Nikolayevsk incident

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
Date	12 March 1920 – 3 June 1920 (1920-06-03)
Target	Russian and Japanese civilians and POWs
Attack type	Massacre
Deaths	Thousands (half of the population)
Perpetrators	Red Army Partisan (Red Bandit) detachment under Yakov Tryapitsyn

The Nikolayevsk incident or Nikolaevsk incident (Russian: Николаевский инцидент) was a series of mass killings that took place in the region of Nikolayevsk-on-Amur during the Russian Civil War. 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.

There was also a large-scale rape and murder of women in the city by the Red Army Partisan detachment under Tryapitsyn.

In general, historians agree that the event was a massacre in which "unprecedented and unprovoked brutality and the Red Army Partisan detachment under Tryapitsyn deliberately burned, destroyed, and devastated the entire city, killing thousands of people."

According to Bolshevik documents and trial verdicts, half of the population was killed in the massacre, of which the majority were Russians.

Nikolayevsk-on-Amur around year 1900

Prelude: Red Terror in the Russian Far East

According to Dr. Alexey Teplyakov, it should be noted that episodes of Red massacres were not new to the inhabitants of the Russian Far East until 1920.

In March 1918, over a thousand residents of Blagoveshchensk fell victim to the Red Guards, who seized the city after the mutiny of Ataman I. M. Gamov. As reported in 1922 by the prominent Chekist I. P. Pavlunovsky,

"A mass of workers from the mines rushed into the city, stormed it, and organized a massacre of the bourgeoisie ‘in general’. They went in squads from house to house and slaughtered all those suspected of rebellion and those sympathizing with them. By the way, they slaughtered almost the entire staff of the Blagoveshchensk City Administration and especially cut up the specialists and employees of the mining offices."

The press in the spring of 1919 reported on terrorist actions in Blagoveshchensk under the Reds:

"Bolshevik atrocities in the city reached terrible proportions. From the local population, more than 1,000 people were shot. Excavation of graves has started. After the capture of the city, most of the students joined our army as volunteers."

At the beginning of April 1920, the former head of Kolchak's government, P. V. Volgodsky, met in Shanghai with two officers who had escaped from the Red Terror in Vladivostok, who said that there, despite the coalition socialist government of A. S. Medvedev, "the Bolsheviks were actually at work there," arresting and, after almost obligatory torture, killing Whites:

"...In Vladivostok, there are systematic murders of White Guard officers. They are arrested and shot on their way to prison under the pretext of stopping escape attempts, etc."

I. I. Zhukovsky-Zhuk, a well-known Far Eastern Socialist-Revolutionaries-Maximalist, wrote:

"In the interests of historical veracity, it should be noted that almost all revolutionaries in the D.-East, especially in Blagoveshchensk on the Amur River, resorted to the ‘ragtag’ methods, i.e., to the methods of active, ruthless revolutionary struggle that knew no compromise. Shootings without trial, which served as the main accusation against the ragpickers, were not uncommon here. Individual representatives of the Amur authorities, such as Matveev, the head of the regional prison, and his assistant S. Dimitriev (both Communists), shot dozens of persons suspected and accused of counter-revolution and White Guardism without trial. This was known to the Revolutionary Committee, and many people in the city also learned about it, but no one protested against it, with the exception of the Blagoveshchensk group of anarchists, because everyone was so "accustomed" to this kind of phenomenon.

However, according to Dr. Alexey Teplyakov, Tryapitsyn's Bandit managed to carry out the Red Terror in its most ruthless form, when almost all socially and nationally alien elements were physically exterminated, along with a considerable number of "socially close" people.

Massacre

Anarchist Yakov Ivanovich Tryapitsyn, a Red Army Partisan leader who came from Petrograd, was a World War I volunteer who rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer. In the Russian Far East, he worked in the Olginsky district and the Suchan valley of Primorye. At the end of 1919, Tryapitsyn was sent by the Military Revolutionary Staff of Red Army 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 Red Army Partisan command. Nina Lebedeva-Kiyashko, an active Socialist-Revolutionaries-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.

