Russian Sideshow

by Robert L Willett

  It is not known from what sources the War Department received the reports upon which the foregoing telegram to me was based, but events of the past year have borne testimony to the accurateness of that estimate as evidenced by the Japanese support of the notorious Kalmykoff, Seminoff and Ivanoff-Rivanoff.6

  He also mentioned the problems the Japanese were giving Mr. Stevens and the RRSC. The Japanese plan was working; any prospect of a central government in Siberia, let alone Russia, was improbable while the Japanese supported separate factions.

  Even with that uneasy situation, as late as September 1919 Graves still maintained good relationships with Japanese General Otani, describing him as “a man of kindly character, of temperate habits, and as the Senior Allied Commander he has been manifestly fair in dealing with all of us.”7 He also recognized other Japanese traits:

  [T]he Japanese have simply been following a different policy. They have resorted to bribery and trickery in every way. . . . They spend money in a way and follow methods that Americans can not and must not follow. . . . I doubt very much whether it is possible for us in the face of such obstacles to realize American ideals of honesty, liberty, and justice in Siberia for years and years to come.8

  A Japanese paper, the Kokumin, gave an interesting explanation of Japanese diplomacy: “International relations are quite unlike relations subsisting between individuals. Morality and sincerity do not govern a country’s diplomacy which is guided by selfishness, pure and simple. It is considered the secret of diplomacy to forestall rivals by every crafty means available.”9

  General Graves found himself in a vast turbulent arena that contained numerous factions with conflicting strategies and goals and several dominant figures with whom he would soon clash. One of the members of the expedition, Lt. Sylvian Kindall, wrote about Graves’s arrival:

  Contrary to expectations, the arrival of General Graves did not remove any of the mystery which hitherto had surrounded the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia. The fact turned out to be that the general himself, although he had been sent direct from the United States to assume command, had not been entrusted with any information which could be construed to define what had been the real purpose in sending American troops to Siberia.10

  Graves, however, had found one point in Wilson’s Memoire to which he adhered: he was in no way to interfere with the internal affairs of Russia. That specific order of the president brought him into conflict with virtually every faction of Siberia. There was no communication between Vladivostok and Archangel, so Graves may well have had no knowledge that the British had thrown American doughboys into open battle with the Bolsheviks, and the Allies probably expected the same thing would happen in Siberia. But Graves, throughout the twenty months of his expedition, never wavered from his position, offering battle only when necessary to protect his troops. He clashed principally with the British, whose commander Gen. Alfred Knox, an avowed foe of Bolshevism, looked with disdain on America’s late entry into the Great War as well as their reluctance to join the Allies in Russia.

  An early evidence of difficulties among the Allies was in the guarding of the vast mountains of material stored in and around Vladivostok. When Graves arrived he suggested to his Allied partners that an inventory be made of all Allied stocks in the area. That seemed to him a reasonable request, but the British and French requested time to think the suggestion over. The French and British thought there should be some exceptions to any control of these vast amounts of material, specifically arms and ammunition. Eventually, agreement was reached on a complicated series of procedures requiring the permission of the commission, then proceeding with a series of forms, requisitions, and receipts.11 There appeared to be little discussion of the preservation of the stockpiles of materials that remained and that, in many cases, were subjected to the hazards of Siberian weather and poorly guarded.12

  The American general was faced with the question of troop placement. He had authorized Colonel Styer, now commanding the Twenty-seventh Infantry after his brief role as AEF commander, to participate in the Ussuri campaign. Graves reasoned that the battle was primarily against the elusive Austro-Hungarian-German war prisoners who Otani had claimed were the cause of the stubborn resistance on the Khabarovsk line. Graves wrote:

  I learned that the Twenty-seventh Infantry was taking part in a combined action against the enemy. The enemy being represented to me as Bolsheviks and German prisoners. I was satisfied that the American troops were not departing from the announced policy of the United States Government to refrain from taking part any part in Russian affairs.13

