Japanese take Khabarovsk

On 5 September 1918 the Special Ussuri Cossack Detachment of Ataman Ivan Kalmykov entered Khabarovsk, the largest city on the lower Amur and the seat of Soviet power in the Russian Far East. Behind it came units of the Japanese 12th Division of Lieutenant General Shigemoto Ōi. A British chronology of the war records the capture of the city by the Japanese under this day. Russian accounts state that Kalmykov’s Cossacks acted together with Czechoslovak units of General Mikhail Diterikhs and with the support of the Japanese division, and some date the Japanese entry to 4 September. There was no fighting for the city itself.

The fate of Khabarovsk had been decided two weeks earlier. After the Battle of Dukhovskaya on 24 August the front on the Ussuri collapsed. The congress of soviets of the Far East, sitting in Khabarovsk from 25 to 28 August, concluded that the city could not be defended and decided to switch to partisan warfare. The Far Eastern Council of People’s Commissars, headed by Alexander Krasnoshchekov, evacuated with the remnants of its troops up the Amur, to Amur Oblast. The Reds did not manage to take everything with them. On 7 September the Japanese seized the main force of the Amur Flotilla lying at Khabarovsk, including the monitors Shkval and Smerch, and incorporated them into their own river flotilla. The gunboat Orochanin and several dozen steamers and barges escaped up the Amur and then the Zeya, but at the end of September their crews destroyed them themselves so that they would not fall into enemy hands.

In the same week Soviet power collapsed in Transbaikalia. The American ambassador in Tokyo, Roland Morris, reported on 5 September that according to the Japanese general staff the Czechoslovak units, after taking Chita and Karymskaya station, had joined up with those fighting at Lake Baikal, so that the whole Trans-Siberian Railway east of Baikal was in the hands of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. According to Russian accounts, on 6 September the vanguard of Ataman Grigory Semyonov also entered Chita, together with the Japanese supporting him. According to Morris, the Japanese were preparing to send the 3rd Division through Manchuria, and their staff intended to clear the Amur valley of Reds and armed prisoners of war. There were already far more Japanese soldiers in Siberia than Tokyo had promised the Americans.

In Khabarovsk power was in practice assumed by Kalmykov. On 17 September he became garrison commander, and soon afterwards chairman of the district military council. He considered himself independent of all the White governments and relied on the Japanese, who according to many accounts financed and armed his units. As early as September his men carried out executions without trial in the city. According to Russian accounts, in the same month two delegates of the Swedish Red Cross, a Swede and a Norwegian, were killed after being arrested by Kalmykov’s Cossacks near Pogranichnaya station on the border with Manchuria. The American consul in Vladivostok wrote in November that the ataman was killing people every few days without due process, citing Japanese backing, and that the Japanese were doing nothing to stop him.

The capture of Khabarovsk ended organised Red resistance in the Maritime Province and opened the way for the Japanese along the Amur to the west, towards Blagoveshchensk. Kalmykov’s rule in Khabarovsk became one of the darkest chapters of the Siberian intervention and a source of constant disputes between the Japanese and the Americans.