The Chinese in the service of the Russian revolution

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Probably there is no person here who has not seen the movie "The Elusive Avengers". Not everyone knows that the film is based on the book by P. Blyakhin "Chervony d'yavolyata", and there are already very few people who know that there is no gypsy in the book - in the book there is a Chinese. Let's remember the role of the Chinese in the civil war.

A hundred years ago, our country already went through an experiment with the use of cheap migrant labor. The experience was tragic: tens of thousands of Chinese guest workers marched across Russia with fire and sword, exterminating the civilian population.

No one knows for certain when the first Chinese migrants appeared in Russia. This may have happened in 1862, when the rules of Russian-Chinese trade were signed on the basis of the Beijing Treaty, possibly in 1899, the year when the Ihatuan Uprising broke out in China, and a stream of Chinese refugees poured into all countries of the world. Some fled to the United States, others to European colonies in Africa, and still others moved to Russia. Here they began to be called "Walking-walking" - apparently, that was the name of peddlers, traders of every little thing.

Then there was another wave of migration - after the lost Russo-Japanese War. Russian troops left part of Manchuria to the Japanese, and along with the soldiers, the Chinese also pulled northward. But the main wave of Chinese migration to Russia was associated with the First World War: when all Russian men were called to the front, there was no one to work, so the government began to hire Chinese - fortunately, their work was worth mere pennies.

In 1915, Chinese workers began to be imported from Russian Manchuria for the construction of the Petrograd-Murmansk railway, the Murmansk port and other objects of state importance. Many Chinese workers were sent to various mines in the Urals, to the coal mines of the Donetsk basin, to logging in Belarus and cold Karelia. The most literate Chinese were selected to work at various enterprises and factories in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, Lugansk, Yekaterinburg. In 1916, groups of Chinese were even formed to dig trenches for the Russian army on the German front. The number of "Walking Walking" is growing exponentially: if by the end of 1915 there were 40 thousand Chinese in Russia, then in 1916 - already 75 thousand people, and in the spring of 1917 - already 200 thousand.

And so, when the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, these thousands of Chinese found themselves in a foreign country without money, without work and without any prospects of returning home. And in the blink of an eye, the harmless "Walking-Walking" turned into dangerous gangs that wandered aimlessly through Russian cities, trading in robbery and violence.

The first to notice the orphaned Chinese were the Bolsheviks, who called their "class brothers" to serve in the ChON - special forces, punitive detachments of the Red Army, who were entrusted with the most "dirty work". Why were the Chinese good? The bulk of the Chinese did not know the Russian language and did not represent the country they were in, its religion, customs and way of life. Therefore, they held out to their fellow tribesmen, forming close-knit closed groups with strong discipline. Unlike Russians, Tatars or Ukrainians, the Chinese did not go home on occasion, their home was too far away. They did not become deserters, because the whites, aware of all the horrors that the "Chonists" did, shot the Chinese without trial or investigation.

However, not all Chinese liked the torture and execution of the civilian population; many of the migrants went into the army simply in order not to die of hunger and cold. In one of the reports of the Chinese diplomats, we read: “Secretary Li invited the workers recruited into the army to the embassy and spoke frankly with them. They burst into tears and said: "How can you forget your homeland? But in Russia it is very difficult to find a job, and we have no money for the way back. We cannot make ends meet, that's why we signed up as a soldier."

So, the first detachment where Chinese migrants were hired for military service was the international detachment under the 1st corps - this is Lenin's personal guard. Then this detachment with the move of the government to Moscow was renamed into the "First International Legion of the Red Army", which began to be used to protect the first persons. So, for example, the very first circle of Lenin's protection consisted of 70 Chinese bodyguards. Also, the Chinese guarded Comrade Trotsky, and Bukharin, and all other prominent party members.

The organizer of the first combat Chinese battalion was the future army commander Iona Yakir - the son of a pharmacist and yesterday's student at the University of Basel in Switzerland. With the outbreak of the First World War, Yakir returned home, and, avoiding mobilization, got a job at a military plant - then the workers of defense plants were exempted from conscription. After the February Revolution, Yakir decided to become a revolutionary - the time was coming for a quick career. Through acquaintances, he immediately finds himself in a leading position in the Bessarabian provincial committee, and soon becomes the commissar of the "special army of the Rumfront" - that was the name of his detachment of Chinese guest workers.

