At the Red Cross Hospital in Khabarovsk, Far East, in the Soviet Union on September 11, 1924, Sun Jiwu, the most famous guerrilla leader along the Amur River (i.e., Heilongjiang) during the Russian Civil War, closed his eyes forever and left the world of dear comrades and longing.
The Rout of the White Guards and the Expulsion of the Intervention Army from the Far East (April 1920 – October 1922)
Sun Jiwu was wounded four times in successive battles to defend Soviet power. Under the war conditions of lack of medical treatment and lack of medical treatment, wind and food, and sleeping, he could not get timely and good treatment, and his health was seriously damaged. Although the doctor actively rescued him for more than a month after being admitted to the hospital, his life was still taken away by the god of death.
Sun Jiwu was born in 1876 to a poor peasant family in Heilongjiang. In 1900, he and his brother participated in the Boxer Rebellion. In a battle, his brother was tragically killed. In order to escape the Qing government's arrest, in 1902, he carried his brother's orphan who had just turned two years old, sandwiched himself in the crowd of people who had gone to Tsarist Russia to work as a coolie, to the depths of the dense forest on the north bank of the Amur River, and settled in a small village where Chinese gathered to make a living hunting.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially after the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, many Chinese came to the Russian Far East. Some of them choose to live in thatched huts in dense primeval forests, making their living digging ginseng, collecting deer antler velvets, and hunting fur beasts.
Primeval forests of the Russian Far East in winter
In the primeval forests along the Amur River, villagers always carry weapons with them, both to deal with tigers, wild boars and other beasts of prey, but also to prevent bandit attacks. They often banded together for self-defense and elected a trustworthy man to lead. Sun Jiwu was fair and righteous, and soon won the respect and trust of his fellow villagers and became the leader of the villagers.
At that time, the Russian officials were very vicious towards the Chinese, oppressing the villagers, collecting harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, and even robbing them of their hard-earned furs and gold. Because he dared to speak for the victim, Sun Jiwu formed an enemy family. In 1913, he was forced to leave the village and go to Khabarovsk in The Coast Province to work as a worker in a Chinese-owned flour mill. It was during this period that he came into contact with the Bolshevik Party and quickly embraced socialist ideas. In 1918, he secretly joined the Russian Communist Party (Brazzaville) and carried out revolutionary activities among local Chinese workers.
Chinese in the Russian Far Eastern city of Vladivostok
How did Sun Jiwu become a well-known "guerrilla leader" in the Far East?
Karkaev, a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has conducted in-depth research on the participation of Chinese in Siberia and the Far East in the defense of the Soviets. He told me that before the outbreak of The First World War, the Chinese in Russia were mainly concentrated in Siberia and the Far East, with a maximum of 250,000 people, the vast majority of whom were Chinese workers who left their hometowns to earn a living. During World War I, there was an influx of more than 160,000 Chinese workers throughout Russia, but Siberia and the Far East were still the main gathering places. The Chinese people were discriminated against and oppressed by the Tsarist government, squeezed and exploited by the capitalists, and their lives were extremely difficult. After the October Revolution, Soviet power was soon established in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok and other places in the Far East. The Policy of National Equality in the Soviets, for which the Chinese in Russia rejoiced, joined the Russian people in the struggle to create and consolidate Soviet power.
After landings at Vladivostok in August 1918, Japanese troops (top) and American troops (bottom) jointly occupied
In the summer of 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion rebelled. Imperialist intervention armies, mainly Japanese and American, landed in Vladivostok, united with various local white armies, and strangled Soviet power. The Japanese Intervention Army, of seventy-three thousand men, accounting for eighty percent of the Allied InterventionIst forces in the Far East and Siberia, was mainly entrenched in the present-day Amur Region and Primorsky Krai, controlled all ports in the Russian Far East, towns along the routes east of chita on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and supported the White Russian regime. It was not until October 22, 1922, when the Russian Red Army liberated Vladivostok, that the Japanese army was completely driven out of the Soviet Far East. The U.S. Intervention Army, with about 8,000 men, was mainly tasked with occupying the railway line from Vladivostok to Ussuriysk.
In 1918, Japanese warships invaded Vladivostok
Among the foreign intervention forces, the Japanese were the most brutal, burning and looting, committing various crimes against Chinese and Koreans. Affected by this, the White Army also slaughtered innocent people. Such atrocities made many Chinese respond to the call of the Bolshevik Party, take up arms, join the guerrillas, and become an important force in resisting the intervention army and the White Army.