One of Tryapitsyn's assistants, Ivan Lapta (Yakov Rogozin), organized a Red Army detachment that "raided villages and camps, robbed and killed people," destroyed those who did not give up gold at the Limursk mines, and looted the Amgun gold mines and surrounding villages. Lapta's detachments, together with the Tryapitsyns Zavarzin, Bitsenko, Dyldin, Otsevilli, and Sasov, killed hundreds of Lower Amurians even before the occupation of the regional center.

In Tryapitsyn's detachment, there were about 200 Chinese and the same number of Koreans recruited from the gold mines of the Taiga (the latter were commanded by Ilya Pak), to whom the ataman gave a generous cash advance, promised gold from the mines, and many Russian women. Partisan chiefs were appointed by the most determined and cruel personalities, who kept the units in submission by giving them the right to plunder and kill.

The town of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur was located some distance from the main events. However, as part of the 1918 intervention, a Japanese garrison was stationed there because of the city's strategic location at the mouth of the Amur River, opposite Sakhalin Island. In addition, Nikolaevsk-on-Amur had been a gold mining center since the late 19th century. In addition to the small garrison stationed there in 1918, Japanese citizens, including the consul and his family, lived in the town.

In 1920, Soviet Russia and Japan discussed a buffer state in the Russian Far East. Recognizing that Kolchak's government had collapsed, the Japanese agreed to allow the Red Army to enter Vladivostok in late January 1920. With so many foreign troops stationed in Primorye, the Bolsheviks were forced to accept 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 garrisons 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. The Red Army entered the area after promising the Japanese garrison and the white garrison that it would not commit atrocities. The Red Army signed a pact with the Japanese garrison on February 28, 1920, promising to abide by the agreement. Nevertheless, the Red Army immediately began looting and killing.

M. 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 by 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 8–9 March they shot 93 people after taking them out of prison. On 9 March, I myself saw the corpses on the shore against Kuenga. On the next day, 10 March, a flyer was issued by the Japanese saying that, against the fact that the Reds were "ruining the people," shooting measures would be taken by them. Nevertheless, the arrests continued, ever increasing. On the evening of 11 March, 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 the night of the same day about two o'clock, shooting began—the Japanese came forward."

The red guerrilla forces entered the city after agreeing to peace with the Japanese garrison, but once inside, they ignored the agreement and killed residents. The red guerrilla forces arrested and executed civilians sympathetic to the White Movement and even wealthy civilians. Since then, red guerrilla units have provoked the Japanese garrison. The red guerrillas gave the Japanese garrison an ultimatum to disarm. The Japanese garrison refused the ultimatum. This led to the armed conflict on March 12. The Japanese realized that they were dealing with a Red Army that did not recognize any agreements, and that Tryapitsyn wanted to provoke the Japanese into action with this ultimatum. And when the Red Army gave the Japanese garrison an ultimatum to disarm, Major Ishikawa, the Japanese garrison commander, refused. He launched a preemptive strike on 13 March. 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. A survivor, S. Strode, told about the mountains of mutilated corpses of prisoners, exterminated on the eve and at the moment of the Japanese intervention:

"Having examined this heap and not found my brother, I went to the huge second one, which contained 350–400 people. <...> Among the corpses, I saw a lot of familiar people. I recognized the old man Kvasov, engineer Komarovsky; his corpse was dry, eaten, and exhausted; it was obvious that he was terribly tortured and beaten; the lower jaw and nose were twisted on the side; two brothers Nemchinov, a former dancer, then an employee of the State Bank Vishnevsky; his hands were tied back and the whole chest stabbed with bayonets; two brothers Andrzhievsky, one of them Michael; his head was completely broken; a Japanese soldier was on all fours with his tongue hanging by a single thread. The shipowner, Nazarov, stood stoically on the corpses with his eyes gouged out and his face laughing. Some corpses were deprived of genitals; many female corpses had visible bayonet wounds to the genitals; and one woman was lying with a miscarriage on her chest. I did not see my brother's corpse in this heap... Many female corpses were completely undressed, so I saw the corpses of Pluzhnikova, Kukhterina, and Klavdia Meshcherinova, the typist of the zemstvo; some of them were wearing only shirts, and some of them were wearing underpants. The Chinese who were working on the ice finished breaking through the ice-hole, and with gyrating laughter, dragging them along the ice by their feet, began to pile up the corpses to the ice-hole and push them under the ice with poles. In the third pile of corpses, 75–100, were, as I was told later, the corpses of Mrs. E.S. Lurie, engineer Kukushkin, and some other familiar faces."

