The Soviet Union, Northern Manchuria and the Civil War: Aspects of Interplay and Separation

Abstract

Vital to an understanding of the fortunes of Russians in Northern Manchuria in the period in question are the effects on it of the Revolutions of 1917, which effectively cut the Russian community in Manchuria from the country as a whole and created a sizeable diaspora in the course of that year. However, as Rosemary Quested and other scholars of the region have noted,¹ the Manchurian Russians’ contribution to the history of the Revolution is a marginal one; a ‘Russian revolution in miniature’.² Far more important to an assessment of the Manchurian Russians’ role in the region, and indeed their lasting contribution to the geopolitics of Northeast Asia, is their part in the subsequent Civil War, and notably in Siberia and the Russian Far East; a role, arguably, which has been underplayed because of the relative non-event that the Russian Revolution itself represented in the region.³