There is no doubt, Karlkaev told me, that during the Russian Civil War, Siberia and the Far East "wrote the most glorious page by the guerrillas." There, the heroic struggle against the imperialist intervention army, the Czechoslovak legion, the Kolchak White Army, the Semyonov and Kalmykov gangs lasted for more than five years.
"The guerrilla movement probably began in the summer of 1918. Before the establishment of the Far Eastern Republic in 1920, there were no regular units of the Red Army, only guerrillas led by the Bolshevik Party. After 1920, the Red Army entered the area, and some of the guerrillas were integrated into regular units. Due to the rampant activities of the Japanese Intervention Army and the White Army, the situation of the struggle required the retention of a large number of guerrillas, dealing with the enemy in the countryside and dense forests. There are different accounts about the number of guerrillas in the whole region, I think at least more than one hundred thousand. ”
Under the pressure of the imperialist intervention army and the White Army and the white terror, the Red Guards went to the depths of the dense forest and formed a guerrilla group to make the "taiga forest a defensive fortress". The centres of guerrilla activity in Siberia and the Far East were located in the Amur region, the Maritime Voivodeship, the Baikal Littoral Voivodeship and the Transbaikal Voivodeship, respectively. The Soviet scholar Reichberg once described the battle there this way: "It was a mass war against foreign oppressors and invaders. Local residents, young and old, were inextricably linked to the guerrillas. They provided the guerrillas with food, clothing, transportation, and intelligence on the Intervention and White Army. Even the Japanese admit that 'every bush, every child becomes a sentry of the guerrillas'. ”
According to many personal memoirs and materials, there were a large number of Chinese in the Far East and Siberian guerrillas. For example, some guerrillas formed Chinese companies, and some guerrillas were half Chinese.
A small town in the Russian Far East at the beginning of the twentieth century
Sun Jiwu was an outstanding representative and leading figure of the Chinese Red guerrillas who participated in the battle to defend Soviet power.
In May 1918 (it is also recorded that in June), Sun Jiwu was sent back to the village where he had lived, where he was propaganda among hunters and mobilized to join the guerrillas. Within a month or so, a guerrilla group was formed, including his nephew, who was only eighteen years old.
At the end of June 1918, according to the arrangement of the party organization, Sun Jiwu brought a guerrilla group of Chinese hunters to the Ussuri front to participate in the battle. For more than five years, Sun Jiwu led his troops to fight against an enemy with superior weapons and numbers. They sabotage transportation, transmit intelligence, mobilize and organize the masses, occupy important settlements and transportation hubs, and deal a heavy blow to the enemy.
Cossack guerrillas in the Ussuriysk region in 1920
In early July 1918, the White Army and the Japanese Intervention Army marched north. Due to the huge disparity in strength between the enemy and us, in accordance with the requirements of the Ussuri front command, various guerrilla groups have withdrawn from Nikolsk-Ussuriysk, Sbasque and other places.
In order to effectively stop the enemy's offensive and strengthen the Ussuri front, the superior decided to dispatch five larger guerrilla units from The Coast Province to block the enemy near the town of Lutkovka on the Ussuri River, of which Sun Jiwu was one of them. By this time, Sun Jiwu's guerrillas had replenished their fresh blood, and more than thirty railway workers from Vyazemsk Station, the grand hub of the Ussuri Railway, joined the ranks.
In early August, five guerrilla groups attacked along the Ussuri Railway and won a beautiful battle. The guerrillas responded to each other and finally rushed into the white army headquarters in the town of Antonovka, and the leader of the Cossack white army, Kalmykov, jumped out of the window in a hurry and fled.
After August, more foreign interventionist forces landed in the Far East. On the 22nd, the Ussuri Front Command learned that an Intervention Army had disembarked from Sviakino Station and was advancing towards the Songatsa River on the border between China and Russia, in an attempt to cross the river to the Chinese side in order to bypass the right wing of the guerrillas, who were threatened to be surrounded by flanks. That night, Sun Jiwu was ordered to lead his troops across the Song'acha River to a village in China three kilometers from the river. Their mission was to use the village's favorable highland terrain to block the detachment of Japanese and American intervention forces. On the other side of the river, another red guerrilla group echoed them across the river.