Another eyewitness wrote:

"...By 11 March 1920, the prison, the arrest room at the militia and the military brig were overcrowded with arrestees. In total there were about 500 people arrested in the prisons, about 80 in the militia and 50 people in the brig. On 12 and 13 March, all the Russians in prison, in the brig and in the militia were killed by the partisans. Thus, more than 600 Russians, mostly intellectuals, were killed on those days. Arrests, searches, confiscation of property, murders of citizens did not stop for a single day." People were chopped with checkers and axes, bayoneted, and bludgeoned with logs with deliberate cruelty. Some Red Army Partisan left the trenches with the sole purpose of "killing at least one bourgeois".

The archives speak of the numerous sincere complaints of both Red Army Partisan and the newly born Soviet authorities in the affluent Siberian and Far Eastern regions about the bourgeoisie of the population, poorly enriched with a proletarian layer. The authorities assessed the composition of the urban population of Novonikolaevsk as petty-bourgeois and speculative. According to the assessment of the local revcom, half of the population of Pavlodar, Semipalatinsk province in 1920 was "counter-revolutionary Cossacks", and a third was bourgeoisie. Secretary of the Altai provincial committee of the RCP (b) Ya. R. Yelkovich noted in the spring of 1921 that "most of the population of the province was kulak peasantry". In March 1921, the staff of the Gosudolitohrana of the DVR characterized Zabaikalsk Nerchinsk as "a center of counterrevolution and speculation". As the D. S. Buzin (Beach) stated, the typical representatives of the population of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur were

"fishermen, goldsmiths, steamship owners, speculative traders, bourgeoisie officials, etc. There are almost no workers here, unless you count one or two dozen loaders and as many cooperators. ...It would be in vain for us to look here for people devoted to the revolution and supporters of Soviet power".

But a native resident of the city wrote about the labor layer differently: in 1919, the booming fishing industry attracted "new entrepreneurs and masses of workers" to the city. However, the latter negatively perceived the Bolshevik agitation to join the Red Army Partisan, because they received good salaries and were afraid of the Japanese.

Tryapitsyn, like all Red authorities, clearly divided the population under his control into "his own" and "bourgeois". The latter were subject to looting and selective extermination; active dissidents were killed and isolated, while the rest were usually subdued. On the eve of the collapse of the Nikolaev Commune, Tryapitsyn and his team maximized the contingent of socially and nationally alien people to be eliminated.

Tryapitsyn's personal and secret counterintelligence had control over everything, including the Investigative Committee, which was typical of the behavior of the leaders of large partisan units. For example, according to the testimony of A.A. Tabanakov, the former chief of counterintelligence who served in I.Y. Tretiak's Altai Mountain Division in the fall of 1919, this Bolshevik was the head of the Investigative Committee. This Bolshevik commissar hid in the mountains after the fall of the Soviets and, together with accomplices, carried out "robberies of the local population" until September 1919, then joined the guerrillas, having been given a very responsible Chekist post in Tretiak's division, which demonstrated the proximity of its holder to the leadership. Similar characters filled the functions of the secret police and Tryapitsyn. Having established a terrorist state commune, the Tryapitsyns went as far as possible along the path of social cleansing, deciding to undertake the total destruction of even the families of those who were "bourgeois", Jews, or simply "not their own". The "Deep Purge" was planned, carefully prepared, and carried out without the slightest hesitation.

Commenting on the Red Terror of the Tryapitsyn Units, Dr. Alexey Teplyakov writes:

«This leader, being a developed and erudite proletarian, in his approach to social cleansing was an for relied on the criminal element, which was abundantly present in the partisan units of eastern Russia...Partisan terror, relying both on home-grown Chekists and the fury of active partisans, bore all the features that the Bolsheviks and anarchists brought to it: mass, ruthlessness, destruction of people not only on social but also on national grounds, as well as terror against “their own”.»

