The Bolsheviks Won Through Terror by an Army of Chinese and Other Foreigners

· History, Vestibule, Russia, USSR, Ukraine

A detachment of Chinese Red Army mercenaries sets out to fight the troops of Ataman Grigoriev, 1919.

The theme of the invincible Chinese godless army is relevant in recent times of this world. In Armageddon there will be two “darknesses” of those soldiers, that is, 200 million (a darkness meant 10,000). Only China with its allies can field such a host.**..

In Lugansk, on the name plaques of the memorial complex “To the Fighters of the Revolution,” we find five surnames strange for our region: Liu Fa V., Liu Sha M., Wang Sha Yu I., Li Ho Yu S., Mi Sha Tsy M., Liu Sha M. In the village of Stanitsa Luganskaya there is a monument to the “Fallen Heroes of the Civil War,” where Chinese are also buried (their exact number is unknown). Everyone has seen, everyone loves Edmond Keosayan’s trilogy “The Elusive Avengers” – Danka, Ksanka, Valerka, Yashka the Gypsy… The film is based on Pavel Blyakhin’s novella “The Little Red Devils.” We are interested in the fourth hero of this quartet of brave teenagers. In Keosayan’s screen adaptation, the internationalist idea of the revolution is embodied by Yashka the Gypsy. In the first film adaptation of the story, which came out in 1923, the embodiment of that idea was not a gypsy, but an African American, Tom Jackson. Yet in the novella “The Little Red Devils” itself, standing shoulder to shoulder with Ukrainian teenagers against counter-revolutionary bands is neither a gypsy nor an African, but the Chinese Yu-yu.

…The participation of Chinese workers—and foreigners in general—in the Civil War of 1917–1922 was not popular in Soviet historiography; it was believed that the Civil War was a strictly internal affair and that victory in it was achieved without the aid of foreigners. Although in the Soviet period, individual books and scholarly publications about the “internationalists” appeared from time to time.

Not long ago, the “Alma Mater” publishing house of Luhansk National University issued a monograph by Candidate of Historical Sciences Nikolai Karpenko, “The Chinese Legion. The Participation of the Chinese in Revolutionary Events on the Territory of Ukraine (1917–1921).” The print run was distributed among the university libraries of Ukraine, Russia, China, Germany, Canada, Great Britain, and Japan. Nikolai Karpenko is the only researcher in Ukraine to whom we can address the question: where did the Chinese names on the memorial plaques come from?

Nikolai Mikhailovich, over the 74 years of Soviet rule, literature, cinema, and theater have not ignored a single social group involved in the events of 1917–1922 – from the poor village boy Makarka the Pathfinder and his sworn enemy Priest Krestovozdvizhensky, to barons, generals, admirals, British prime ministers, and ordinary ministers… Meanwhile, the wide participation of foreigners in the Civil War, not only on the side of the White Army but also the Red, has always been known. But just known. Why and when was this topic closed to comprehensive, objective research? Why were the Red internationalists spoken of only in a positive context?
The first reasons appeared immediately after the end of the Civil War. The side that wins an internecine confrontation usually prefers to leave inconvenient moments of history in the past. And foreigners, not only the Chinese but all foreigners, during the Civil War turned out to be not only reliable fighters on the front lines but were also used in massive numbers for punitive functions – in suppressing mutinous Red units, in executing hostages, in putting down peasant uprisings in the rear, and in forcibly seizing food supplies. Foreigners were drawn into blocking detachments…
Blocking detachments already in the Civil War?
Yes, in August 1918 they first appeared in Red Army units on the Eastern Front and simultaneously near Tsaritsyn on the Southern Front. Then, in the army commanded by Kliment Voroshilov, a blocking detachment was formed from Chinese who had come there from the Donbass; their immediate commander was the Lugansk miner Zolotenko. And in December 1918, Lev Trotsky issued an order to form special subunits with blocking detachment functions everywhere. He demanded the most active role from them, noting that in many cases blocking detachments reduced their work to detaining individual deserters.

Meanwhile, in his opinion, during an offensive the role of blocking detachments should be more active: stationed in the rear of the Red troops, they were to use machine-gun fire to force the troops to attack. At the same time, Lev Trotsky was against covering information about repressions in the army in the newspapers, and especially the participation of foreigners in them, including the Chinese. No one wanted this publicity after the Civil War ended, either. The Chinese did not remain aloof from the blocking detachments being formed everywhere throughout the entire war.

For example, a report from the headquarters of the Southern Front to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic on the accounting of international units, dated 10 December 1918, stated that in the 8th Army a small internationalist detachment had been made up of prisoners of war and partly of Chinese, later disbanded. The best part of the internationalists was then incorporated into the newly formed blocking detachments.

