Republic of Armenia—was captured and convicted, essentially lynched, by the surviving Russian residents of Nikolayev. Japan benefited: to prevent similar incidents, the imperial government deployed troops to northern Sakhalin.
The Left Socialist Revolutionary and later Bolshevik Sergei Lazo, unlike the anarchist Tryapitsyn, was an intelligent man – from the Bessarabian nobility.
He had a knack for speaking beautifully. When, in the winter of 1920, the leftist coalition overthrew Kolchak's viceroy, General Sergei Rozanov, in Vladivostok, Lazo propagandized the officers from the ensign school on Russky Island, addressing them with the following words:
"No, we didn't sell our Russian souls to foreign taverns, we didn't exchange them for foreign gold and guns... We will fight with our lives for our Motherland against foreign invasion" (by foreigners, he meant the Japanese). The propaganda worked.
In the coalition Zemstvo Council that seized power in Primorye, Lazo was, by our standards, a vice-premier, and he insisted that the Far Eastern Republic should be organized not in Verkhneudinsk, but here, in Vladivostok, on the basis of the Primorsky Provisional Government.
But the politician Lazo suffered as a result of the Nikolaevsk incident, which he had nothing to do with. Nevertheless, the Japanese arrested the Bolshevik and handed him over from "pluralistic" Vladivostok to the White Cossacks. They apparently executed him. The story of his burning in a locomotive is most likely a legend: squeezing a body into a hole measuring 64 x 45 cm is problematic.
THE JAPANESE LIKE THE "BLACK BUFFER"
In the spring of 1921, when the Red Army soldiers in European Russia were finishing suppressing the Tambov Uprising, a constitution was adopted in the Far Eastern Republic at the instigation of Comrade Krasnoshchyokov, mentioning the separation of powers and a multi-party system.
However, it appears that the Japanese were no longer satisfied with coexistence with the "semi-Soviet" republic (which, moreover, enjoyed weak support in Primorye). In May 1921, the occupiers did not object when the Whites overthrew the "pink" Zemstvo Council in Vladivostok.
The penultimate White government in the former Russian Empire was established, although in Moscow it was dubbed the "black buffer." The regime was led by brothers Nikolai and Spiridon Merkulov, a first-guild merchant and lawyer. The average Soviet reader knew about them from Yulian Semyonov's book "No Password Needed," the second episode in the Isaev-Stirlitz epic.
Less well known is the background against which these upheavals took place.
In August 1921, negotiations between the Far Eastern Republic and the Empire of Japan began in the city of Dairen (the Japanese name for the port of Dalny, captured during the Russo-Japanese War; today it's Dalian, China). The issue at hand was nothing less than the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Primorye, the Nikolaevsk-on-Amur region, and northern Sakhalin. The negotiations were sluggish: the Japanese demanded that the Far Eastern Republic destroy all military fortifications on the border with Korea (a Japanese colony at the time) and near Vladivostok and scuttle what remained of the Pacific Fleet.
But the very idea of raising the troop withdrawal was no accident. The interests of the United States were behind it.
NEGOTIATIONS WITHOUT A TRUCE
The fact is that the much larger Washington Conference was taking place simultaneously with Dairen (a delegation from the Far Eastern Republic also attended, but was not admitted). In Washington, the Western powers, led by the United States and Britain, declared their goal: to curb Japan's appetites in East Asia.
At the same time, the Americans tried to prevent the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance and, in general, to prevent British hegemony in the Pacific Ocean and the Far East.
The situation was reminiscent of the Russo-Japanese War and the peace concluded at Portsmouth, America. London was encouraging Japan to turn against Russia, while the United States acted as a restraining force, seeking to prevent the strengthening of Britain and Japan. Moreover, the British dominion of Canada was on the Americans' side.
In the Russian Primorye region, the interests of Japan and the United States clearly did not coincide, and the Far Eastern Republic (or rather, Moscow, which stands behind it) tried to play on these contradictions.
At the height of the Dairen and Washington negotiations, the Japanese played their trump card in bargaining with the Far Eastern Republic.
On November 30, 1921, the most combat-ready White units in Primorye—the Kappelites—launched an offensive northward. In December, the White Army captured Khabarovsk. The Far Eastern Republic's forces, predominantly partisans, retreated beyond the Amur River.