  Shortly afterward, Graves released the Twenty-seventh Infantry to Otani and Oi to use at their discretion.14

  Earlier, in March 1918, a thorough report had been made concerning POWs in Russia by Mr. Webster of the American Red Cross and Captain Hicks, British Army. Their opinions were that any expectation of armed German or Austro-Hungarian prisoners playing a role in the Russian revolution was utter nonsense.15 In spite of the lack of evidence of any armed prisoners being involved anywhere, and that the Bolsheviks obviously were a part of the Russian internal scene, Graves ordered the Twenty-seventh Infantry to support the Japanese drive against the Bolsheviks. It should be noted that this was his first day in Siberia; while he spent weeks at sea, Colonel Styer had already made the troop commitment.

  The following days brought more decisions to make, not the least of which was where he should locate his headquarters. On September 8, he requested guidance from Washington. He pointed out that everyone was moving west except the Japanese; Czechs, British, and French were all making preparations to move, possibly as far as the Volga, with visionary dreams of a renewed eastern front. Graves recommended, under certain conditions, that he move west with them, citing the fact that few troops were needed in Vladivostok. He said he would need several additional units if he headed west: a regiment of mountain artillery, a provisional artillery battery, and one company of engineers.16

  On September 27, the War Department cabled that any move to Omsk or beyond was disapproved. They thought Harbin might be a good central location, but left the decision to Graves. He was cautioned to be sure his supply lines stayed intact, that he in no case should send troops west of Lake Baikal, and that guarding Czech lines was still a priority.

  Deciding that his headquarters would remain in Vladivostok, Graves told Otani that he would not to move to Harbin, where quarters were at a premium, but was thinking of sending a battalion to some place between Chita and Lake Baikal. The Japanese garrisoned all the areas east of Chita, but they had no troops west of Chita. Graves eventually decided not to spread his troops out as far as the Baikal area; thus, as winter set in October 1918, Americans were located almost exclusively on the Khabarovsk-Vladivostok Railroad, with only one unit, Company B of the Thirty-first Infantry, in Harbin, China. The Thirty-first Infantry headquarters was in Vladivostok with companies A, C, E, H, I, and K in areas near the city. Companies F and G were at Spasskoye, L was at Razdolnoye, B at Harbin, and M at the Suchan Mines. Most of the Twenty-seventh Infantry was at Khabarovsk, with its First Battalion at Spasskoye and one platoon at Ussuri.

  General Graves visited Khabarovsk in September, going as far west as Bira on the railroad. He found the troops in Bira quartered in Russian boxcars, made reasonably livable by the doughboys’ ingenuity, but still boxcars. At two other outposts Graves found similar situations and wrote, “I could see no reason for keeping these troops at any of these stations, so ordered that all be brought to Khabarovsk.”17 There they were housed in almost luxurious barracks where they spent the winter.

  In Khabarovsk the Twenty-seventh Infantry was given responsibility for the Austrian-German prison camp a few miles from the city in a place called Krasnaya Retchka (Red River). When Company E was sent to the camp, the men found a mess: filthy, refuse-strewn, unsanitary, inefficient, and generally dark and gloomy, it was a challenge for the Americans. Of the 2,000 prisoners, 460 were sick and feverish, and there were
no medical facilities. “The Russians had no individual records of these prisoners, nor did they know how many prisoners they held in confinement.” The Americans discovered that about fifteen hundred of the prisoners were officers. With their tattered clothes, minimum rations, and without medical care, they faced the Siberian winter with little hope.18

  That all changed with the arrival of the Americans under the command of Capt. Edward Larkin. Within thirty days, a transformation had been made in the way the prisoners were treated. Soon the camp was entertained by the strains of two inmate orchestras, a thirty-seven-piece Austrian symphony, and another made up of Hungarian musicians. The cost of caring for these victims of the war was considerable, but it was agreed that the expenses would be shared equally by the United States, Japan, England, France, Italy, and China.19 The POWs held in this camp and others run by Americans were lucky; in thirty other prison camps in Siberia run by Russians and Czechs, life was far from pleasant.20

  One of the most poignant scenes at the prison was the cemetery, where there were about fifteen hundred graves. They lay neglected and deserted in tangles of overgrown vines and weeds with only rough wooden markers to identify those who lay beneath. In the center stood a magnificent limestone monument made by the prisoners.

