The end of the Russian Civil War

At four in the afternoon on 25 October 1922 the last Japanese units sailed out of Vladivostok, and right behind them the leading detachments of the 1st Transbaikal Rifle Division entered the city. Formally this was the army of the Far Eastern Republic, a buffer state on the Pacific; in reality it was part of the Red Army under another name. A few days earlier the remnants of the White forces of General Mikhail Diterikhs and thousands of civilians had fled by ship to Korea and China. Vladivostok – the port through which Allied supplies had flowed into Russia during the First World War, and from 1918 the base of the foreign intervention – was the last large city of the former empire in the hands of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. Its capture is regarded as the end of the civil war, which had begun almost exactly five years earlier when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. Two months later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded.

The last Whites, but not in Siberia

War chronologies often record that in October 1922 the civil war ended with “the defeat of the last White forces in Siberia”. The date is right, but the place needs refining. The last fighting took place not in Siberia in the strict sense but in the Primorye, the Maritime Province on the Pacific coast, between Spassk and Vladivostok. Nor was it the end of all fighting. In Yakutia the White expedition of General Anatoly Pepelyayev, which had landed on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk in September 1922, fought on until June 1923, when it surrendered at the port of Ayan. In Central Asia the guerrilla war of the Basmachi went on for many more years, and peasant revolts broke out later too. Northern Sakhalin remained under Japanese occupation until 1925. But after the fall of Vladivostok there was no longer any government or regular army opposed to the Bolsheviks on the territory of the former empire that they regarded as their own.

The Far East after Kolchak

The civil war in European Russia was decided in 1919–1920. The armies of Anton Denikin were thrown back from Oryol in the autumn of 1919, Nikolai Yudenich failed to take Petrograd, and in November 1920 General Pyotr Wrangel evacuated nearly 150,000 soldiers and civilians from the Crimea to Constantinople. In Siberia the armies of Admiral Alexander Kolchak disintegrated in the winter of 1919–1920. Kolchak himself, handed over to the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk, was shot on 7 February 1920.

Further east the Red Army halted. In the Russian Far East stood Japanese troops, who had arrived in 1918 as part of the Siberian intervention dispatched by the government of Prime Minister Masatake Terauchi, and who at their peak numbered more than 70,000 men. The Americans, British and French withdrew in 1920. The Japanese stayed, because part of their army hoped to create a state on the Russian coast dependent on Tokyo. Moscow, then fighting Poland and Wrangel, did not want war with Japan. Vladimir Lenin therefore agreed to the creation of a formally independent, democratic buffer state. The Far Eastern Republic was proclaimed on 6 April 1920 in Verkhneudinsk, today’s Ulan-Ude, and in the autumn Chita became its capital. It had a parliament, a constitution modelled on Western ones and a multi-party government, but it was run by the Far Eastern Bureau of the Bolshevik party, and its People’s Revolutionary Army was in practice part of the Red Army.

In the spring of 1920, at Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, Red partisans massacred the Japanese garrison and the colony of Japanese civilians, as well as many Russians. In retaliation Japan occupied northern Sakhalin. In July 1920 the Japanese agreed to leave Transbaikalia. Without their support Ataman Grigory Semyonov, a Cossack warlord who had terrorised the Chita region for two years, fell. Japanese troops nevertheless remained on the coast, around Vladivostok.

The black buffer

On 26 May 1921, under the protection of Japanese troops, the Whites overthrew the left-wing local authorities in Vladivostok. The new government, known as the Provisional Priamurye Government, was formed by two local businessmen, the brothers Spiridon and Nikolai Merkulov. The remnants of Kolchak’s army and of Semyonov’s detachments gathered in the Primorye, which the Bolsheviks called the “black buffer”. In the summer of 1921 Soviet troops and Mongolian revolutionaries destroyed in Mongolia the division of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who had tried to strike at Siberia from there. Captured, Ungern was shot in September 1921.

In the winter of 1921–1922 the Whites of General Viktorin Molchanov advanced north and in December took Khabarovsk. The army of the Far Eastern Republic under Vasily Blyukher counter-attacked in bitter frost and on 12 February 1922 took the fortified White positions near Volochayevka station. On 14 February it was back in Khabarovsk. The Whites withdrew south, under Japanese protection. “The storming nights of Spassk, the days of Volochayevka” later became the words of one of the best-known Soviet songs.

Talks between Japan and the Far Eastern Republic, held from August 1921 in Dairen (Dalny) in Manchuria, collapsed because in return for withdrawing its troops Tokyo demanded, among other things, the disarmament of the fleet and of fortifications, freedom of navigation on the Amur and an 80-year lease of northern Sakhalin.

Japan pulls out

The fate of Vladivostok, however, was decided not by battles but by politics in Tokyo. The Siberian intervention had cost Japan enormous sums and the lives of some 3,000 soldiers, more than half of whom died of disease. It had brought neither territory nor a grateful Russian ally, and instead had become the target of sharp criticism in parliament and the press. Japan was also diplomatically isolated. At the Washington Conference, which ended in February 1922 with the treaty limiting naval armaments, the United States and Britain pressed Tokyo to leave Siberia. In June 1922 Admiral Tomosaburō Katō, who had led the Japanese delegation in Washington, became prime minister. On 24 June his government announced that it would withdraw all its troops from the mainland part of the Russian Far East by the end of October. Northern Sakhalin was to remain occupied until reparation was made for Nikolayevsk.