On December 12, the Japanese delegation in Dairen broke off negotiations, awaiting the outcome of two events: the White offensive in the Amur region and the results of the Washington Conference.
But on December 27–28, 1921, in a battle near In Station, NRA units halted the White advance, and the hopes for an anti-Bolshevik uprising in the Amur region failed to materialize. The war entered a positional phase—as had the Dairen and Washington negotiations.
And then events happened that turned the tables.
The last major battle of the Civil War, February 5–14, 1922, near Volochayevka, ended in the rout of the White rebels. Khabarovsk was recaptured, and the NRA slowly but surely began to suppress the Whites in Primorye.
And on February 6, agreements were signed in Washington, according to which Japan really did (as it later turned out, temporarily) moderate its appetites both in terms of naval development and in terms of expansion in Manchuria and China.
In the Far East, the situation was replayed on the battlefield: it was becoming clear that the Far East would not be a sphere of influence for either Japan or the United States (which clearly had no intention of a large-scale intervention overseas), but would belong to Russia. More precisely, to Soviet Russia.
THE LAST OF THE WHITES
In July 1922, while Moscow's representatives were meeting at the Hague Conference with delegates from Great Britain, Italy, and Japan, and preparations for the proclamation of the USSR were underway in Moscow itself, another coup occurred in Vladivostok.
General Mikhail Diterikhs, one of Kolchak's ministers of war and a staunch monarchist, overthrew the Merkulov brothers and was proclaimed voivode of the Amur Zemstvo region. The line "they dispersed the voivodes" in the Red Army song "Across the Valleys and Hills" refers specifically to him. The remnants of the White armies were united into the Zemstvo Host.
At the same time, the governor approved and financed the desperate idea of 30-year-old General Anatoly Pepelyaev, the younger brother of the executed Kolchak minister, to set out on a naval expedition to the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk and raise uprisings among the Tungus and Yakuts.
The last romantic attempt to continue the struggle for a united and indivisible Russia was doomed. Dieterichs's Zemstvo army, alas, was just such a tool in the hands of the Japanese.
The Reds, pursuing pragmatic goals in the name of the triumph of the "world revolution," unwittingly acted as the gatherers of Russian lands. A new era was dawning: on October 12, 1922, the State Bank of the USSR was established, and on October 29, the Tupolev Design Bureau was founded. Between these events came Japan's decision to withdraw its contingent from Vladivostok (October 23) and the NRA's entry into this "White Guard stronghold."
General Pepeliaev's "Siberian Volunteer Squad," which had landed far to the north, did indeed continue the war in what is now Khabarovsk Krai and Yakutia, but it was a dying battle. On June 19, 1923, Pepeliaev and the remnants of his unit surrendered to the Red Army soldiers of Janis Strod. The civil war in the USSR ended.
Former General Pepeliaev was shot in 1938, later the "president" of the Far Eastern Republic Krasnoshchekov, the commander-in-chief of the People's Republic of Armenia Ieronim Uborevich, who took Vladivostok, and the Latvian rifleman Strod (all repressed in 1937).
In the same year, 1938, as the White General Pepeliaev, the Red Marshal Vasily Blucher was also shot.
Of all the main heroes of the Civil War in the Far East, only Heinrich Eikhe, the first commander-in-chief of the People's Republic of Latvia (NRA), was "lucky." In 1938, he was arrested as a Latvian counterrevolutionary, endured NKVD imprisonment in Lefortovo, and exile in the Far North. After serving 16 years in the camps, he was one of the first to be rehabilitated in 1954 and died in 1968 in Jurmala.
The Far Eastern Republic was abolished "as unnecessary" as early as November 1922. But the intervention lasted longer than the Civil War. Despite Soviet demands, the Japanese did not withdraw from Northern Sakhalin, exporting oil (up to 25,000 tons over five years) and furs.
International bargaining continued until the spring of 1925, with Moscow's favor being played by the discontent of some Japanese political circles—maintaining the occupation contingent was expensive.
But here, too, the Soviet side succeeded in exploiting Japanese-American tensions. Washington exerted pressure on its then-less-powerful competitor, and the Japanese agreed to a compromise: the withdrawal of troops from the Soviet part of Sakhalin in exchange for maintaining an oil production concession there. Fuel from the Okha field was shipped to Japan, including during World War II, until 1944.
But northern Sakhalin was ours, which was confirmed by its inclusion in the Far Eastern Territory on January 4, 1926.