In the captured city for three months there existed the so-called Nikolaevskaya commune with all the necessary attributes: requisitions, confiscations, generalization of fishing gear, prohibition of trade and introduction of cards, and an emergency commission. The anarchist Tryapitsyn and the Socialist-Revolutionaries-Maximalist Lebedeva, having arrested and killed "their" Communists on suspicion of conspiracy, pursued - and in an extreme version - the policy of war communism, being officially recognized by Moscow. Tryapitsyn's inner circle consisted of persons with criminal backgrounds - Bitsenko, Budrin, Lapta, Otsevilli-Pavlutsky, Sasov.

The armed intervention of the Japanese on 4–5 April 1920 dealt such a cruel blow to the Red forces that there was nothing to think about any serious response of the immediately scattered Red Army Partisan and the army of the Russian Far East. Japan saw the killing of the military garrison, the consul, and his family as sufficient grounds to send additional troops to the city and to occupy northern Sakhalin (opposite Nikolaevsk-on-Amur) indefinitely. Japanese units were sent from Khabarovsk to the mouth of the Amur, and warships approached the coast in May.

The complete destruction of the regional center was unprecedented even for the Bolsheviks, although the authorities of neighboring regions secretly prepared the main cities for destruction during the retreat. In the summer of 1920, preparing the evacuation of Blagoveshchensk in anticipation of the Japanese offensive, the Amur revcom

"hastily removed all valuables to a safe place and organized a conspiratorial troika consisting of the communists Bushuev and Nilander and the Socialists-Revolutionaries-maximalist S. Bobrinev, who were instructed to hastily work out a plan to destroy Blagoveshchensk. Bobrinev, who were instructed to hastily work out an evacuation plan and outline those fortified stone buildings which the Revkom intended to blow up in case of abandonment of the city, so that they would not be used by the Japanese! - He who is not with us is against us! This was the general mood of the revolutionary circles of Blagoveshchensk. No one felt sorry for the city, which was doomed to destruction, because it was decided that the entire Red labor population would go to the taiga with the partisans, and only the counter-revolutionary element could remain, to whom no stone would be left unturned...". Blagoveshchensk survived, but during the panic retreat from Khabarovsk on 22 December 1921, the Bolsheviks, as the Whites noted, burned the railway station, "blew up the church[,] the hospital [and] many state and private houses[,] wagons [with] shells and other property." A member of the Dalbureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), V. A. Maslennikov wrote about the "unnecessary destruction" during the retreat of the Dobroflot steamships and the station: "A number of destruction of valuables made at Khabarovsk station also, of course, left a very depressing impression on the mood of the average citizen." Here Maslennikov also noted that "one had to imagine the indignation of the population", who learned about "unnecessary shooting of 22 arrested GPO when leaving the city".

According to K. A. Emelianov, who worked under Tryapitsyn as a clerk at the headquarters and knew well the documents of the "commune", after receiving news of the approaching Japanese troops at a meeting of the revstab and the emergency commission at the suggestion of Tryapitsyn and Lebedeva

"... it was decided to burn the city to the ground, evacuate some of the inhabitants and destroy some of them. The Cheka received extraordinary powers to make not only mass arrests, but also executions. The chairman of the emergency committee was appointed peasant village Demidovka Mikhail Morozov, who received the uncontrolled right to dispose of the lives of Nikolayev's inhabitants. <...> At the same secret meeting they drew up lists of proscription, the material for which was the information requested in advance from all the commissariats. The order of mass murder was established as follows: in the first place were Jews and their families, in the second place were the wives and children of officers and soldiers, in the third place were designated all the families of persons previously arrested and killed by the verdicts of the tribunals or by orders of Tryapitsyn, in the fourth place were persons acquitted by the tribunal for any reason and released, as well as their families. The fifth were officials, commercial employees, artisans and some groups of workers who did not sympathize with the policy of the Red Staff. According to the lists drawn up, about three and a half thousand people were to be exterminated. For almost a month, approximately until May, the intensified work according to the planned plan continued. Those on the lists were systematically killed in small batches in a predetermined order. The executions were carried out by specially designated detachments of Russian Red Army partisans, Koreans and Chinese loyal to Tryapitsyn. Every night they went to the prison and killed a certain number of victims (30–40 people) according to a list. By that time there were about 1,500 people in the Nikolayev detention centers".

