Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

By the time that the forces of Wrangel were being pressed back into Crimea in October–November 1920, the Red Army commanded sufficient men and resources to begin to deal simultaneously with remaining White ulcers at the other end of the Red body politic, in the Far East. Having defeated and executed Kolchak earlier in the year, in February 1920, with the AFSR not yet eliminated and the Poles clearly girding themselves to advance, “Not a Step Further East” had been adopted as the Red Army’s order of the day in Siberia when it reached Irkutsk, as all available forces were required in the west. Thus, on 2 February 1920, the Politbiuro had announced itself to be “unconditionally opposed to committing military and other forces beyond Irkutsk” and pulled many forces and arms of the 5th Red Army back to European Russia.176 Moreover, the Soviet government feared clashing with the still sizable Japanese presence along the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railways. To act as a buffer between the new Soviet border east of Irkutsk and the interventionists, there was therefore proclaimed, at a “Congress of Toilers” at Blagoveshchensk on 6 April 1920, a nominally independent Far Eastern Republic. This had a coalition government, included SRs and Mensheviks in its administration, and had its own armed forces, the People’s-Revolutionary Army, but its self-government was a chimera: the FER was always and entirely controlled by Moscow through the Bolsheviks’ Far Eastern Bureau (Dal′biuro), as was its army, into which were incorporated forces from the Red Army’s formally disestablished Eastern Front, and which was initially commanded by G. Kh. Eikhe, former commander of the 5th Red Army. Still, the “independence” of the FER was a useful fiction that suited the climate of the times, as the Allies also sought to wash their hands of their former—but now embarrassing (for they had failed)—White protégés, and were coming, albeit uneasily, to normalize relations with this strange new regime in Moscow. Even the Japanese, albeit after lengthy negotiations, signed a peace treaty with the FER (the Gongota Agreement, 15 July 1920), although at that point Tokyo refused to acknowledge the FER’s claim to sovereignty over the Maritime Province and its chief city, Vladivostok. These would remain outside the FER’s control until October 1922, when the Japanese were prevailed upon to withdraw from the Russian mainland and the FER’s forces entered Vladivostok. The FER immediately petitioned for union with the USSR and was accepted into the Soviet fold.177 Meanwhile, on 6 July 1921, White forces under the rogue ataman Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg were driven from the Mongolian capital, Urga (Ulan Bator). However, although most White forces in the region were able to flee abroad, chiefly into Manchuria, some remained cut off in the taiga and, having regrouped, were able to stage offensives against Soviet forces, such as that in Iakutsk, which lasted until well into 1923.178

The missing piece of the jigsaw that was becoming the USSR remained Central Asia (or Transcaspia and Russian Turkestan in the parlance of the times), where the final campaigns of the “Russian” Civil Wars were fought. This was a very particular struggle (or, rather, series of struggles), in which the Red Army faced opponents that usually had little in common with any other of their previous adversaries—least of all the Whites.179