A summary for 1–15 October 1919, from the Information and Communications Section of the Political Department of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, concerning the formation of a Chinese company within the blocking detachment of the 46th Rifle Division, which fought in Ukraine as well, stated: «Morale is high; discipline is conscious; command staff is good. An international company is being formed in the detachment, consisting mostly of Chinese. The international company needs Chinese political workers and Chinese literature«.

When the Civil War ended, the victors did not want to remind people of the role of foreigners in establishing the new government. Moreover, the unpleasant memories associated with foreigners were still fresh in the people’s memory. This was especially true of Latvians, Hungarians, and Chinese, although Latvians at that time were still perceived as recent subjects of the Russian Empire.

It was not only the victor, that is, the Bolsheviks and their allies — the vanquished have done and still do exactly the same. Cruelty was shown by all participants in the war; all sides have always preferred to portray themselves in a noble light and the enemy as a bloodthirsty monster. Maxim Gorky once stated: the one who managed to show greater cruelty won.
You know, I would probably agree with Gorky; my value judgment is that the “Red Terror” that brought the Bolsheviks to power exceeded the “White” one. However, during the Civil War there was enough cruelty from all the warring armies. Let me give you one example. I hope you have seen the monument in Luganskaya Stanitsa. It was restored in 1985 and changed its appearance. The new monument bears the inscription: “To the Fallen Heroes of the Civil War,” which, in my opinion, does not reflect the full tragedy of the Civil War.

Yes, there were fearless people capable of self-sacrifice. They existed both among the White volunteers and among the Red Army men. However, for obvious reasons, very little was known about the volunteers. As for the Chinese, examples of heroism have been cited. One of them concerns five surnames on the monument “To the Fighters of the Revolution” in Lugansk.

In April 1919, in Politrovka — now a part of Novosvetlovka — a Chinese battalion won a fierce battle against the White Guards. Regiment commander Ivan Sila was so impressed by the stubbornness of the Chinese fighters that he ordered the names of the fallen to be recorded and their bodies to be transported to Lugansk. They were buried in the Kambrodskoye cemetery. Later, when construction of the “To the Fighters of the Revolution” monument began in 1935, the former commander of the 1st Nezhin Chinese detachment Zhan Chan-din, who also fought in the Lugansk region, provided a list of the Chinese killed in Politrovka. The heroes were also remembered during the restoration of the monument in Luganskaya Stanitsa.

But by and large, the flavor of heroism has some kind of political or ideological tinge…
Ivan Solonevich, a contemporary of those revolutionary events, once remarked that an external enemy breeds heroes, while an internal one breeds executioners. This is true in any camp — both victors and vanquished. For example, in January 1919, Red Army units occupied Luganskaya Stanitsa and Lugansk. But holding the territory was problematic. The stanitsa changed hands more than once: the “Reds” would come, then units of the Volunteer Army. After one attack, a Chinese battalion (450 men) of the 1st Moscow Workers’ Division entered the stanitsa. Battles, encirclement, capture… When the “Reds” reoccupied the stanitsa three days later, it turned out that all the captured Chinese had been executed.
You mean executed, not killed in battle?
Executed. The bodies of the Chinese, hanged on poles and trees, showed signs of torture; many had their bellies ripped open, eyes gouged out, tongues cut off. In all, more than two hundred Chinese were killed, including battalion commander U Er-hu. By the way, that was not his real name, but a nickname. Under that name, he had joined the Red Guard at the end of 1917 in Kiev Province. And he found his final resting place in Luganskaya Stanitsa…

But speaking of cruelty, one can also understand the Cossacks of the Lugansk Cossack Regiment who defended the stanitsa. After all, it was their “homeland,” and they had not invited any Chinese to meddle in the internal civil conflict. Therefore, when leaving the stanitsa under the pressure of the “Reds,” the volunteers asked local women to tell the Chinese that if they did not leave the Red Army, the same end awaited them — ripped bellies, gouged eyes.

It must also be borne in mind that the cruelty of the “Red internationalists” also quickly became public knowledge. The same Chinese, having entered Odessa at about the same time (April 1919), brutally dealt with the captured volunteers, wiping out almost the whole lot. While serving in Cheka detachments — and there was a notable number of Chinese in them — they introduced a series of cruel tortures: burying the interrogated up to the neck in the ground until they lost consciousness or died; tying the tortured to a wall or a post, then firmly tying to the body one end of an iron pipe a few inches wide, a rat was placed through the other opening, the hole was immediately covered with a wire mesh, and fire was applied to it. Driven to desperation by the heat, the animal would start gnawing into the unlucky person’s body to find an exit. Such torture would last for hours, sometimes until the next day, until the victim died.