Tryapitsyn openly said that three quarters of the city's population consisted of counter-revolutionaries and lurking "creeps". Tryapitsyn and Lebedeva, shouting at meetings of the plenipotentiary military-revolutionary headquarters created by the regional executive committee on 13 May: "Terror! Terror without pity!", signed very eloquent documents with instructions to the heads of commissariats and institutions to hastily liquidate the enemies. For example: "Mandate to Pakhomov. You are urgently instructed to compile a list of persons to be eliminated. The revolutionary conscience is yours." Or the order of 24 May to the commander of the 1st Regiment: "The Military Revolutionary Staff orders you to carry out the death sentence on the arrested Japanese in the infirmary, as well as on the convicted persons in prison”. The peak of the terror came at the end of May.

Tryapitsyn's unit exterminated Jewish children and women during the "purge. Children were destroyed along with their mothers, and women were raped before being executed. The guerrillas deliberately destroyed children as an unnecessary burden. Members of the Jewish community were taken by steamboat to the Amur River and drowned, young and old.

Ideologically, the children of the "bourgeois" were also considered "bourgeois" by the unit. In response to the question: "Did you say that it is necessary to destroy six-year-old children in the city[,] since there is not enough milk in the city?", the chairman of the Sakhalin Regional Executive Committee, F.V. Zhelezin, replied that he "He actually said that bourgeois children over the age of 12-13 are already incorrigibly harmful."

The executions were carried out by specially designated squads of Russian Red Army partisans, Koreans and Chinese loyal to Tryapitsyn. Every night they went to the prison and killed a certain number of victims according to a list.

On 28 May, the Red Army partisans began to burn the surrounding area, destroying fishing villages opposite Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, and on 29 May - to burn dwellings and blow up large stone buildings of the regional center. In total 1,130 residential buildings were destroyed - almost 97% of all housing stock. Of the public buildings only the prison and the trade school survived. Tryapitsyn officially announced to the village revcoms: "The city is all burned. large buildings are blown up, the Japanese were left with only ashes. There is no stone left of Nikolaevsk". Loaded with looted goods, including half a ton of gold and many confiscated jewels, the partisans left the ashes. They fled up the Amgun River to the mining settlement of Kerby, setting fire to villages, mines and dredges and killing everyone along the way.

Tryapitsyn's unit retreated only after laying waste to the entire city, setting fire to wooden buildings and blowing up stone structures. In the last days of May and the first days of June 1920, on the orders of Tryapitsyn's headquarters, himself and a group of people close to him, the town of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur was blown up and burned, the surrounding fishing grounds along the coast were burned, the inhabitants of the town were destroyed according to the censorship of "trustworthiness" and social affiliation; surviving Japanese, who were kept as prisoners, as well as Red Army partisans who did not agree with Tryapitsyn's actions. As a result of the evacuation of part of the population to the taiga, almost all children under the age of 5 died.

The remaining population of the city retreated together, and they were taken out of the city by force. The survivors were forcibly taken away by Red Army through the taiga to the middle Amur (to Red Army partisans hearth - the so-called "red island"). A desolate ashes were left in the place of Nikolaevsk. The Red Army massacred thousands of Russians.

The Red Terror did not stop with the destruction of Nikolayevsk. Civilian massacres took place during a march of several days through the taiga of nine thousand forcibly evacuated townspeople, when Red Army partisans, according to the memory of G.G. Milovanov, "rode on people on horseback," and weakened women and children were killed on the spot. Another eyewitness recalled: "Terrible atrocities were committed in Kerby. Armed men came at night and told us to evacuate. People were picked up and taken out of the village. No one came back. Without rifle fire, everyone was cut down with sabres. Bodies were floating down the river". Many bodies floated down the Amgun: "Women, children, and seldom men floated with cut off ears, noses, severed fingers, with slashed, stabbed bayonet wounds. It was forbidden to bury them."

