Nikolayevsk incident
The Nikolayevsk incident(Николаевский инцидент) refer to the mass killings that took place in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. The massacre and terrorism perpetrated by the Red Army under Yakov Tryapitsyn (a group of Russian Bolshevik-anarchist, Chinese and Korean guerrillas led by Ilya Park) killed thousands of Russians in Nikolaevsk and devastated the region. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]
| Nikolayevsk incident | |
|---|---|
| Part of the Russian Civil War | |
The ruins of Nikolayevsk after the massacre | |
| Location | Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, Russian SFSR |
| Coordinates | 53°08′N 140°44′E / 53.133°N 140.733°E |
| Date | 12 March 1920 – 3 June 1920 |
| Target | Russian and Japanese civilians and POWs |
Attack type | Massacre |
| Deaths | Thousands |
| Perpetrators | Red Army Partisan detachment under Yakov Tryapitsyn |
There was also a large-scale rape and murder of women (girls and wives) in the city by the Tryapitsyn guerrillas.[14]
In general, historians agree that the event was a massacre in which "the actions of the Tryapitsyn guerrillas were unprecedented and unprovoked brutality, and the Tryapitsyn guerrillas deliberately burned, destroyed and devastated the entire city, killing thousands of people.[6]
According to Bolshevik documents and trial verdicts, half the population was killed in the massacre (most of the victims were Russians). The chairman of the Sakhalin People's Revolutionary Committee, G.Z. Prokopenko, wrote in late 1920 to the DVR government that "half of the region has been destroyed and half of the population wiped out and driven under the ice by the partisans.[3][13]
Anarchist Yakov Ivanovich Tryapitsyn, a young and ambitious partisan leader, came from Petrograd workers, was a brave World War volunteer who rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer. Once in the Far East, he proved himself a capable organizer of an anarchist criminal liberty in the Olginsky district and the Suchan valley of Primorye. At the end of 1919 Tryapitsyn was sent by the Military Revolutionary Staff of partisan detachments and revolutionary organizations of Khabarovsk and Nikolaev districts to the lower reaches of the Amur River to organize an insurgency there. There is a version that Tryapitsyn left with the detachment arbitrarily, dissatisfied with the passivity of the partisan command. Nina Lebedeva-Kiyashko, an active Socialist-Maximalist from Blagoveshchensk, left with him as commissar. The movement of about two thousand troops of Tryapitsyn and Lebedeva down the Amur River was accompanied by the almost complete extermination of rural intellectuals (for revolutionary "passivity") and anyone who looked like a town "bourgeois"; priests were drowned in ice-holes, taken prisoners, including those who voluntarily went to the partisans, were shot.[3]
One of Tryapitsyn's assistants Ivan Lapta (Yakov Rogozin) organized a bandit detachment that "raided villages and camps, robbed and killed people", destroyed those who did not give up gold at the Limursk mines, looted the Amgun gold mines and surrounding villages. Lapta's detachments, together with the Tryapitsyns Zavarzin, Bitsenko, Dyldin, Otsevilli, Sasov, killed hundreds of Lower Amurians even before the occupation of the regional center.[3]
In Tryapitsyn's detachment there were about 200 Chinese and the same number of Koreans, recruited from the gold mines (the latter were commanded by Ilya Pak), and to whom the ataman gave a generous cash advance, promised gold from the mines and many Russian women. A contemporary noted: "The partisan detachments were composed. exclusively of the Chinese lower classes, social scum, robbers, murderers, morphinists, opium-smokers, etc.". One of the most prominent Siberian Bolsheviks, A. A. Shiryamov, wrote honestly that even among the Russian mine workers of the Amur there was "a considerable percentage of a strong criminal element." Independent life in the desolate taiga turned the miners into anarchic personalities, in connection with which the Amur partisans "showed a lot of excessive cruelty". Shiryamov explicitly noted that "the Amur taiga miner takes revenge in the same way as our [distant] ancestors took revenge." Partisan chiefs were nominated from the most determined and cruel personalities, who kept the anarchist rebels in submission by giving them the right to plunder and kill.[3]