Among the Odessa executioners was a Negro named Johnston, specially summoned from Moscow. A contemporary of those events, Averbukh, wrote about Johnston: “To flay a living person before execution, to cut off limbs during torture, etc. — only one executioner was capable of that, the Negro Johnston.”

The Red Terror was effective precisely because it relied on an alien international component, because local peasants and workers refused to take part in it, with the exception of a few “convinced Bolsheviks and Chekists.”

How many foreigners fought in the Red Army?
In total, more than 300,000 foreigners served in the Red Army. The Chinese constituted the second largest force after the Hungarians (80,000) — up to 60,000. Of these, 21,000 fighters fought in Ukraine. When the war ended, they tried to quickly demobilize all internationalists so as not to stir up anti-Hungarian, anti-Chinese, and other sentiments among the people. And they put an end to it there.

What was there to tell about in historical literature or on the pages of newspapers? Not how foreigners, as part of blocking detachments, shot Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians in the back—those fighting to establish the most just system in the world. On the contrary, in the 1920s Soviet and party bodies made every effort to restrain various interethnic conflicts in the postwar period, including those rooted in everyday life.

And to close the topic of the one-sided portrayal of Chinese participation in the Russian Revolution in Soviet historiography—the very topic with which we began—one more aspect of the problem should be noted: the international one. It mainly concerns Soviet–Chinese relations, which were complex, marked by periods of close cooperation, periods of confrontation, and even armed border conflicts.

It is clear that during the Cold War, relations with China were strained, and any laudatory materials mentioning Chinese battalions were in principle unthinkable. Moreover, Chinese Red Guards, Chinese Red Army soldiers were persecuted both in the Soviet Union and in People’s China: today—a war hero, tomorrow—a Japanese (or conversely Soviet) spy. In Luhansk region alone, 11 Chinese were repressed in the 1930s.

New materials (only now have I clearly realized this) devoted to the Civil War create the impression that the “Reds” (particularly Iona Yakir) recruited Chinese people directly in China, specially hired them and brought them into the country to take part in the war. In any case, they do not ask the question: how did the Chinese end up on the territory of the RSFSR, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Siberia? And this is important for determining the status of these foreigners—participants in the Civil War. A mercenary is one thing. A prisoner of war who shared the Bolshevik ideology and, moreover, received temporary citizenship is another. Something else entirely are former subjects of the Russian Empire whose homeland (Poland, Finland, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia) became an independent state. Twenty-one thousand Chinese on the territory of Ukraine alone! How did they get here?
Many had come to the territory of the Russian Empire, including the territory of Ukraine, even before the 1917 revolutions and before the start of the Civil War, as seasonal workers.
That is, in modern parlance, they were labor migrants, gastarbeiters.
Precisely. First, internal, Chinese reasons contributed to this…
Forgive me if we digress in this direction; we would not reach the First World War until autumn. Let us limit ourselves to mentioning that China at the beginning of the twentieth century (the period relevant to our subject) is an unstable country: the end of the rule of Empress Dowager Cixi, the end of the Manchu Aisin Gioro dynasty as a result of the Xinhai Revolution, the proclamation of the republic… As a consequence of social cataclysms, it is the people who suffer most of all.
Suffice it to say that from 1914 to 1916 the area of cultivated land in China decreased threefold. One can imagine the consequences of a threefold reduction in harvest in what was essentially a medieval country, a country with a huge population of four hundred million. Hence the surge in labor migration, which had already been noticeable. At the same time, the labor of a Chinese abroad was in demand. It was not for nothing that on posters the Chinese was depicted as many-armed—it was thought that he literally managed to do everything: cook, stoke the stove, clean, look after the master’s child, build…

It will sound cynical, but exploiting Chinese workers at the beginning of the 20th century was profitable: an enormous volume of heavy work—for minimal pay. The labor of Chinese workers was used in all countries, on all continents, from Australia to America. Russia is no exception in this list. Most Chinese were, naturally, in the Far East. In general, the depth of penetration depended on the amount of money. Little money—the Far East; enough—the European part of Russia, Odessa, Nikolaev, the Donbass.

Seasonal workers came to Russia, worked, and left again. The newly operational Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) facilitated this. The second route was from Uyghur territory through Russian Turkestan. When the First World War began and industry began to experience a shortage of labor, tsarist authorities in Turkestan started carrying out “requisitions”—people, including Chinese, were forcibly transported to central Russia for work.

The third route was by water, with the final destination in Odessa, Mariupol, or Nikolaev. Some Chinese found themselves in Russia from the territory of Iraq. The British had brought them there, but the working conditions were so severe that even the hardy Chinese could not endure them and left for the Caucasus, particularly the Baku oilfields.