According to Dr Alexey Teplyakov, It should be noted that the extermination of the families of those who had already suffered from the terror was practiced on the Don during the Raskazachivanie of 1919, and a little later - during the Chekist terror of 1920–1921 in the occupied Crimea. Thus, Tryapitsyn is one of the ideologists and practitioners of mass purges of the civilian population, including the deliberate extermination of children.

Wartime sexual violence

In Nikolayevsk, there was also brutal wartime sexual violence. Wartime sexual violence in the Russian Civil War had a cultural component. Traditionally, a conquering warrior had the right to rape the defeated. Irregular units were characterized by an increased propensity to violence of all kinds during the civil war. Some ethnographic peculiarities of the Trans-Ural peasants also contributed to the rampant sexual crime. It is known that in the Siberian village, there was an ancient custom among young people of gang rape of girls. Lack of respect for women and promiscuity of morals combined with class hatred bore their fruits. During the guerrilla years, mass rape was an omnipresent, grim reality. The rebels, who considered all women their legitimate prey, raped the wives of priests, civil servants, officers, and merchants, as well as nuns and teachers, but occasionally they willingly pounced on peasant women from neighboring villages.

Mass rapes were characterized by the adventures of Y. Tryapitsyn's detachments (Sakhalin region), whose headquarters became the centers of mass rapes. The places of wartime sexual violence were the headquarters and Red Army partisans of Tryapitsyn. Tryapitsyn's unit in the captured village, accustomed to wartime rape, violated human rights. Tryapitsyn's unit in the captured village of Susanino herded all the girls into one room and raped them, then tried to burn their victims alive, but were repelled by other Red Army partisans.

Red Army partisans often raped minors, often killing them afterwards. The opera singer Vera Davydova survived Tryapitsyn's unit at the age of 14 and told Nikolaev local historian V.I. Yuzefov that after the evacuation she was immediately seized by a group of Red Army partisans, forcibly separated from her parents, for allegedly sending her to the "headquarters." Her mother's screams attracted one of the Red Army partisan leaders, who recognized her as his former teacher and intervened. Tryapitsyn's unit also sexually assaulted women during their hasty escape from Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. N.D. Kolesnikova recalled: "It was forbidden for girls from the age of 16 to leave Nikolaevsk with their families. They had to go through the taiga together with the Red Army partisans. Luckily for me, I was only 13 years old."

Mass hunting of young women and girls, ending not only in rape but also in brutal murders, was especially characteristic of the pogrom in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur and the subsequent Tryapitsyn's unit atrocities. In the summer of 1920, many corpses, mostly women and children, were fished out of the Amgun River: "Women, children, and rarely men—with cut ears, noses, severed fingers, and slashed and stabbed bayonet wounds." One of the acts drawn up in the village of Udinskoye in early July 1920 recorded the discovery of the body of Mozgunova, a girl of 15–17 years of age, with eight dagger wounds in the chest area.

Criminal trials

Not far from the city, in the town of Kerbi, an uprising broke out. Tryapitsyn was arrested, convicted, and executed on 9 July 1920, for the crime of undermining the confidence of the working people in the Communist regime.

As claimed at the party purge in 1925, the former A. A. Zinkevich, who rose to assistant chief of staff of the 56th border guard detachment of the Amur provincial department of the OGPU, partisans "were shot right and left," and the head of the Nikolaev Revolutionary Committee at the end of 1920. noted that "when the wives and children of partisans, their fathers and mothers floated down the Amur and Amgun [killed], the people rose up and overthrew Tryapitsyn." In a sudden raid by a group of Red Army partisans led by the chief of the regional police, I. T. Andreev, on the night of July 4, the sleepy Tryapitsyn, along with 450 associates, were captured without resistance. A few days later, the thugs recognized as the most dangerous were quickly convicted by a hastily assembled 103-member court of Red Army partisans and local residents.

