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 detachment under Yakov Tryapitsyn

The Nikolayevsk incident (Russian: Николаевский инцидент) was a series of mass killings that took place in 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 (girls and wives) 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 the population was killed in the massacre (most of the victims were Russians).

Nikolayevsk-on-Amur around year 1900

Prelude

According to Dr Alexey Teplyakov, it should be noted that episodes of Red massacres were not new to the inhabitants of the 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 1000 people were shot. Excavation of graves has been 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-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 phenomena.

However according to Dr Alexey Teplyakov, Tryapitsyn's gang 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” ones.

Massacre

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.

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.

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.

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 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. 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. 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.

The 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 finding 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, 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, 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, Klavdia Meshcherinova, the typist of the zemstvo; some of them were wearing only shirts, 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 March 11, 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 March 12 and 13, 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 partisans left the trenches with the sole purpose of “killing at least one bourgeois”.

Having learned of the approach of the Imperial troops, ready to avenge the death of the Japanese colony, Tryapitsyn decided to demonstrate his "revolutionary consistency" by red terror carried to the extreme limits. He, like all Red authorities, clearly divided the population under his control into “his own” and “bourgeois”. The latter were subject to plunder and selective extermination; active dissenters 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.

The archives speak of the numerous sincere complaints of both the partisans 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 ragpicker 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 partisans, because they received good salaries and were afraid of the Japanese.

For Tryapitsyn, a hostile rich city with a large foreign colony became an testing ground for the imposition of a new order, physically rid by the partisans of the presence of both the “creeps” themselves and their families. This leader, being a developed and erudite proletarian, in his approach to social cleansing was an apologist for unrestrained terror and relied on the criminal element, which was abundantly present in the partisan units of eastern Russia. Tryapitsyn's personal and secret counterintelligence had surveillance over everything, including the investigative commission. According to Dr Alexey Teplyakov, this was typical of the behavior of the leaders of large partisan units. For example, according to the testimony of A. A. Tabanakov, former chief of counterintelligence of I. Y. Tretiak's division operating in the fall of 1919 in the Altai Mountains, this Bolshevik commissar after the fall of the Soviets hid in the mountains and together with accomplices until September 1919 was engaged in “robberies of the local population,” and then joined the guerrilla, having received in Tretiak's division a very responsible Chekist post, demonstrating the proximity of its owner to the leadership. Similar characters dispatched the functions of the secret police and Tryapitsyn. 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-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. Having founded a terrorist state-commune, the Tryapitsyns destroyed it themselves under the onslaught of Japanese troops. At the same time Tryapitsyn's gang went extremely far along the path of social cleansing, deciding to undertake the complete 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.

The objectivity of the data in the detailed book by the experienced journalist and publisher A. Y. Gutman, “The Doom of Nikolaevsk on the Amur”, which relied on dozens of testimonies of survivors of the “incident”, including lawyers, first of all, the court official K. A. Emelyanov, is confirmed by many Soviet documents.

The armed intervention of the Japanese on April 4-5, 1920 dealt such a cruel blow to the Red forces that there was nothing to think about any serious response of the immediately scattered partisans and the army of the 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 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 December 22, 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 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 May 13: “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 May 24 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.

Later, during the "purge," another monstrous side was revealed - the predominant extermination of children and women, both before and after the evacuation. Children were destroyed along with their mothers, and women were raped before being executed. The guerrillas deliberately destroyed children as an unnecessary burden, considering them "incorrigibly harmful.  "Members of the Jewish community ... were taken by steamship to the Amur River and drowned, young and old".

These unprecedented cruelties had an ideological basis - the children of “bourgeois” were considered to be “bourgeois” too, only small. 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 “did indeed say that bourgeois children over 12-13 years of age are already incorrigibly harmful”

The executions were carried out by specially designated squads of Russian 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 May 28, the partisans began to burn the surrounding area, destroying fishing villages opposite Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, and on May 29 - 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 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 bandits through the taiga to the middle Amur (to the partisan hearth - the so-called “red island”). A desolate ashes were left in the place of Nikolaevsk.

The Red Army slaughtered 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 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. Traditionally, a conquering warrior had the right to rape the defeated. As a European historian wrote, “the raids of the Cossacks in 1815, who chopped men with sabers and raped women, remain legendary in France to this day”. M. Gorky, defending against attacks S.M. Budyonny artistic truth “Conarmy” I.E. Babel, emphasized that “...war always excites frenzied eroticism. this is confirmed by the behavior of the Germans in Belgium, the Russians in East Prussia. I am inclined to consider it a natural - though not normal - increase in the “instinct of continuation of the species”, the instinct of life in people who are facing death.” In Babel's story “My First Goose” Budyonovets said about the mores of the red cavalry: “A man of the highest distinction - from him here the soul out. And if you spoil a lady, the cleanest lady, then you will get affection from the fighters...”. In September 1920, in a letter to Lenin, commissioner N. Narimanov described the atrocities of the Red Army in Azerbaijan: “We receive amazing reports from the localities. It comes to open rape of girls and women...”.

