Japanese Offensive against Russia, 1920 (Part IV)
By Jamie Bisher
Legacy of Japan's Offensive
Chaos reigned throughout the Maritime Province for two or three days, and, when the dust settled, Japanese flags flapped mockingly atop captured revolutionary headquarters in Nikolsk-Ussuriisk, Khabarovsk, Olga, Shkotovo, Spassk and other towns. Korean émigré communities had been terrorized, and, after a brief taste of urban comfort, Red partisans had returned to the forests again. In Nikolsk, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, former officers of Semenov, Kalmykov and Rozanov walked the streets flaunting White insignia and decorations that had been outlawed by Vladivostok's zemstvo government. General Oi apologetically explained in an April 5 proclamation that his forces were simply responding to concerted Russian attacks on Japanese installations the night before, although no such attacks took place. As Captain Fay explained, the Japanese had simply advanced upon Red positions until the Russians were forced to fire or be effortlessly overrun, thus allowing Oi and Japanese diplomats to insist with a straight face that the Russians had attacked first. Oi and other Japanese spokesmen cynically painted the whole powerful offensive as a misunderstanding.
The offensive broke the accelerating momentum of Red power in the Far East and gave Japanese generals a chance to lean back and consider their increasingly bleak options in the Transbaikal, Amur and Maritime Provinces, while milking them of their last drops of economic benefit. The Japanese negotiated an agreement to coexist with the “Red-Pink Vladivostok government of Medvedev” before the end of April 1920, by which time Aleksandr Krasnoshchekov had proclaimed the creation of the Far Eastern Republic (F.E.R.) in Verkhne-Udinsk (modern Ulan Ude), a buffer state ordered by Lenin to shield Moscow’s struggling Soviet government from the wrath and voracity of the Japanese Army.
The offensive allowed the Japanese to strengthen their hold over the Chinese Eastern Railway and to take control of the Trans-Siberian in the Maritime Province. Subsequently, the Japanese Army made every effort to delay its' day of reckoning with the Reds by impeding the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion. In brazen contravention of the Inter-Allied Technical Agreement, General Hoshino made everyone get written permission from the Japanese headquarters in Nikolsk for movement through that city. In late April the Japanese began holding back Czech trains at Nikolsk with the baseless explanation that the Vladivostok railyard was too congested. After an abbreviated workday, the Japanese would lock all the switches in the busy yard at Nikolsk at 5 p.m., leaving only one main track clear and freezing all traffic in place until the next morning.
Japan's military control of the Chinese Eastern Railway was complemented by a firm hold on the Trans-Siberian between Nikolsk and Vladivostok, leaving only the segment between Pogranichnaya and Nikolsk to be mastered. Most employees refused to work, and the few that did refused to run a train unless it was flying the Czechoslovak flag. "So terrified were the railway workers on the Ussuri Railway when they heard the Japanese forces were coming, that they took all the belongings they could, as well as telegraph instruments from the stations, burnt the wooden bridges on the line, and fled to the forests," reported American intelligence sources.
During the first half of June 1920, Commissar Andreev was kidnapped by a death squad of kalmykovtsy, former O.K.O. personnel, operating secretly out of a railcar attached to the Russo-Japanese Commission echelon. He was executed.
Publicly the Japanese promised to restore zemstvo government in the Maritime Province, but few Russians believed them. After the fall of Semenov’s Transbaikalia in October 1920, thousands of kappel’evtsy (survivors of White General Vladimir Kappel’s army) settled around Nikolsk, particularly after the December 12 resignation of Medvedev’s Maritime Zemstvo Board in favor of Krasnoshchekov’s F.E.R. (now at Chita), which spurred a westward exodus of job-seeking Reds and an influx of destitute Whites into the Maritime Province. On May 23 and 24, 1921, a long-awaited White coup d’etat began materializing at Razdolnoe and Nikolsk-Ussuriisk, where kappel’evtsy disarmed revolutionary militias and captured the train stations. Spiridon and Nikolai Merkulov established a White enclave that they named the Provisional Priamur Government, even though it only extended from Vladivostok to Spassk, 125 miles north. Moscow immediately ordered a formidable rescue expedition into the F.E.R.: a Siberian division of the Red Army, 100 military-political zealots, a number of armored trains and General Vasilii Blyukher.
On August 15, 1922, General Tachibana announced the phased withdrawal of the Japanese Army. The Whites initiated a desperate offensive to try to clear out the partisans once and for all, and at the end of September even mobilized children, sending many of them to the front to be slaughtered by experienced Red soldiers. The “last White stand, a useless shedding of blood," occurred midway between Spassk and Nikolsk during October 10 through 14. Ten days later the final White refugees departed Russian soil, filing numbly past the great stockpiles of weapons in Vladivostok that their allies, even the Japanese, had denied to them, and boarding a motley fleet of rusty freighters, gunboats, trawlers, scows, and rafts to Wonsan, Korea, the nearest foreign port. By noon the next day the Japanese Army had vacated Vladivostok.