In his book "Memories of the Civil War," Yakir writes: “The Chinese looked at their salaries very seriously. They gave their lives easily, but pay on time and feed well. Yes, that's it. Their authorized representatives come to me and say that 530 people were hired and, therefore, I have to pay for all of them. And how many are not, then nothing - the rest of the money that is owed to them, they will share between everyone. I talked with them for a long time, convinced them that this was wrong, not in our opinion. Yet they got theirs. Another reason was given - we, they say, should send the families of those killed to China. We had a lot of good things with them on the long long-suffering journey through the whole of Ukraine, the whole Don, to the Voronezh province."

In 1919, the intelligence of the 1st Volunteer Corps of Kutepov collected a lot of information that sometimes the Russian Red Army men refused to carry out executioner functions in the captured villages. Even the fact that the executioners were generously watered with vodka and given the clothes of the executed did not help. But "Walking, Walking" without any special worries, they shot, cut off their hands, gouged out their eyes and flogged pregnant women to death.

By the way, in the famous novel How the Steel Was Tempered, Oleksiy Ostrovsky showed that the Chinese made a great contribution to the “liberation” of Ukraine from the Ukrainians: “The Petliurites fled on the way to the South-West Railway Station. Their retreat was covered by an armored car. The highway leading into the city was deserted. But then a Red Army soldier jumped out onto the road. He dropped to the ground and fired along the highway. Behind him another, a third … Seryozha sees them: they bend down and shoot on the go. Tanned runs without hiding; a Chinese man with sore eyes, in an undershirt, belted with machine-gun belts, with grenades in both hands … A feeling of joy seized Seryozha. He rushed onto the highway and shouted as best he could: - Long live comrades! In surprise, the Chinese almost knocked him off his feet. He wanted to violently attack Seryozha, but the enthusiastic look of the young man stopped him. - Where did Petliura run? the Chinese shouted to him breathlessly."

Soon, special Chinese detachments were created under the Red Army. For example, under the Special Battalion of the Kiev Gubernia Cheka, a "Chinese detachment" was formed under the command of Li Xiu-Liang. An important role in the creation of the Chinese Red units was played by the members of the RSDLP-CPSU (b) San Fuyang and Shen Chenho, loyal to the Bolsheviks. The latter even received a mandate from the Soviet government and was appointed as a special commissar for the formation of Chinese detachments throughout Soviet Russia. San Fuyang created a number of Chinese Red units in Ukraine. Shen Chenho played an important role in the formation of the Chinese international red detachments in Moscow, Petrograd, Lugansk, Kharkov, Perm, Kazan and a number of other places.

Anastasia Khudozhina, a resident of Vladikavkaz, writes in her diary about how the Chinese fought: “The massacre was terrible, because a detachment of Chinese, who had come out of nowhere in our city, dragged a machine gun onto the bell tower of the Alexander Nevsky Church and began to pour fire on everyone around. “The devils are slanting,” my mother hissed and prayed incessantly. And these Chinese were dark, darkness, about three hundred, no less."

And further: “Then it turned out that before leaving, the Chinese had shot a lot of people. It turns out that they went home at night - there were many retired military men in Vladikavkaz - and took everyone who served in the White Army or who found award weapons or photographs of their sons in officer uniforms. They were detained, ostensibly for the investigation, and everyone was shot behind the hospital cemetery near the corn fields."

The most bloody gang of migrants was the 1st separate Chinese detachment of the Cheka of the Terek Republic, commanded by Pau Ti-San.

This military formation "became famous" during the suppression of the Astrakhan uprising on March 10, 1919. Even against the background of the Red Terror, "Astrakhan Shooting" stood out for its unparalleled rigidity and madness. It all started with the fact that the Chinese surrounded a peaceful rally at the entrance of the plant. After the refusal of the workers to disperse, the Chinese fired a volley of rifles, then machine guns and hand grenades were used. Dozens of workers died, but, as it turned out later, the massacre was only gaining momentum. The Chinese hunted men all day. At first, the arrested were simply shot, then, for the sake of saving ammunition, they began to drown them. Eyewitnesses recalled how the hands and feet of the arrested were tied and thrown into the Volga straight from steamers and barges. One of the workers, who remained unnoticed in the hold, somewhere near the car and survived, said that about one hundred and eighty people were dropped from the Gogol steamer in one night. And in the city in the emergency commandant's offices there were so many executed that they barely had time to be taken to the cemetery at night, where they piled up in heaps under the guise of "typhoid".