In places of war captive women became a valuable commodity. One of the prominent Bolsheviks boastfully wrote in a personal letter from Uryankhai (Uyuk village) at the end of December, 1921: “Now. we are evacuating Bakich's gang to Siberia. there are many women for whom I, as the ‘head’ of the region, have demands, but I myself have not acquired a single one, although my official position requires me to have a whole harem.” From this letter it becomes clear what the wagons of the Red commanders looked like, which could carry crowds of slave concubines. Chekist reports for the beginning of 1922 give some details of the rampage of the victors in Tuva, emphasizing the “guilt of the White Guards”: “In Uriankhai there are many ‘luxurious wives’ of officers Bakich, making great feats in seducing local Soviet and military workers ... The case comes to duels, both between the seduced, and between seducers. Of the latter, the former mistress of Bakich himself, who lives with the predkrairevkryrevkomom of t.... ... ...Former bandit women can also be successful in their own field of espionage and counter-revolution”.

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 among young people there was an ancient custom of gang rape of girls. Lack of respect for women, 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, nuns, teachers, but occasionally they willingly pounced on peasant women from neighboring villages.

Mass rapes were characterized by the adventures of the detachments of G. Rogov (Kuzbass, Altai) and Y. Tryapitsyn (Sakhalin region), whose headquarters became centers of orgies. The mass rape in Kuznetsk, Tomsk province, in December 1919 was reported in a Chekist information bulletin. Rogovtsy broke into houses, kidnapped women and girls, and used them for brutal pleasure, including in their headquarters. Partisan memoirs contain the names of some of the victims: "The 18-year-old schoolteacher Inna P., daughter of one of the popes burned in the cathedral, was summoned to the headquarters 'on urgent business' and raped there. She fell ill with a nervous disorder. A 19-year-old girl, Polasukhina, was raped in her apartment. The girl almost went mad and soon died of shock. The 52-year-old widow of a prison official, Sycheva, was also raped in her apartment". Places of such orgies were the headquarters and Tryapitsyn partisans. Accustomed to wild bacchanalia Tryapitsyn's unit in the captured village of. Accustomed to wild bacchanalia, Tryapitsyn's unit in the captured village of Susanino herded all the girls into one room and raped them, after which they wanted to burn their victims alive, but they were repelled by other partisans.

Partisans often raped minors, often killing them afterwards. The famous opera singer Vera Davydova survived Tryapitsyn's unit at the age of 14 and told the Nikolaev local historian V.I. Yuzefov that after the evacuation she was immediately seized by a group of partisans, forcibly separated from her parents, for allegedly sending her to the “headquarters”. Her mother's screams attracted one of the partisan leaders, who recognized her as his former teacher and intervened. During the hasty escape from the Japanese-besieged Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, the Tryapitsyn's unit did not forget about their sexual needs either. 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 partisans. Luckily for me I was only 13 years old”

Mass hunting of girls, 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, with 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 July 9, 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 ragpicker 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, children of partisans, their fathers and mothers floated down the Amur and Amgun [killed], the people rose up and overthrew Tryapitsyn”. By a sudden raid by a group of 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 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 ‘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, found money in papers, gold, silver, 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, 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, V. Lobastov, regimental commanders and power structures 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 Far East, Japanese occupation of northern Sakhalin), although earlier, on February 4, 1920, the Japanese command had declared neutrality and on February 17 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 June 6, 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 August 1, 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, A.Z. Ovchinnikov to the United States.

In mid-November 1921, the security officers of the DVR informed that "the Japanese are beginning to construct buildings in Nikolaevsk, a large merchant SIMADO is building an Orthodox church". From the intelligence report of the DNRA headquarters of the DVR dated August 3, 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 Priamurskaya 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-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 historiansagree 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

It was somewhat controversial in Russian academia before 2010, but after 2010 Russian historians largely agree that the Nikolayevsk massacre was a unilateral and unjustified massacre of civilians by the Red Army partisan detachment under Yakov Tryapitsyn. And many non-Russian-speaking historians agree. The massacre of civilians and the devastation of the region by Tryapitsyn's unit is acknowledged by most historians. (Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov, Vladimir Grigorievich Datsyshen, Alexey Georgievich Teplyakov, Alexander Alexeyevich Azarenkov, Valery Vladimirovich Krivenky, Ivan Sablin, Chang Li, Kurt Hackemer, John J., Stephan, Tatiana Linkhoeva, Harold Henry Fisher, and Ian R., Stone.)

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.
  

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)