In early 1920, the idea of a Far Eastern "buffer" between Soviet Russia and Japan was actively discussed. Faced with the fact of the collapse of Kolchak's power, the Japanese agreed with the arrival of red detachments in Vladivostok, which they realized on the last day of January 1920. The presence of a large number of foreign troops in the capital of Primorye did not allow the Bolsheviks to win a complete victory, and they were forced to accept the transfer of power to the socialist Zemstvo. At the same time Tryapitsyn besieged and after an artillery bombardment at the end of February captured Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, where a Japanese battalion (350 men) and about the same number of white garrison were stationed. There were no roads to it before the ice drift, so the defenders of the almost 20,000-strong city could rely only on their own forces. They were deceived by the partisans, who promised not to produce any atrocities. However, despite the presence of Japanese troops who guaranteed compliance with the agreement of February 28, 1920, the Ragpickers immediately began an orgy of looting and brutal murder. М. V. Sotnikov-Goremyka, one of the survivors of this terrible time, recalled how the arrested people were hastily shot in front of each other near the prison the next morning, stripped down to their underwear: "...The corpses fell one on top of the other. Many of the men fainted, but the women went to the slaughter very bravely. ...During these days 72 people were killed in the militia. On the next day several sledges arrived and took the corpses, already completely naked, to drown them in specially made ice-holes. They drowned them and said: "Let's send them to Japan". From the testimony of Nikolaev S. I. Burnashev it follows that the guerrillas, by agreement with the Japanese military, "...were not to make any arrests and generally not to retaliate against anyone. On the night of March 8-9 they shot 93 people after taking them out of the prison. On March 9, I myself saw the corpses on the shore against Kuenga. On the next day, March 10, a flyer was issued by the Japanese that. against the fact that the Reds were "ruining the people," shooting, measures would be taken by them, the Japanese. Nevertheless the arrests continued, ever increasing. On the 11th of March in the evening the Reds invited the Japanese commanders to a meeting, where they informed them that. the Japanese must surrender their arms tomorrow morning before 12 o'clock. At night on the same day about two o'clock shooting began - the Japanese came forward."The Japanese quickly realized that they were dealing with a brutal gang that did not recognize any agreements. Most likely, A. Gutman is right when he writes that Tryapitsyn wanted to provoke the Japanese with this ultimatum to act, hoping that all the guerrillas of the Far East would respond in the same way and defeat the invaders. And when a crowd of drunken murderers and looters gave the Japanese an ultimatum to surrender their weapons, the garrison commander Major Ishikawa realized what would follow the disarmament of the only force that could somehow hold the guerrillas. So he launched a preemptive strike on March 13. Tryapitsyn received two wounds in the surprise attack, but was able to organize resistance, - and after a fierce battle, the Japanese garrison was crushed in numbers, and the consul and all the staff died in the consulate set on fire by the guerrillas.[3][15][6]
After this, he was free to start a reign of terror and execute all those civilians he deemed dangerous to his forces. Being short of ammunition, one of the methods to execute the victims was to stab them with a bayonet and thrust them in a hole under the ice of the river Amur. Several thousand inhabitants of the town were killed like this and with other execution methods.[15]
In late May, as a Japanese relief expedition approached, Tryapitsyn executed all of the remaining inhabitants of the town, both Japanese and Russian, and burned the town to the ground.[15]
The Japanese government lodged a protest against the Bolshevik government in Moscow, demanding compensation. The Russian government responded by capturing and executing Tryapitsyn and 31 others involved in the massacre; however, the Japanese government felt that this was not sufficient, and used the incident as a rationale to occupy the northern half of Sakhalin island, and to delay diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1925.
References edit
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- ^ Тепляков, Алексей Георгиевич (2018). “К портрету Нестора Каландаришвили (1876-1922): уголовник-авантюрист, партизан и красный командир”. 《Исторический курьер 1》: 47-48.
- ^ a b c Sergey V, Grishachev; Vladimir G, Datsyshen (2019). “Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War and Japanese Troops in Russia’s Far East, 1918–1922”. 《Brill》: 145~146.
- ^ Hackemer, Kurt (1998). “The Nikolaevsk massacre and Japanese expansion in Siberia”. 《American Asian Review 16.2》: 119, 122~124.
- ^ John J., Stephan (1994). 《The Russian Far East: A History》. Stanford University Press. 144~146.
- ^ Linkhoeva, Tatiana. (2018). “The Russian Revolution and the Emergence of Japanese Anticommunism”. 《Revolutionary Russia 31.2》: 268~269.
- ^ Li, Chang (2016). “Sino-Japanese negotiations over the Nikolayevsk Incident”. 《Chinese Studies in History 49.4》: 184.
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- ^ The Testimony of Kolchak and Other Siberian Materials. The Testimony of Kolchak. Memoirs of the Red Partisan Movement in the Russian Far East. By A.Z. Ovchinnikov. The Nikolaevsk Massacre. The Vladivostok Incident, April 4-5, 1920. Ed. by Elena Varneck and H.H. Fisher. Transl. by Elena Varneck. Stanford University, Calif. : Stanford University Press ; London : H. Milford, Oxford University Press, (1935). 265~328.
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