By March 15, it was hardly possible to find at least one house where they would not mourn for their father, brother, husband. In some houses, several people disappeared. “The authorities decided to obviously take revenge on the workers of Astrakhan for all the strikes for the Tula, Bryansk and Petrograd strikes, which swept in a wave in March 1919,” wrote the “white” newspapers. - Astrakhan presented a terrible picture at that time. The streets are completely deserted. There are streams of tears in the houses. Fences, shop windows and windows of government offices were sealed with orders, orders and orders for executions … On the 14th, an announcement was posted on the fences about the appearance of workers at the factories under the threat of taking away ration cards and arrest. But only one commissars came to the factories. The deprivation of the cards did not frighten anyone - nothing had been issued about them for a long time, and the arrest still could not be avoided. And there are not many workers left in Astrakhan …"

After the end of the Civil War, Chinese mercenaries were left out of business - and most of them began to flock to Moscow, where a quite noticeable Chinese community was formed (according to the 1926 census, there were over 100 thousand Chinese in Russia).

Initially, Moscow's "Chinatown", as historian Maria Bakhareva writes, was located in the area of the present metro station "Baumanskaya" - there, on Engels Street, the office of the board of the "Renaissance of China" society operated, nearby was a Chinese hotel, at which a restaurant operated. There were also shops with Chinese goods - spices, clothes and all sorts of little things. All houses in the area were inhabited by representatives of the Chinese diaspora. However, some of them preferred to settle closer to the center - many KGB executioners moved to leading posts in the Comintern. They began to prepare a revolution on a global scale. By the way, in Moscow, for example, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, Jiang Ching-kuo (Russian name - Nikolai Elizarov), who later became president of Taiwan, and the future long-term ruler of China, Deng Xiaoping (Russian name - Drozdov), studied in Moscow.

But ordinary fighters of punitive detachments were retrained as laundresses - in those years, Chinese laundries could be found in almost every quarter of the city.

For example, in Skatertny lane there was a "Shanghai" laundry, on Pokrovka and Meshchanskaya a "Nanking laundry" opened, and in Pechatnikov lane, the laundry was accepted by "Jean-Li-Chin". Only men worked in such laundries, but Chinese women usually sold toys, paper fans and rattles on the streets. Sergei Golitsyn in his "Notes of a Survivor" wrote: as a Jew, a lot of Chinese came to Moscow. They not only showed tricks with apples in the markets, but also kept laundries all over Moscow and small haberdashery trade in the same markets and near the monument to the First Printer under the Kitaygorodskaya wall. There they stood in rows with homemade buttons, hairbrushes, watchbands, and various little things."

However, often all this peaceful activity - tricks for the public, trade and laundry - was just a cover for another, much more profitable business. The Chinese in Moscow traded in contraband rice alcohol, later replaced by opium, cocaine and morphine.

The age of "Chinatown" in Moscow was short-lived. Sergei Golitsyn wrote: “The Chinese general Zhang Zolin unceremoniously took away from us the Chinese Eastern Railway, built with tsarist money and passing through the territory of Manchuria. We swallowed the offense, but in revenge we imprisoned all the Chinese in Moscow and throughout the country."

Pau Ti-San, the organizer of the Astrakhan shootings, also received what he deserved. After the war, he worked as a translator for the Kiev United School of Commanders, and lived in Moscow. On November 10, 1925, he was arrested and on April 19, 1926, the OGPU Collegium sentenced him to death on charges of counter-revolutionary terrorist activities. The same fate befell the rest of the revolutionary Chinese.

Ordinary Chinese internationalists were sent to China to "export revolution" - to help create the Chinese Red Army and fight the international imperialists in Asia. Thus, the communists killed two birds with one stone: they got rid of the allies that had become unnecessary and even dangerous and "provided assistance" to the struggling for independence China. And by the end of the thirties, nothing remained of the Chinese diaspora, except for frayed fans and a reminder that only a well-fed and healthy society can "digest" a huge flow of migrants. In a country with a troubled economy, with a society gripped by social ailments, migrants become a time bomb that will explode sooner or later, destroying both the migrants themselves and those people who gave them jobs and shelter.

Russia has paid too high a price to understand this lesson in history.

Anti-Bolshevik poster "The dashing work of the red international army of Lenin and Trotsky"