In the early morning of the 23rd, the sky was dark, and the intervention army, with the Japanese cavalry as the vanguard, drove towards the village where Sun Jiwu's guerrillas were ambushed. In hastily dug bunkers, the guerrillas nervously awaited Sun Jiwu's order to fire. When the enemy was only about a hundred meters away from them, Sun Jiwu shouted "fire." The guerrillas strafed with machine guns and fired at the enemy with two field guns. The enemy did not expect to be ambushed here, and the river was blocked by guerrilla fire on the opposite bank. In desperation, they adjusted their tactics, detoured from the side, and occupied two Chinese tunzi four kilometers away from the village where Sun Jiwu's guerrillas were located.
The Intervention Army sent scouts to haunt Sun Jiwu's village every day. In order to support the guerrillas, many Chinese villagers in the lower reaches of the river rushed here with weapons. Villagers brought millet porridge, soybeans, roasted steamed buns and so on to the guerrillas. At this time, in order to cut off the communication between this enemy army and the headquarters of the intervention army in Sviakino, the guerrillas on the opposite bank quickly made a decision and sent a small detachment to the upper reaches of the Songatsa River.
Sun Jiwu was not idle. He sent his nephew, who had become a reconnaissance platoon leader, to lead a squad to raid the enemy one night and capture a "tongue". In the middle of the night the next day, his scouts reported that the Intervention Army was preparing to launch another attack on the village. Sun Jiwu immediately decided to leave a platoon to contain the enemy, while he and the others quietly withdrew, and then divided into two ways and detoured back to the enemy's rear. After the battle began, the platoon responsible for containing the enemy first put up a kind of resistance, without arousing any suspicion from the enemy. After that, they found the right moment, quickly withdrew from the village, and met Sun Jiwu.
After this interfering force climbed to the high ground around the village, Sun Jiwu led the guerrillas to open fire on the enemy from both sides, and quickly surrounded the village and launched a fierce attack on the enemy. The guerrillas besieged the village for two days and two nights. When the nearby Chinese peasants heard that the guerrillas were attacking the Japanese army, they all came and demanded that Sun Jiwu issue them weapons to participate in the battle. Sun Jiwu was ready to launch a final attack on the enemy after replenishing his ammunition.
With victory in sight, the situation has changed. The foreign interventionist forces continued to move northward, and the strength of the guerrillas had reached ten times that of the guerrillas. In order to preserve the revolutionary forces, the Soviet power in the Far East decided to withdraw the partisans on the Ussuri front in the direction of Khabarovsk, as did Sun Jiwu's guerrillas.
On the evening of 27 August, the Intervention Army set up artillery on the banks of the Song'acha River and bombarded China in an attempt to rescue troops trapped in small villages. Sun Jiwu, who had received the order to retreat, no longer loved the battle, led his troops to march down the river for six kilometers to meet the guerrilla group originally stationed on the other side of the river. The two teams boarded a steamboat that had stopped there to pick up.
Babichev's "Chinese and Korean Laborers in the Far East's Civil War"
Kovary, a veteran soldier who fought with Sun Jiwu against the Japanese Intervention Army and the White Army, recalled that many ordinary Chinese people in the border area rushed to the docks to send them off, bringing pork, eggs, vegetables, fruits and sugar. Red flags flew everywhere, and hundreds of young people surrounded Sun Jiwu and asked to join the guerrillas. Sun Jiwu told them:
Dear compatriots! On behalf of the Red Soldiers of the Detachment, I would like to thank you for your farewell. As a result of the powerful offensive of our common brutal enemy, the U.S.-Japan Intervention Army, which we share with the Russian people, we are about to withdraw. But the retreat was temporary, and no matter how strong the interventionist forces were, they could never defeat Lenin's people. In China, there will certainly be a regime of the poor and workers like Russia in the future. We will never lay down our arms until we have achieved final victory!
On September 4, the young Far Eastern Soviet regime died. According to the instructions of the Bolshevik Party, Sun Jiwu led the troops to retreat into the boundless dense forest.
(Text/Han Xianyang, Material Source/Han Xianyang, Editor-in-Charge/Lin Feng, Editor/Qianli, Haizhe, Illustration/Qianli, Co-ordinator/Nanke)
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Source: "Broken Circle" WeChat public account