this collaborative effort so remarkable: as dangerous as it was to be a
tiger, it had become just as dangerous to be a Russian.
Following the Revolution of 1917, the former “Far East Republic” was
the last place in Russia to fall to the Bolsheviks, and it did so only after a
vicious civil war that dragged on until 1923. Initially, the conflict
involved a veritable bazaar of nations, including Czech, Ukrainian,
Korean, Cossack, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, British,
and American troops, along with assorted foreign advisors. However, as
the embattled region grew more and more to resemble a vast and
dangerous open-air asylum, most of the foreigners abandoned the cause.
By 1920, three armies—the Bolshevik Reds, the anti-Bolshevik Whites,
and the Japanese—had been left to fight it out on their own. Next to the
Russians, the infamously brutal Japanese looked like models of restraint.
In the spring of 1920, after a particularly gratuitous massacre in which
the Bolsheviks slaughtered thousands of White Russians and hundreds of
Japanese, and burned their homes to the ground, the Whites managed to
capture the Bolshevik commander of military operations in the Far East.
After stuffing him into a mail sack, his captors took him to a station on
the Trans-Siberian where they delivered him into the hands of a
sympathetic Cossack named Bochkarev. Bochkarev commandeered a
locomotive and burned his captive alive in the engine’s firebox, along
with two high-ranking associates (the latter, also delivered in mail sacks,
were shot first).
Even after the Bolsheviks took control of the region, there was no
peace, only a series of increasingly savage repressions by the victors.
Some of Russia’s most notorious gulags, including the Kolyma gold
fields, were located in the Far East and throughout the 1920s and 1930s
their populations swelled steadily, as did their cemeteries. Already
battered by what Alec Nove, an expert on the Soviet economy, described
as “the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in