Some Chinese arrived in Russia with trade missions—merchants hired them as porters and, having arrived at the place and sold the goods, simply abandoned them to their fate in Kharkov, the Caucasus, the Don region, Odessa. But there were also those who came to Russia for permanent residence with families, settled down, built homes. They built, by the way, economically: a shared wall for two neighbors…

At this time, the term “Shanghai” was born. One may quote Alexander Fadeev about the Sorokino mine, modern-day Krasnodon: “From all corners of our land people stream into the Donbass. And their first question is: where to live? The Chinese Li Fang-cha molded himself a dwelling out of clay and straw on a vacant lot, and then began to mold little rooms… (…) Thus an extensive district of daubed huts clinging to each other formed—this district was called ‘Shanghai’.”
At this time, the “Shanghais” of Krasnodon, Kadiyevka, and Luhansk also came into being. There were “Shanghais” everywhere the Chinese lived—in Odessa, in Nikolaev, in Tiraspol. But the peak of Chinese labor migration to Russia falls during the years of the First World War.
War demands men; women’s and children’s hands are drawn into production, but this is not enough; the authorities are faced with the question of labor resources.
In 1916, 55% of able-bodied men in the Donbass were in the active army. The labor shortage led to the organized importation of Chinese workers to industrial enterprises. The authorities of Russia and China concluded an agreement under which factory managers could enter into contracts with Chinese individuals. In one recruitment wave, for instance, 800 Chinese workers were brought to the Donbass. They were employed at the mines of what are now Stakhanov, Brianka, Kirovsk, Antratsyt, Krasnodon, Lysychansk.

To cross the border, they were issued passports and assigned a permanent number under which the worker was registered at Russian enterprises and with which he was photographed for the passport. Each candidate underwent a medical examination. Upon arrival, the Chinese worker’s passport was stamped on the reverse side to confirm registration with the police supervisor. The passport also noted that the arriving worker could not be conscripted for service in the active Russian army.

And on what terms did the Chinese work in the Donbass mines?
The State Archive of Luhansk Region holds a unique document in Chinese — a contract between the administration of the Varvaropol and Petro-Mariivka mines and a Chinese worker. It contains 32 articles stipulating the conditions of hiring, wages, food, and the worker’s obligations.

The worker was obliged to work 900 days and nights, after which he would return to China. He was provided free dormitory, use of water, and medical services. In the event of a miner’s death, the employer was obliged to deliver the body to China for burial. The administration was bound to pay the family of a miner killed at work 500 rubles, but if the deceased was himself to blame for his death, the family would be paid 300 rubles. One cook was assigned to every 50 men. Incidentally, a Chinese miner was paid 1 ruble 90 kopecks a day. In addition to money, they were issued 2 poods of flour per person per month, 2 poods of salted fish, 4 kilograms of salt, as well as potatoes, cabbage, rice. For comparison: a Russian miner’s wage was 2 rubles 15 kopecks.

Sorry, considering the food, that’s not bad at all.
Working conditions in the Donbass were markedly better than those in Northern Russia and Siberia. For example, Siberian lumberjacks were simply robbed, paid less, and after every payday they were led into gambling games and lost everything down to the last kopeck. Having no money for the return journey, they were forced to believe the next promises of contractors, who urged the deceived Chinese to trust them once more and go to earn money, say, in Ukraine. They were persuaded that the climate was milder there and the wages higher. In reality, they were tricked into being taken to the front-line zone, where battles raged and labor was needed for digging trenches, building roads, and military structures, receiving for their work in a month what a Donbass miner earned in a day.

In all, in 1916, more than 50,000 Chinese worked on the construction of engineering works for the Western Front. Many of them ended up together with Russian troops in captivity among Germans and Austrians.

It was written that during the Kryvyi Rih–Donetsk Republic, the Chinese put up stubborn resistance to the German and Austrian occupiers — they remembered how those had treated the Chinese in captivity during the World War.
Yes, after the war Red Army soldier Li Fu-qing recalled that the Germans in the concentration camp treated the Chinese even worse than in the tsarist army. He wrote: “Each day they gave out a single piece of black bread the size of a teacup. When you bit into it, sand grated on your teeth. From morning till late night they forced the coolies to build prisons and lay roads. The Germans did not skimp on kicks, blows with a whip or bayonet. And many people died from beatings and unbearable labor. Every day whole truckloads of corpses were taken out of the camp.”
And Hetman Skoropadsky was an ally of the Central European countries — Germany, Austria.
The regime of Hetman Skoropadsky and the Austro-German occupation of Ukraine in 1918 gave Chinese workers a choice: either join partisan detachments or wait for a chance to join the Red Army. During the hetman period, not only was the eight-hour working day abolished and wages unpaid or delayed at factories and mines, but beatings of miners were also practiced.