The elimination of the Ataman was carried out by the Khabarovsk authorities with the help of loyal party members and Chekists to eliminate the anarchist source of military provocations with Japan, hostile to the already established DVR and the Communists. One of the historians writes:

"Already in May 1920, the revolutionary headquarters in Khabarovsk decided to finish off Tryapitsyn and his headquarters. For this purpose, a detachment of 10 men was prepared with orders to arrest Tryapitsyn and his vile assistants, try them in a "people's court," and execute them as "traitors to the Soviet power. At the end of June, the Khabarovsk envoys snuck to Amgun. and got in touch with a group of partisans led by Andreev, who stood in opposition to Tryapitsyn."

A. A. Petrushin, who had access to the archives of the FSB, reports that the authorities, who learned about Tryapitsyn's arbitrariness,

"had to send to Priamurye the 'tamer of Siberian partisans'... Alexander Lepyokhin... Lepyokhin's Chekist special forces secretly seized the headquarters of the partisan Tryapitsyn and liquidated him along with his mistress Lebedeva-Kiyashko, atrocities no less than his friend."

After Tryapitsyn's arrest, a hurried documentation of his atrocities began. As reported by M. V. Sotnikov-Goremyka, I. T. Andreev "appointed a commission to examine the corked boxes and found money in papers, gold and silver, and gold earrings torn off along with earlobes. Protocols were drawn up for corpses fished out of lakes and rivers. Women had their breasts cut off, and men had their cores crushed. All the fished corpses had bare [scalped] skulls."

On July 9, the seven main defendants were sentenced to death and shot immediately. A little later, on July 13, the rest of the active perpetrators were sentenced. A total of 133 people were tried, of whom 23 were shot, 33 were sentenced to imprisonment, 50 were released, and 27 cases were never considered. Chekist M.G. Morozov, Bitsenko's adjutant A.L. Fainberg, Bitsenko's bandit associates I.G. Zhivny, V.N. Burya, and V. Lobastov, regimental commanders, and power structure employees B.V. Amurov-Kozozozov were shot. V. Amurov-Kozodaev, L. V. Grakov, F. V. Kozodaev, M. S. Podoprigorov, F. I. Gorelov, A.S. Kozitsin, A.I. Ivanov, A.I. Volkov-Sokolov, I.D. Kulikov-Fyodorov, G.N. Konstantinov, K.I. Molodtsov. Molodtsov.

The other rapists and murderers sentenced to imprisonment were not guarded too carefully and soon managed to escape safely to the guerrilla units operating in the area.

After the massacre

In the end, this gave Japan a pretext for a major armed intervention in Russian affairs (Japanese intervention throughout the Russian Far East, Japanese occupation of northern Sakhalin), although earlier, on 4 February 1920, the Japanese command had declared neutrality and on 17 February had begun to evacuate its troops from Russian territory.

Some of Tryapitsyn's bandits remained in the region's power structures, which caused some concern among the DVR leadership. On 6 June 1921, the Dalbureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) decided to dismiss Vasily Ganimedov from the post of head of the Amguno-Kerbinsky district "as a ragamuffin." And in the fall of 1922, in the production of the Investigative Department of the Main Military Court of the NVRA and the Fleet of the DVR, was the case of the former chief of staff of the Military Commissioner of the Amguno-Kerbinsky mining district, P.G. Tenterev, accused of underreporting and complicity in the crimes of V. Ganimedov (Ganimedov himself, on 1 August 1922, was under arrest in the Military Department of the GPO of the DVR). However, at the same time, Tenterev was released on the surety of some high-ranking person.

Some of the protagonists of the trial were forced to flee Russia. I.T. Andreev went to Japan and China, and A.Z. Ovchinnikov went to the United States.

In mid-November 1921, the security officers of the DVR reported that "the Japanese are beginning to construct buildings in Nikolaevsk, and a large merchant SIMADO is building an Orthodox church." From the intelligence report of the DNRA headquarters of the DVR dated 3 August 1922, addressed to the GPU of the RSFSR, it follows that on July 15, the headquarters of the Japanese regiment stationed in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur received an order from the divisional headquarters to prepare for evacuation, in connection with which "the construction of houses [in] Nikolaevsk by the Japanese has been stopped."

Number of victims

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."

