In April 1920 the Bolsheviks created a country they did not want, in order to avoid a war they could not win. The Far Eastern Republic — capital at Verkhneudinsk, then from October 1920 at Chita — was declared as an independent, democratic, multi-party state with a constitution, a parliament, private property and civil liberties, occupying everything from Lake Baikal to the Pacific.
It was a fiction and everyone involved knew it. The Red Army had reached Irkutsk and destroyed Kolchak, but beyond it stood the Japanese Expeditionary Army, at its peak some 70,000 men, with no intention of leaving and an interest in a detached Far East. Moscow could not fight Japan in 1920 while fighting Poland in the west. So it manufactured a buffer: a state Japan could deal with, that was not Soviet Russia, and that was run throughout by the Dalburo of the Russian Communist Party.
For the subject of this volume the republic matters enormously, because it was the only authority in the Far East between 1917 and the present that allowed Ukrainian national organisations to function legally and without harassment.
A constitution, and who wrote it
The constituent assembly elected in January 1921 produced a document that reads as a model liberal-democratic constitution: universal suffrage, a directly elected parliament, guarantees of civil rights, freedom of the press, private property, an independent judiciary, and explicit provision for the national and cultural rights of minorities.
The assembly contained Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, peasant deputies, Buryat and other national representatives, and a Communist bloc that never held an outright majority of the chamber but controlled the government throughout. Alexander Krasnoshchyokov, the republic's first head of government, was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik who had spent thirteen years in Chicago as a lawyer and returned in 1917 — a biography that tells you something about who was available to run an imaginary democracy on the Pacific.
The republic issued its own currency, ran its own foreign ministry, sent a delegation to the Washington Conference in 1921, and negotiated directly with Tokyo at Dairen. It was recognised by nobody except Soviet Russia. Its army, the People's Revolutionary Army under Blyukher, was the Red Army under another name and fought the decisive battle of the eastern civil war at Volochayevka in February 1922 in forty degrees of frost.
What the Ukrainians did with it
The years from 1918 to 1920 had been bad. Under Kolchak's dictatorship at Omsk the Ukrainian Far Eastern organisations were treated as separatism: the Secretariat's leadership was arrested in late 1918 and into 1919, the newspapers were closed, and the Fourth Congress's resolutions became a charge sheet. Kolchak's programme was Russia one and indivisible, and there was no room in it for the congresses at Nikolsk-Ussuriysky.
Under the Far Eastern Republic the position reversed. Ukrainian organisations reconstituted themselves, the hromady resumed, cultural and educational work restarted, and a Ukrainian Far Eastern Regional Council operated openly at Vladivostok. Ukrainian schools functioned. The press reappeared. The republic's commitment to national-cultural rights was on paper an exact match for what the congresses had been demanding since 1917 — national-cultural autonomy inside a federal democratic Russian state — and for about two years it was more or less delivered.
The movement's political problem in these years was that it had nowhere to look. The Ukrainian People's Republic in Kyiv, with which the Fourth Congress had resolved on an eventual link, had been destroyed; Petliura was in exile by the end of 1920 and Ukraine was partitioned between Soviet Russia and Poland by the Treaty of Riga in March 1921. There was no longer a Ukrainian state to be autonomous in relation to. What remained was to make the best of the buffer.
The Japanese question
Every political movement in the Far East between 1918 and 1922 had to have a position on the Japanese army, and the positions available were all bad.
The intervention had begun in 1918 with an Allied agreement to rescue the Czechoslovak Legion and guard war stores, and the Japanese contribution had immediately exceeded what was agreed — 70,000 men against a nominal 7,000 — and stayed after the Americans, British, French, Canadians and Italians had gone home in 1920. Japanese forces occupied northern Sakhalin from 1920, held the Maritime Province, backed a succession of White warlords, and in April 1920 carried out a coordinated attack on partisan and Soviet forces across Primorye.
Ukrainian organisations had contacts with Japanese officers, as did every other political grouping in the region including the Bolsheviks, who were negotiating with Tokyo at the same time. There is no evidence of significant Japanese funding or control of the Ukrainian movement in this period, and the movement's programme long predated the intervention. What there was, in a territory occupied by a foreign army, was the necessity of dealing with it.
The consequence came later. When the Soviet authorities constructed the case against Ukrainian Far Eastern organisations in the 1930s, the contacts of 1918–22 supplied the raw material for an accusation of Japanese espionage, and the genuine — and genuinely compromising — accommodation reached by part of the Harbin emigration with Japan after 1931 made the accusation superficially plausible.
Dissolution
The Japanese announced their withdrawal from the Maritime Province in the summer of 1922 under American and British diplomatic pressure, the weight of the expedition's cost, and domestic political exhaustion. The People's Revolutionary Army entered Vladivostok on the 25th of October 1922.
The Far Eastern Republic's parliament voted on the 14th of November to dissolve the state and petition for incorporation into the RSFSR. Moscow agreed the following day. The buffer had lasted two years and seven months, and it ceased to exist within three weeks of becoming unnecessary.
For the Ukrainian movement this was the end. Within months the Regional Council was wound up, the leadership was arrested or dispersed, and those who could crossed into Manchuria. A series of trials followed in 1923 and 1924 at Chita and Vladivostok, at which the surviving leadership of the congresses was convicted of counter-revolutionary separatism — mild sentences by the standards of a decade later, and the formal end of the organisation the settlers had built in 1917.
What came next was not straightforward suppression. It was something considerably stranger, which is the subject of the next chapter: for most of the 1920s the Soviet state promoted Ukrainian language and culture in the Far East more energetically than the Russian Empire had ever permitted, and then reversed itself completely.
End of Chapter VI