Burnt by the Sun. The Koreans of the Russian Far East - Jon K. Chang

Conclusion 189

At the end of the Second World War, Stalin made a victory toast to

the Rus s ian people openly stating that the Rus sians were the greatest

and the most loyal of all the Soviet nationalities. Stalin’s “toast to the

Rus sians”:

I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people, and in the

first place, the Rus sian people. (Stormy and prolonged applause and shouts of

“Hurrah!”) I drink in the first place to the health of the Rus sian people

because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the

Soviet Union.... Our government made not a few errors, we experienced

at moments a desperate situation in 1941–1942.... A diff er ent people

might have said to the government, “You have not lived up to our expecta-

tions, get out... .” But the Rus sian people did not take this path.^15

However, the civil war and the Intervention period did not reveal the East-
ern Slavs to be any more loyal to Rus sia, the Soviet Union, and Bolshevism
than other nationalities. The vari ous White forces, local provisional gov-
ernments (Omsk), zemstvo governments, vari ous Cossack atamans, and
others all received aid, arms, provisions, monies, and support from cap i tal ist-
imperialist nations from 1918 to 1922. Foreign Minister Sukin of the Omsk
Provisional Government stated outright its dependence on foreign support
and funding. He stated, “ ‘ Every branch of our government work to one de-
gree or another came up against the necessity of obtaining the support of
the [Entente] powers—we needed foreign help for the railway, for the army,
in the question of trade, or finance and even education.’ ”^16 During the Inter-
vention and civil war, entire cities and their municipal leaders primarily
throughout Rus sia changed their allegiances overnight and then back
again.^17 In the RFE, when the Bolsheviks lost control of Khabarovsk in Au-
gust 1918, entire units of Red Army soldiers went over to the Whites and
joined the units of the ataman’s Kalmykov and Semyonov.^18 Grigorii  M.
Semyonov was the leader of a Cossack detachment (as part of the Whites’
forces) in Zabaikalia that proclaimed an in de pen dent Buryat Autonomous
Republic in Chita. In February– March 1918, before he started his march
to Chita, he received 3,106,408 rubles from Japan in order to strengthen
his detachment and obtain the arms and provisions he needed. Also, in
March  1918, General Pleshkov (of the Whites) received 20,000 rifles
and 100,000 rubles from the Japa nese while guarding the CER. In the civil
war’s western borders, Pavlo Skoropadsky’s Hetmanate, which controlled
much of the Ukraine from April to November 1918, was supported by
German funding, arms, and munitions.^19 In the Arkhangelsk province
(encompassing Murmansk and Arkhangelsk), when the Bolsheviks fell to