In Horlivka and Kadievka this led to “dead strikes,” when all sections shut down. The German authorities threatened to send all the workers to a concentration camp. Naturally, Chinese workers began to be drawn into the liberation struggle. In October 1918, the state security department of Skoropadsky’s government sent a demand to provincial elders to immediately arrest Chinese suspected of ties with the Bolsheviks. In Kyiv, 80 Chinese were arrested in two weeks. A similar situation arose in early 1918 in Transnistria, when it was occupied by Romanian troops. As soon as the Romanians killed three Chinese working in the front-line zone and began to beat and torment the rest, over 500 Chinese immediately signed up for the Red Guard under Iona Yakir.

A foreigner in a war‑torn territory is vulnerable from all sides. And how did the miners of the Donbass come to join the Red Guard, since they were in a better position?
When two revolutions took place in Russia in 1917, all contracts with imported workers became morally obsolete. They had, after all, been concluded with private mine owners. And during the period of the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Republic, most large enterprises were nationalized, the former owners were gone, some enterprises closed because of the devastation, wages were not paid, and the Chinese had no money for the return journey. Moreover, in 1917 the prisons were opened; from the Luhansk prison, for example, a huge number of criminals were released, and robberies started immediately. There was no authority, the police had fled. Therefore, the Chinese were forced to take part in the factory committees and even sign up for self‑defense units, and then for Red Guard detachments.

Since food supplies, especially bread, from Ukraine and the Don region to Russia’s industrial centers had been cut off, the Bolsheviks organized a punitive expedition to the Don. Chinese workers also joined it. In Sorokino (Krasnodon) alone, the former engineer Shen Chen-ho recruited 36 Chinese. And once they had taken up arms, it was already hard to survive without them in the conditions of the Civil War. All the more so because the blame for this lies entirely with the former tsarist government and specifically the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) in Ukraine — nobody cared about the hundreds of thousands of starving migrants.

Everything was left to drift. And under the influence of Bolshevik agitation—since the Bolsheviks lacked a sufficient social base to draw local workers and peasants into the Red Guard and later into the Red Army—the Chinese proved to be ideal material. The local workers and peasants were all sick of war; they were heading home from the fronts of the First World War. The Chinese, however, finding themselves in a hopeless position during the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation, joined the ranks of the Red Guards. Of the 3,000 Chinese workers in the Donbass, 80 percent joined.

The path from labor migrant to participant in the Civil War is precisely reflected in the biography of the hero of “The Little Red Devils,” the Chinese Yu-yu: “…It turned out that Yu-yu had long been in Budyonny’s army, carrying out various assignments for the regimental staff and sometimes doing reconnaissance work. Before joining the army, he had worked in a Chinese laundry in Moscow, then was an acrobat in a circus and even a street conjurer with an old organ-grinder. The Civil War awakened in him a passionate desire to abandon his thankless work and throw himself into the fire of bloody events…”

Here you can put a question mark against every verb: did Yu-yu graduate from a gymnasium, from a university, was he promised a “cushy” post in the provincial administration? “He vaguely understood that the struggle of the Russian peasants and workers for Soviet power was the cause of all the oppressed, and he was instinctively drawn to the Reds, under the banners of freedom and revolution.” That does not raise any doubt for me: “a vague understanding of the struggle of the Russian peasants and workers” held sway over millions of people. And on what terms did the Chinese enter the service of the Bolsheviks?

They entered on full clothing and food provision. Those who wished were offered to change their Chinese citizenship for Soviet, although many remained Chinese subjects. As a rule, Chinese units were formed along ethnic lines, but not exceeding a battalion, since there were not enough trained commanders. These units were then subject to inclusion in Russian or international regiments.

The most significant point was wages. The Chinese kept scrupulous accounts of them. By the agreement between Iona Yakir and the Chinese at the beginning of 1918, the latter were set a wage of 50 rubles a month. Over the years of the Civil War, the “wage” of a Chinese Red Army soldier, which was paid out twice a month in equal installments, increased 24-fold and reached 1,200 rubles a month.

Lenin’s bodyguard was also initially set a wage of 50 rubles. As is well known, he was guarded by Latvian riflemen. But few people know that out of the 200-man guard, 70 were Chinese. By the way, why was the guard of the top state official entrusted to foreigners? Because, essentially, it was an ideal soldier: reliable, hardy, uncompromising, cruel, disciplined, undemanding, not inclined to negotiate or to loot. Local Red Army men, having occupied a populated locality, might loot and scatter, or enter into talks with the enemy…