  The hands of the war prisoners that erected it had apparently been guided by no thought of reviving any soreness of heart from the graves of the dead comrades around it, who from shattered battlefields had been marched and carted across two continents into this distant corner of the world, here to rot away the remaining days of their lives, in pestilential prison barracks. In contrast to the bitter things that might have been said, the shaft bore a single, simple inscription, which Sperati translated to read, “Here all are friends”21

  The prison became part of a struggle between Cossacks and Americans. For several months, Ataman Ivan Kalmykof, part of the Kolchak White Army, had roamed the Amur territory, robbing, burning, raping, and executing hundreds of Russian peasants. In October he arrested a Swedish Red Cross representative, Sven Hedblum, and a Red Cross assistant, tried them for espionage, and hanged them both in a boxcar in Khabarovsk, while stealing 1.6 million rubles from Red Cross dispatches. A Red Cross typist was then raped and shot by Cossacks.22 At the same time, a group of Hungarian musicians, POWs, was executed by Kalmykof’s men. One of his lieutenants, a man named Julienk, carried out the killings with obvious relish:

  Some Cossacks and I caught them all—16 men—like dogs; at 12 o’clock noon I led them into a garden by the Amur near the Muaviev Memorial where there is a chasm extending down to the river. . . . I lined them up, the Cossacks stood ready, I commanded “fire” and they rolled into the Amur to the Devil’s Mother.23

  Word of these executions and arrests reached Graves on an almost daily basis; by December 1, he had had enough. Under his orders, American soldiers could do nothing, even when they were witnesses to Kalmykof’s crimes; that created serious morale problems for the troops. General Graves finally wrote to Otani, suggesting that they both notify Kalmykof that the next time he murdered, he would be turned over to the civil courts. The Japanese responded, “Kalmykoff had promised them, on November 28, that he would not kill any more people, and that he had kept that promise, but, if I desired, they would join me in notifying him as I had suggested.”24 That was no solution, but Kalmykof did become more careful, hiding his actions from the Americans while apparently continuing his purges.25

  The atrocities became so flagrant that even the Kalmykof Cossacks could take no more. On the night of January 27, 1919, a large body of his Cossacks came to the American headquarters in Khabarovsk while Kalmykof was away. Their grievances were presented to the Americans, listing, “enforced enlistment; prisoners of war being forced to serve under penalty of death; whippings and executions for slight offenses; fear of being shot; insufficient food and clothing; arrears and reduction in pay; drunkenness and cruelty of officers; great numbers of execution and mutilation of civilians.”26 Even Cossack tribunals had been disgusted by the Cossack leader. On February 12, 1919, a decision of the Volna Special Cossack (Ussuri) Assembly declared, among other things:

  Ataman Kalmykoff has filled the cup of endurance by his shooting down of Cossacks. . . . The numerous cases of shooting the civil inhabitants of the town of Khabarovsk—guilty or not guilty of having taken part in Bolshevism—have excited the population of the province to such an extent and have instilled such disgust towards the Cossacks that only threats of the Kalmykoffites holds back the civil population of the province from taking the law into their own hands and applying it to the Cossacks.27

  That slowed, but did not stop, his brutality.

  After complaining to the Americans, the rebelling Cossacks, some 700 strong, went in different directions: 300 disappeared into neighboring villages, 30 turned themselves in to the Chinese detachment, and 398 marched in a body, with animals, rifles, and machine guns, to the headquarters of the Twenty-seventh Infantry. Colonel Styer refused to turn over the mutineers to Kalmykof or any representative of Horvat, but decreed that they should be released to return home.