Nikolsk turned to reconstruction and volatile social experimentation with communism. Harold Fay returned to New York three days before Christmas 1920, got married there in 1923, and apparently moved to Switzerland shortly thereafter. He attended a “great world conference” at Geneva in May 1927 where Cordell Hull and other visionaries tried in vain to steer post-war commercial policy towards a reduction in trade restrictions, and, later that year, Fay co-authored a book about the conference with Allyn Abbot Young, one of America’s most renowned monetary economists. By 1930, Fay was living in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, where he had given up his journalism aspirations and become an investor with a trust company to better support his wife and daughter.
The offensive broke the accelerating momentum of Red power in the Far East and gave Japanese generals a chance to lean back and consider their increasingly bleak options in the Transbaikal, Amur and Maritime Provinces, while milking them of their last drops of economic benefit. The Japanese negotiated an agreement to coexist with the “Red-Pink Vladivostok government of Medvedev” before the end of April 1920, by which time Aleksandr Krasnoshchekov had proclaimed the creation of the Far Eastern Republic (F.E.R.) in Verkhne-Udinsk (modern Ulan Ude), a buffer state ordered by Lenin to shield Moscow’s struggling Soviet government from the wrath and voracity of the Japanese Army.
The offensive allowed the Japanese to strengthen their hold over the Chinese Eastern Railway and to take control of the Trans-Siberian in the Maritime Province. Subsequently, the Japanese Army made every effort to delay its' day of reckoning with the Reds by impeding the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion. In brazen contravention of the Inter-Allied Technical Agreement, General Hoshino made everyone get written permission from the Japanese headquarters in Nikolsk for movement through that city. In late April the Japanese began holding back Czech trains at Nikolsk with the baseless explanation that the Vladivostok railyard was too congested. After an abbreviated workday, the Japanese would lock all the switches in the busy yard at Nikolsk at 5 p.m., leaving only one main track clear and freezing all traffic in place until the next morning.
Japan's military control of the Chinese Eastern Railway was complemented by a firm hold on the Trans-Siberian between Nikolsk and Vladivostok, leaving only the segment between Pogranichnaya and Nikolsk to be mastered. Most employees refused to work, and the few that did refused to run a train unless it was flying the Czechoslovak flag. "So terrified were the railway workers on the Ussuri Railway when they heard the Japanese forces were coming, that they took all the belongings they could, as well as telegraph instruments from the stations, burnt the wooden bridges on the line, and fled to the forests," reported American intelligence sources.
During the first half of June 1920, Commissar Andreev was kidnapped by a death squad of kalmykovtsy, former O.K.O. personnel, operating secretly out of a railcar attached to the Russo-Japanese Commission echelon. He was executed.
Publicly the Japanese promised to restore zemstvo government in the Maritime Province, but few Russians believed them. After the fall of Semenov’s Transbaikalia in October 1920, thousands of kappel’evtsy (survivors of White General Vladimir Kappel’s army) settled around Nikolsk, particularly after the December 12 resignation of Medvedev’s Maritime Zemstvo Board in favor of Krasnoshchekov’s F.E.R. (now at Chita), which spurred a westward exodus of job-seeking Reds and an influx of destitute Whites into the Maritime Province. On May 23 and 24, 1921, a long-awaited White coup d’etat began materializing at Razdolnoe and Nikolsk-Ussuriisk, where kappel’evtsy disarmed revolutionary militias and captured the train stations. Spiridon and Nikolai Merkulov established a White enclave that they named the Provisional Priamur Government, even though it only extended from Vladivostok to Spassk, 125 miles north. Moscow immediately ordered a formidable rescue expedition into the F.E.R.: a Siberian division of the Red Army, 100 military-political zealots, a number of armored trains and General Vasilii Blyukher.
On August 15, 1922, General Tachibana announced the phased withdrawal of the Japanese Army. The Whites initiated a desperate offensive to try to clear out the partisans once and for all, and at the end of September even mobilized children, sending many of them to the front to be slaughtered by experienced Red soldiers. The “last White stand, a useless shedding of blood," occurred midway between Spassk and Nikolsk during October 10 through 14. Ten days later the final White refugees departed Russian soil, filing numbly past the great stockpiles of weapons in Vladivostok that their allies, even the Japanese, had denied to them, and boarding a motley fleet of rusty freighters, gunboats, trawlers, scows, and rafts to Wonsan, Korea, the nearest foreign port. By noon the next day the Japanese Army had vacated Vladivostok.
Nikolsk turned to reconstruction and volatile social experimentation with communism. Harold Fay returned to New York three days before Christmas 1920, got married there in 1923, and apparently moved to Switzerland shortly thereafter. He attended a “great world conference” at Geneva in May 1927 where Cordell Hull and other visionaries tried in vain to steer post-war commercial policy towards a reduction in trade restrictions, and, later that year, Fay co-authored a book about the conference with Allyn Abbot Young, one of America’s most renowned monetary economists. By 1930, Fay was living in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, where he had given up his journalism aspirations and become an investor with a trust company to better support his wife and daughter.