But a foreigner has nowhere to “scatter” to. His uncompromising nature and cruelty are also explicable (cruelty can also be characterized as dutifulness, for instance, the shooting of hostages: parents, wives, children of White Guards): one’s own might be spared, but to a foreigner everyone is alien.
It was not for nothing that guard functions were entrusted to foreigners, which they carried out impeccably. During General Mamontov’s raid, one curious episode took place…
The cavalry raid of General Mamontov — a raid in the rear of the Southern Front by the 4th Don Corps of the Don Army in August-September 1919?
Yes, then the White Guards occupied a small town near Tambov; they enter the Red Army headquarters, and a Chinese gets up from behind the desk and salutes the “Whites.” It turned out that the Chinese had not received the order to abandon the post, nobody shouted “Look out! Every man for himself!”. No order to leave — and he will carry out his duties to the end. And this is how the Chinese regarded their service duties everywhere, in whatever units they served in by assignment — in the infantry, cavalry, river flotilla, blocking detachments, punitive, guard, special Cheka detachments, special-purpose units, and so on. At the same time, they never surrendered, for they knew that only execution awaited them. They themselves said that if a Cossack catches a Chinese, he would surely kill him and even mock him. But if capture was unavoidable, the Chinese always tried to escape and would certainly rejoin the Red Army to take revenge.
And did Chinese serve in units opposing the Red Army?
Practically not. About a half-company of Chinese was in the units of the Don Cossack General Popov at the very beginning of the Civil War, when he undertook the so-called Steppe Campaign. For a time, Nestor Makhno’s units had a battalion of Chinese when he was serving in the Red Army. One more Chinese — Mon Za-lit — somehow ended up in the Ukrainian detachment of Yurko Tyutyunnyk when he organized the Winter Campaign from Polish territory into Ukraine. That, perhaps, is all.
So, it turns out that Chinese fighters were not ordinary foreign mercenaries. Because they served only in the Red Army and fought only on the side of the “Reds.”
They considered all the rest as enemies, oppressors of the working man.
Nikolai Mikhailovich, the war is over, the armies of the oppressors are defeated, “the struggle of the Russian peasants and workers” has ended in victory — what happens among the former labor migrants, the demobilized Red Guards and Red Army men?
Many remained in the USSR, since the way to China was closed. The Chinese from the Red Army did not want to demobilize. Some continued to serve in the army, many went to work in the Cheka, in the militia. But the majority of former Red Army soldiers returned to enterprises. By 1925, 3,000 Chinese were again working in the Donbass mines. Initially, in 1921, many of them were mechanically transferred to the citizenship of the Ukrainian SSR. Then from 1922 to 1925, a union of Chinese workers functioned in Ukraine. And many Chinese again recognized Chinese citizenship. Almost all of them married local girls. At that, their Russian wives were recorded in certificates as “Chinese subjects.”

In the militia and in production, the Chinese worked very well. Gradually, in the 1920s–30s, they departed for China. At the same time, the Soviet government encouraged not only the enrollment of former Red Army soldiers in schools for training Chinese fighters in China itself, for example, the Whampoa Red School, but also trips by agitators from their number. For a trip of Red agitators to Northern China, upon return to the USSR, they paid 10, and to Southern China — 20 thousand rubles. After the formation of the PRC in 1949, most Chinese returned to their homeland.

And how did the Chinese behave during the Second World War?
Uncompromisingly. Former participant in the Civil War, Shan-Zhen, worked at the “Gornyatskaya” mine in Antratsit until 1942. On assignment from the NKVD, he prepared and, at the moment of the mine’s occupation by the Germans, blew up 18 facilities there. He led his family on foot out of the encirclement and reached Chelyabinsk, where he reported on the completed task. In 1946 he returned, restored the facilities he himself had blown up, and a year later received the medal “For the Restoration of the Coal Mines of Donbass” and the Order of Lenin.

His fellow soldier, but from Krasnodon, communist Fu-Shun Ivan Andreevich was a mining foreman. At first drafted to the front, then for some reason (one can only guess why) returned and appointed head of a dynamite warehouse. What assignment he had on the eve of the occupation is unknown, but it is known that he participated in the evacuation of valuable mine equipment to the Chelyabinsk region, after the war returned to Krasnodon, restored the mines, and in 1947 was also awarded the Order of Lenin. For what merits?

That is a high Soviet award, it was not simply pinned on one’s chest.
Further. Ko-Fu Yakov — a participant in the Civil War, served in the militia, was the section chief at Mine No. 1-Bis in Krasnodon. After the occupation, he restored the mines, was a communist agitator, and enjoyed the absolute trust of the authorities.
They had children…
And they were Soviet patriots. Dmitry Chi-Ko-dyash, son of a Civil War participant, lived in Krasnodon and studied in the same class as Ivan Zemnukhov, fought honestly at the front. He did not sit out in the rear, but fought. Girlfriends Maria Kuzkina and Maria Sun Yu-po in the fall of 1942 were driven from Krasnodon to Germany. But in Munich both became underground workers, participants in the “Fraternal Cooperation of Prisoners of War.” Subsequently arrested and in September 1944 burned in the crematoria of Auschwitz. And they were, essentially, teenagers, tenth-graders.

