The Japanese take Blagoveshchensk

At five in the morning of 18 September 1918 troops that had crossed the Amur during the night from the Chinese bank, from Sakhalyan opposite the city, today’s Heihe, entered Blagoveshchensk, the capital of Amur Oblast. They were Whites of the Amur Detachment of Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff Ivan Nikitin, including the Special Amur Cossack Detachment, and a detachment of the Japanese 7th Division, stationed in Manchuria since 1917, a battalion according to some sources. The city was taken practically without a fight. The British chronology of the war records under this day the capture of Blagoveshchensk by the Japanese. After Khabarovsk, taken on 5 September, it was the second major centre on the Amur to pass into the hands of the interventionists and the Whites.

Flight of the Reds

Soviet power in Amur Oblast had already survived one crisis. In March 1918 the ataman of the Amur Cossacks, Ivan Gamov, raised a rising in Blagoveshchensk, but after a week of fighting the Red Guards crushed it, and the leaders of the Bolsheviks’ opponents fled to Sakhalyan. There they formed the Bureau of Self-Governments of Amur Oblast and waited for an opportunity to return. It came at the beginning of September, when after the collapse of the Ussuri front and the loss of Khabarovsk the Council of People’s Commissars of the Far East withdrew with the remnants of its troops into Amur Oblast. On 12 September Gamov and members of the zemstvo and of the Cossack authorities met on a steamer near the Chinese town of Aigun to agree on a plan of action.

On 17 September the chairman of the Amur Council of People’s Commissars, Fyodor Mukhin (PL), judging that the city could not be held, handed power over to the local trade union bureau. During the night of 17–18 September the Soviet leadership left on several steamers and barges, covered by the gunboat Orochanin, up the Zeya, deep into the taiga. According to Russian works, Japanese troops routed the fugitives near the bridge over the Zeya by today’s Svobodny, and on 19 September the Council of People’s Commissars of the Far East dissolved itself. At the end of September the crews scuttled the Orochanin and the other last ships of the Amur Flotilla so that they would not fall into enemy hands. Mukhin went over to partisan warfare.

The new authorities

On 18 September a Provisional Government of Amur Oblast was formed in Blagoveshchensk. It was headed by the former mayor Aleksandr Alekseyevsky, released from prison before the Whites arrived, and its members included Gamov, the chairman of the zemstvo board Nikolai Rodionov, and Lieutenant Colonel Nikitin. The government announced that it was taking over all power in the oblast, restoring the municipal, zemstvo and Cossack self-governments, refusing to recognise the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and bringing Soviet activists to trial. It also introduced a state of siege. Nikitin banned meetings and rallies and imposed a curfew from eight in the evening to six in the morning.

Alekseyevsky’s government sympathised with the Socialist Revolutionaries and sought broad autonomy, but the real balance of power in the oblast was increasingly decided by the Japanese. In the autumn units of three Japanese divisions, the 3rd, 7th and 12th, entered Amur Oblast, and the headquarters of a Japanese general was set up in Blagoveshchensk. Red resistance did not cease. The partisan movement in the Amur valley grew over the winter, and Japanese units responded with punitive expeditions against the villages. In March 1919 the Whites captured and shot Mukhin.