  During this time, Kalmykof remained near Khabarovsk making threats against Americans, blaming them for the defections, and accusing American soldiers of various offenses. The Japanese responded to Styer’s decision concerning the mutinous Cossacks, saying, “The desertion involved, and your reception the soldiers, is an event within Kalmykoff’s detachment, and is simply a matter of its military discipline. This case is believed as interference with the interior administration of Kalmykoff’s detachment.” The rest of the message was equally troubling.28 Colonel Styer fired back to the Japanese on March 25, with Graves’s blessing:

  The situation grows grave and most serious. On several occasions I have reported the conduct of this detachment towards the Americans and each time you have informed me that you had no authority over Kalmikoff. The mere fact that he is controlled by the Japanese and supported by them makes you responsible for his acts.29

  There was much discussion, but Colonel Styer still refused to turn the mutineers back to their Cossack fate; he had already sent them down to Krasnaya Retchka on February 1.

  The Japanese, whose attitudes toward Americans had been cooling as the winter progressed, sided with Kalmykof’s Cossacks; Japanese papers slandered the United States repeatedly over the event, and Japanese officers made dangerously biased reports about the American role in the mutiny. Daily contact became even more difficult between the lower ranks of the two forces. General Otani maintained his diplomatic approach, writing in response to Styer:

  In view, however, of the facts that the Japanese Government has hitherto assisted them in their equipment and supplies, and that Japanese troops have been operating in co-operation with them, we feel it is our duty to see that Kalmikof be duly advised and that a satisfactory and smooth solution be reached in connection with the matter lately informed by Colonel Styer.30

  A special Cossack trial of the mutineers, with local communities having input, convened on February 21, but arrived at no conclusion; most of the mutineers apparently drifted back to their homes. The arms and equipment were turned over to the Japanese, who claimed they had paid for them.31 It was acknowledged that the Japanese were now openly supporting both Cossack Atamans Kalmykof and Semenov. Relations were rapidly deteriorating as the various forces in the Russian Far East realized that U.S. troops would not be participating in the struggle on either side.

  However, as the men relaxed and bided their time in various ways, the armistice on the western front took effect and the guns in France were silent. The effect on the Siberian troops was minimal. Graves, feeling very much as did Colonel Stewart in Archangel, wrote:

  I expected Allied troops, as well as United States troops, to be withdrawn from Siberia soon after the signing of the Armistice, and I seemed to be the only military representative who was not aware that we had a war of our own in Russia, and that our War was independent and separate from the war in Fra
nce. The Armistice had absolutely no effect in Siberia. It seemed to me, as all the reasons the United States took part in military action in Siberia had entirely disappeared before the Armistice, or at the time of the Armistice, we would withdraw our troops from Russian territory and naturally the question repeatedly came to my mind, why are American troops kept in Siberia?32

  The questions became more frequent and more specific regarding their mission, but there were no visible signs of a departure. Unknown to the troops, Secretary of War Newton Baker wrote the president immediately after the armistice:

  My own judgment is that we ought simply to order our forces home by the first boat and notify the Japanese that in our judgment our mission is fully accomplished and that nothing more can be done there which will be acceptable to or beneficial to the Russian people by force of arms, and that we propose to limit our assistance to Russia hereafter to an economic aid in view of the fact that our armies by the armistice have been required to withdraw their armed forces from Russian territory.33

  But, that, of course, was not to be.

  Another event of critical importance was a coup on November 18, 1918, in Omsk, which installed Adm. Alexander Kolchak as the new head of the Siberian government. The coup was similar to that in North Russia, organized and carried out with British blessing, placing the ex-Tsarist naval officer at the head of a new government. He called himself the Supreme Ruler of all Russia, yet Vladivostok was governed by Czechs, Khabarovsk by Japanese, and other cities by local governments, many with differing agendas. His selection did nothing to solidify the vast regions of Siberia, let alone European Russia, still struggling with the new Soviet government in Moscow.