As is known, in 1942 the Krasnodon miners refused to work for the occupiers, and in September they were buried alive. Among them was a 17-year-old boy from the village of Izvarino, Shi-Ta-Fu Ivan Semenovich. A stance? A stance.

Nikolai Mikhailovich, history is like the sea: you cannot scoop it out. Unfortunately, a huge amount of material remains outside our conversation; we have merely attempted to outline the most obvious contours of our region’s history: the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War was forged, among others, by the hands of Chinese workers, former labor migrants, the fates of thousands of whom were tied to Luhansk region, to Donbass. I must say that works like “The Chinese Legion” I have not held in my hands for a long time — an undoubted success. Thank you.

Interviewed by Laisan Putkaradze, “Nasha Gazeta” ( NashaGazeta.com.ua ), Luhansk

Chinese Volunteers in the Fight against Hetman Skoropadsky and Petliura

Formation of a Chinese detachment

On the fronts of the Civil War, tens of thousands of foreigners fought on the side of the Bolsheviks — by the will of fate — former prisoners of war, refugees, emigrants, workers — who found themselves on the territory of Russia. From their numbers were created both separate army units and small combat groups that became part of divisions or regiments.

In battles against German and Austro-Hungarian troops, hetmanites, petliurists, and denikinians on the territory of Ukraine, nearly 10 thousand internationalists took part. In 1919, Kyiv became one of the centers for forming international units. The same international detachments were formed and operated also in Kharkov, Poltava, and Odessa. Their personnel were both of mixed type and composed of warriors of a single nationality. In the international detachments, besides Ukrainians and Russians, there were Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Latvians, Chinese, Koreans, and others.

Page of the Petrograd daily newspaper “Armed People” with information about the Chinese international battalion, 1919.

Chinese combat detachments, formed exclusively from Chinese volunteers, stood out for their special discipline, steadfastness in battle, and endurance.

“…In January 1918, the Chinese… fought on the streets of Kyiv with the Haidamakas… After Soviet troops entered Kyiv, the fallen Chinese were buried in a mass grave together with Ukrainian and Russian workers…”

(Journal “Pitannia istorii”. — No. 10. — 1957)

“… On October 16, 1918, the State Security Department of the Hetman government … proposed to arrest all Chinese suspected of having ties with the Bolsheviks and hand them over to the German command. In the second half of October alone, 87 Chinese were arrested in Kyiv.”

(State Archive of Kyiv Oblast. F. 812. — Op. 1. — Spr. 948. -Ark. 1)

Chinese battalion before being sent to the front

In 1919–1920, Chinese fighters of the battalion under the command of Liu Shao-Liu, and of the international detachments of Li Syu-Lyan (Li Shu-An), Zhao Shao-Ting, and Zhang Fu took part in combat operations on the side of the Reds in the Kyiv region.

Hundreds of Chinese volunteers served in international units of the Cheka and special-purpose forces.

Li Syu-Lyan (Li Shu-An) — commander of a Chinese detachment under the Special Battalion of the Kyiv Gubernia Cheka, 1919.

“… Chinese Communists in Russia considered it their party duty to defend the gains of the revolution, including in the struggle against counterrevolutionary and profiteering elements in the rear.

In this connection, the Chinese comrades rendered great assistance to the Cheka…

… In localities where Chinese Communist sections existed, representatives of a special commission to aid the Cheka worked as part of the local bodies of the Gubernia Extraordinary Commissions (Gubernia Chekas). Chinese contractors and traders linked with the Russian counterrevolution tried to hinder the creation of volunteer detachments. But the Executive Committee of the Union of Chinese Workers foiled all the machinations of the adventurers. Attempts by agents of the internal and external counterrevolution to disrupt the formation of Chinese volunteer units were unsuccessful.“

(Journal “Soviet Chinese Studies”, No. 4. -1958. -Page 26)

Rest before battle

In April 1919, Li Syu-Lyan’s fighters, as part of the special battalion of the Kyiv Gubernia Cheka, took part in suppressing the mutiny in Kurenivka; in June of the same year a group of Chinese Chekists perished in a battle with Zelenyi’s detachments in the Dnieper-side village of Trypillia in the Kyiv region.

Detachment of Chinese volunteers departs to fight the troops of Ataman Grigoriev, 1919.

After the end of the Civil War, the international units in Ukraine were disbanded.

*****

For example, in the book about Yakir https://www.belousenko.com/books/russian/dubinsky_yakir.htm Dubinsky mentions:
“… in the battles near Yekaterinoslav, dense wedges of Bavarians squeezed the Chinese battalion from two sides. The battalion was commanded by Yakir” (sic). Were there losses? IMHO — undoubtedly. And how many such battles were there and with what losses?