At the trial, the guerrillas themselves spoke about the destruction of about half of the population of the region. By the beginning of 1920, the commune leaders estimated the number of inhabitants of the region at almost 30 thousand people. As a result of the Tryapitsyn massacre, the population of the Sakhalin region in 1920 was reduced, according to some sources, to 10 thousand people, and the region itself was soon liquidated, merging with the Primorskaya region. At the end of 1920, the leadership of the Sakhalin region determined the number of Russian population at 17 thousand, and the number of alien population at 1200 people. according to the assessment of the Sakhalin authorities - based on 18 thousand surviving population - the figure of losses in the whole region was at least 10-15 thousand people, including those who died of hunger and deprivation.

According to the Far Eastern Communists, there was a "Japanophile tendency among the peasantry" in the lower reaches of the Amur River, and then, along with the Japanese, almost half of the entire Russian population of the Sakhalin region was destroyed.

According to the official verdict, half of Sakhalin's population was wiped out by the Red Army.

Historians put the number of victims killed by the Red Army Partisan detachment under Yakov Tryapitsyn in Nikolaevsk in the thousands.

Ties of the perpetrators to the Soviet government

In Soviet historiography, Tryapitsyn was often described as an anti-Soviet bandit, but the Nikolayevskaya Commune "represents the apotheosis of the Soviet regime through the savage beating of thousands of innocent people, including infants, by the most ingenious tortures of Bolshevik executioners".

Yakov Tryapitsyn found himself at the head of the expeditionary detachment sent to Nikolayevsk from the northern headquarters to ensure the implementation of the plan to use the resources of this region (manpower, food) for the continuation and development of guerrilla warfare in the Amur region. In January 1920 he declared himself commander of the Nikolayev front and received official recognition.

The anarchist Tryapitsyn and the Socialist-Revolutionaries-Maximalist Lebedeva, having arrested and killed "their" Communists on suspicion of conspiracy, pursued - and in an extreme version - the policy of war communism, being officially recognized by Moscow.

Historiography

"Today, many historians agree in the description of Tryapitsyn's actions as unprecedented, baseless cruelty: "the intentional burning of an entire city, killing thousands killed with immeasurable ruins and devastation of the territory that had no parallels in thehistory of that war" (Nelyubova 2012, 291).

— Sergey V. Grishachev and Vladimir G. Datsyshen (2019), "Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War and Japanese Troops in Russia's Far East, 1918–1922", 《Brill》: 145~146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004400856_009

The massacre of Russian civilians by Tryapitsyn's unit and the scorched earth policy by Tryapitsyn's unit is acknowledged by many historians, namely:

• Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov (2013),
• Vladimir Grigorievich Datsyshen (2014) (2019),
• Alexey Georgievich Teplyakov (2013) (2015) (2017) (2018),
• Alexander Alexeyevich Azarenkov (2019),
• Valery Vladimirovich Krivenky (2018) (2020),
• Ivan Sablin (2018),
• Chang Li (2016),
• Kurt Hackemer (1998),
• John J. Stephan (1994),
• Tatiana Linkhoeva (2018),
• Harold Henry Fisher (1935),
• and Ian R. Stone (1995).

In popular culture

The memorial of Nikolayevsk Incident in Otaru, Hokkaido

At the time of the massacre, Japan emphasized and exaggerated the Japanese victims, but the majority of those killed by the Red Army were Russians, not Japanese.

Kyra Robinov's 2016 novel is set during the Nikolayevsk massacre. According to the book, Kyra Robinov's grandmother and her family were survivors of the Nikolayevsk massacre.

• Kyra Robinov (2016). Red Winter: One Woman's Struggle to Survive the Russian Revolution. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 978-1533393470.

See also

• Soviet war crimes
• Red Terror

References

• Hara, Teruyuki. Niko Jiken no Shomondai (Problems in the Incident at Nikolaevsk-na-Amure) // Roshiashi Kekyuu, 1975, No. 23.
• Gutman, Anatoly. Ella Lury Wiswell (trans.); Richard A. Pierce (ed.) The Destruction of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, An Episode in the Russian Civil War in the Far East, 1920. Limestone Press (1993). ISBN 0-919642-35-7
• White, John Albert. The Siberian Intervention. Princeton University Press (1950)