The announcement of the evacuation caused panic in Vladivostok. In July a Zemsky Sobor (Assembly of the Land) convened by the Whites removed the Merkulov brothers and entrusted power to General Diterikhs, who during the World War had been chief of staff of the Czechoslovak Corps and in 1919 had directed the investigation into the murder of the imperial family. Diterikhs proclaimed himself “ruler” of the Priamurye region and gave his forces, which numbered somewhat over ten thousand men, the Old Russian name of Zemskaya Rat (Zemskaya rat’), the host of the land. He preached the restoration of an Orthodox monarchy under the Romanov dynasty. But he had neither money nor a base of support, and had to keep a large part of his forces facing Red partisans in his rear. Japanese–Soviet talks at Changchun in September 1922 also came to nothing.

The Primorye operation

In September 1922 the Whites attempted one last offensive northwards along the Ussuri railway, but were repulsed. On 4 October the army of the Far Eastern Republic, commanded since August by the 26-year-old Ieronim Uborevich, went over to the counter-offensive. Its strike group numbered about ten thousand men, with further units and several thousand partisans in reserve. On 8 and 9 October it stormed the fortifications of Spassk, built a year earlier by the Japanese: seven field forts surrounded by entanglements. The Whites lost more than a thousand killed and wounded there. In the following days the main forces of Diterikhs were routed in the battles of Monastyrishche and Voznesenskoye, and the Reds took Nikolsk-Ussuriysky.

On 19 October Uborevich’s units reached the outskirts of Vladivostok. Some 20,000 Japanese soldiers were still in the city. The Japanese command threatened to halt the evacuation if there were clashes with its troops, and the Red command, so as not to give it a pretext, pulled its units back a few kilometres from the city. Diterikhs declared the struggle over and left for the port of Posyet. Around 20 October he and several thousand soldiers with their families were evacuated by ship, and the vessels of Admiral Yuri Stark’s White Siberian Flotilla sailed from Vladivostok for Korea. For a few days the city, where a general strike had broken out, was governed by ephemeral authorities. On 24 October, at Sedanka near Vladivostok, the Japanese signed an agreement undertaking to leave the city by four o’clock the following afternoon. On 25 October, as the last Japanese ships were sailing out, units of the People’s Revolutionary Army entered the city.

On 26 October Lenin telegraphed the government of the Far Eastern Republic that the capture of Vladivostok reunited with Russia its citizens “who have endured the heavy yoke of Japanese imperialism”. A few weeks later the republic ceased to exist. On 14 November its People’s Assembly voted to dissolve itself and restore Soviet power, and on 15 November Moscow incorporated the territory of the Far Eastern Republic into the Russian SFSR as the Far Eastern Region. The buffer was no longer needed, because the Japanese had gone.

The balance of the war

The Russian Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in Europe between the two world wars. It was fought by Reds, Whites, peasant Greens, the anarchists of Nestor Makhno, national movements from Finland to the Caucasus and, at various times, the troops of more than a dozen foreign states. Estimates of the dead usually range from 7 to more than 10 million, most of whom died not in battle but of hunger, typhus and disease, in the Red and White terror, and in pogroms that killed anywhere from several tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand Jews. The last great act of this catastrophe was the famine in the Volga region in 1921–1922. Between one and two million people emigrated. The country lay in ruins, and its industry produced a fraction of what it had before 1914.

The Bolsheviks emerged from the war victorious, but at the head of a different state from the one they had promised in 1917. In March 1921 they crushed the sailors’ rebellion at Kronstadt and at the same time, under pressure from a rebellious countryside, abandoned War Communism for the New Economic Policy. The western border was fixed by the Peace of Riga with Poland, and half a year before the fall of Vladivostok Soviet Russia broke out of its isolation by concluding the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany. On 30 December 1922 Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasian Federation formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The long shadow of the civil war

The civil war shaped the state that in 1939 divided Eastern Europe with Hitler. Its experiences gave rise to the Soviet methods of government – the Cheka, hostages, camps and requisitions – as well as a cult of force and a suspicion of the outside world, which in 1918–1922 had sent foreign troops onto Russian soil. From its fronts came the Red Army commanders who in the 1930s built up its armoured and air forces. Many of them were murdered in the Great Purge on the orders of Joseph Stalin, himself a commissar on the civil war fronts. Uborevich was shot in June 1937 together with Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Blyukher, who as a marshal commanded the fighting against the Japanese at Lake Khasan in 1938, died a few months later under NKVD interrogation.

For Japan the withdrawal from Vladivostok was a defeat that the army did not forget. Its officers brought back from Siberia the conviction that the USSR was the main enemy and that the Asian mainland was the sphere of Japanese expansion. In 1925 Tokyo recognised the USSR and handed back northern Sakhalin, but nine years after the evacuation of Vladivostok the Kwantung Army seized Manchuria, whose railways Russia and Japan had contested since the Treaty of Portsmouth, and created the puppet state of Manchukuo. On the border the two sides now shared there were major clashes in 1938–1939, ending in a Japanese defeat on the Khalkhin Gol river in August 1939, in the very days when Stalin was concluding his pact with Hitler. In April 1941 the two states signed a neutrality pact, sometimes referred to as a non-aggression pact, which the USSR broke in August 1945 when it began its war against Japan.

Together with the Red Army, the NKVD then entered Manchuria and arrested thousands of White émigrés who had settled since 1922 in Harbin and other cities. Ataman Semyonov, who had collaborated with the Japanese for years, and the leader of the Russian Fascist Party, Konstantin Rodzaevsky, were executed in Moscow in 1946. The émigré community in Europe, organised from 1924 in the Russian All-Military Union, split during the war: some, like Denikin, refused to collaborate with Hitler; others, like Ataman Pyotr Krasnov, entered German service and were hanged in Moscow in 1947. In this way the war that ended in Vladivostok in October 1922 had its epilogue only after the Second World War.