Now about the death of the “300 Chinese Spartans” I mentioned… We read Turkul (https://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/turkul_av/02.html):

The cavalry chased the Bolsheviks without stopping, and suddenly trampled in disorder in place. They ran into a battalion of Chinese.

The Chinese met our cavalry with volleys from the knee. Desperate losses. Nearly a quarter of the riders were wounded or killed. Rotmistr Mikhailovsky was mortally wounded in the abdomen.

A swift attack by dismounted scouts and the 1st battalion overturned the Chinese. About three hundred were taken prisoner. Many had on their fingers gold wedding rings from those they had shot, in their pockets cigarette cases and watches, also from those shot. The Asiatic executioners of the Cheka, with their rat-like stench, with their hair matted into black felt, with flat, dark faces, embittered our men. All three hundred Chinese were shot.

Three hundred only captured. Yet there had been a fierce battle with heavy losses for the Whites. Surely there were tens of wounded and killed also on the Chinese side apart from those captured… This example also perfectly illustrates your “arithmetic.”
And which Chinese and whose did the “Greens” cut down? So these Chinese (not Yakir’s) where do we add them:

Who took Kyiv in January 1918?
… Out of approximately 5,500 Red Guards who stormed Kyiv, the foreign component included:

more than 1,000 Chinese, who had grouped in the Bakhmach area before the start of M. Muravyov’s march on Kyiv;
more than 500 former German prisoners of war;
more than 70 Austrian prisoners of war from the detachment of D. Zhloba;
Chinese, Czechs, and Slovaks from the Almaznye and Prokhorovskie mines (unknown number);
over 70 Chinese from the Moscow Red Guard detachment;
more than 100 Latvians from Kharkiv (power station workers);
over 40 internationalists from the 1st Poltava Regiment;
more than 50 Chinese from the Kondratievskiy mine;
a company of Chinese from the Gatchina detachment;
about 200 Czechs from the Czechoslovak Communist detachment.

“The Chinese Legion”: the participation of Chinese in the revolutionary events on the territory of Ukraine (1917–1921): monograph, Karpenko Nikolay Mikhailovich, 2007

In total, more than 2,000 “internationalists”… of whom 1,120 plus an unestablished number (a separate company and detachments from the mines) were Chinese. And you can laugh all you want, but on one hand there’s a monograph, and on the other merely an “I don’t believe it” … “I can’t count.”
In 1920 in the Crimea, how many Chinese laid down their heads? And in Tambov, how many were raised on pitchforks? Mamantov’s raid in 1919:

Riding up to the building, one of the Cossacks tore down the red flag and threw it under his horse’s hooves. Three Cossacks, dismounting, went inside. … a Chinese-“internationalist” rose from behind the table to meet them…
That night the guards everywhere were Chinese, and the Cossacks had to pick off their sentries throughout the city. In their haste the fleeing Communists forgot to relieve the Chinese. Following the patrols, the main forces of General Mamantov’s cavalry group began to enter the city.
On the corner of Seminary and Bolshaya streets in the building of the county Soviet of Deputies, another Chinese was captured. And when the Cossacks were leading him out, the townspeople snatched him from them and lynched him. The fact is that the Chinese mercenaries served the Communists for money and were noted for their cruelty toward the Russian population. They were punishers and executioners – in the city everyone called them “khodya‑khodya,” because when escorting arrested townspeople they prodded them with rifle butts, shouting “khodya‑khodya,” which meant “go, go.” They were considered degenerates. They shot people on the orders of the Communists and were faithful to them like dogs. Naturally the population of the city hated them. They behaved rudely and with great arrogance”

And this is a bit later. But the setting again is Tambov. The people were driven to the limit (Sennikov):

When everyone had come out, the Chinese immediately encircled them and, clicking the bolts of their rifles, began pressing them toward the church wall. An order rang out and a rifle volley sounded. A woman’s heart‑rending scream arose from the crowd, and then all the other women began to wail. The peasants, shocked by what had happened, could not recover from such treachery on the part of the commissar. It turned out that they had handed over to death everyone they respected. The women were the first to throw themselves on the Chinese and the other detachment members, and then the men came to their senses, grabbing shafts and poles. Random shots rang out, but the mass of people had already overwhelmed the Red Guard. The commissar rushed to the machine gun, but its belt had jammed. The enraged crowd, seizing rifles from the Chinese, beat them with shafts and stakes, trampling them underfoot amid howls and shouts. Besides those who had been shot, several women and one four‑year‑old child were killed. Soon the entire detachment was wiped out by the furious crowd, and the commissar, barely alive and with his eyes gouged out, was dragged by the men to the saw‑horse used for cutting firewood and … was sawn in two alive with a crosscut saw.

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