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previous: Chapter 9 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 11

 p99  X

The Ukrainians in Eastern Asia

In speaking of the general position of the Ukrainians within the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union, some mention must be made of the large number who for one reason or another during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had made their way to the east. In various places they had formed entire Ukrainian-speaking settlements and in these the Ukrainian spirit developed very much as it did on its native soil.

Eastern Asia had been used as a place of deportation for the various hetmans of the seventeenth and eighteenth century who had escaped execution at the hands of the tsars. The continuous procession of these men and their sympathizers to the desolate Far East led them to wild dreams of re-establishing the ruined hetmanate in those regions. These never assumed any serious form.

About the middle of the nineteenth century, however, there began a flow of emigration from Ukraine. The movement was inspired by the imperial authorities and despite the hardships of the journey across central Asia, many made it and added to the growing number of Siberians wo looked for a freer regime than was possible in the more settled European parts of the empire. Later when the imperial government actively fostered the movement, it transported the emigrants from Odessa to Vladivostok by sea; after the completion of the  p100 Trans-Siberian Railroad the largest number went by rail to Chita and from there by boat down the river Amur.

By the outbreak of World War I almost two million Ukrainians were scattered in the Kazakh areas of Siberia, and in two additional sections the Ukrainians far outnumbered the Great Russians. These were the so‑called Gray and Green Wedges. The former lay between the territory of the Kirghiz and the Kazakhs, a land in which the Kazakhs still formed the largest single element of the population. In the Green Wedge, the area along the Amur and in the old region of Primorye, the Ukrainians formed an absolute majority, except in Vladivostok and in a few other communities.ion some regions they formed nearly 90 per cent of the population and throughout the entire area, they rarely fell below 50‑60 per cent.

Ukrainian sentiment grew rapidly and even in Vladivostok there existed prior to 1914 illegal groups of Ukrainians who were pressing for more recognition of their specific national rights. Some of these groups were even more outspoken than were the groups in Kiev, which were more closely watched by the authorities, for with them the tsarist regime relied for its control on the great distance between settlements just as it relied on the expanses of wilderness which escaping political prisoners would be compelled to traverse. This was an old tradition; Dostoyevsky in Memoirs from a Dead House,⁠1 written in 1861, alludes to the fact that the authorities allowed many convicts to escape in the spring with the knowledge that they would be forced to return before the approach of winter or perish and meanwhile the officials could pocket the money appropriated for their support.

With the Revolution of 1917 Ukrainian fervor flared up as it did in Ukraine, and it followed a similar course. Representatives from the area took part in the great Ukrainian meetings which were held in Kiev during the spring of 1917 and on June 11 there was held in Mykolsko-Ussuriysky the First Ukrainian Far-Eastern Congress. This was attended by fifty-three delegates from the various Ukrainian Hromady (Communities),  p101 representatives of Ukrainian co‑operative societies, newly formed military units, etc.⁠2 It demanded the organization of a Ukrainian army with officers and men to be chosen from those units which were composed of Ukrainians; the organization of a permanent Ukrainian organization to be called the Secretariat of the Rada of the Green Wedge; and the drawing up of a constitution for a Far-Eastern Ukrainian Rada we were to be approved by a Second Congress.

The first actual military unit was formed in Harbin, Manchuria, by Lieutenant Theodore Tvardovsky. It was welcomed by the Chinese, who allowed it to cross the border into the Russian Empire at a time when the Chinese in Manchuria, in an effort to shake off the Russian yoke, were disarming all the old Russian military organizations.⁠3

After the Ukrainian National Republic declared its independence, it sent in 1918 the same Lieutenant Tvardovsky as the first Ukrainian consul in the Green Wedge and as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Ukrainian consuls were established in most of the important cities to open up relations between the Ukrainians in the Far East and those in the Ukrainian National Republic. This was one of the conditions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which had been signed in the early spring of 1918.

All of these measures for the organization of the Ukrainians of the Far East were opposed by the Russian Provisional Government exactly as they had been in the homeland. Russian remonstrations were, however, of no practical importance at the moment, for the various Allied armies and the Japanese moved into Vladivostok to protect the supplies of war materials which were awaiting transportation over the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Ukrainian hopes were thus entangled with the futile efforts of the Allied Expeditionary Forces to keep open the Trans-Siberian Railroad and stop the advance of the Bolsheviks without the formal recognition of the White Russian regime of Admiral Kolchak. It was the same policy that had proved so  p102 costly to the Ukrainians and the Allies in European Russia. The Allies could not count upon the Provisional Government; they would not countenance a White military regime which sought to bring back a tsar or a conservative government; they would not cater to the Bolsheviks; and above all they would give the barest of promises to any group that was trying to help itself outside of the fixed Russian orbit.

The secretariat of the Far-Eastern Ukrainian Rada established contact with General Janin of the French army and with other leaders. At times some of the Allied officers seemed sympathetic to the movement but sooner or later a change of heart would come, the old question of the unity of Russia would again be raised and Ukrainian hopes would again be shattered.

Yet the Ukrainian population became more and more unified. More and more co‑operatives and other institutions were founded; plans were made for Ukrainian schools and some of them were opened. Peter Ivanovich Horovy⁠4 succeeded in uniting many of the co‑operatives into one union, the Chumak (Teamster), with headquarters in Vladivostok and acting under the Ukrainian banner. He and Dmytro Vorovyk were the leading figures in this movement.

There was, as in the homeland, much hesitation as to the extent of autonomy which the Ukrainians should receive. For a long while the secretariat wavered as to a demand for complete control of the Ukrainian territories in the Far East. Some hoped to be a colony of the Ukrainian National Republic. Others had less drastic ideas and remained in the general position of the Ukrainian National Rada in 1917.

As the hour neared for the withdrawal of their forces, the Allies employed a new device. This was the formation of the Far-Eastern Republic, supposedly an anti-Bolshevik democratic state able to protect itself and prevent the eastward expansion of Communism. Its capital was at Chita. The Ukrainians supported it and one of their number, Peter Marchyshyn, from Lviv, became its minister of Ukrainian affairs.⁠5

It was again a disillusionment and its failure led the Ukrainians  p103 to plan for a Fifth Ukrainian Far-Eastern Congress in 1923. This planned to proclaim the entire Far East, including the Primorye, the region of the Amur and the shore of the Pacific Ocean as far as Bering Strait, including Kamchatka, an independent republic, Green Ukraine. The movement was belated.

On the eve of the congress the Bolsheviks, who had recognized the independence of the Far-Eastern Republic, changed their policy and replaced it by a Communist government. Throughout the whole of the area, they arrested in December, 1922, all of the leading Ukrainian leaders, intellectuals and persons of prominence, even as they promised to open Ukrainian schools in the Ukrainian areas and did so in isolated cases.

The prisoners were held and examined for months. Then in January, 1924, a large state trial was held in Chita.⁠6 The prisoners were accused of trying to tear away "the Russian Far East from Russia and to hand it over to international capitalists and bourgeois." Soviet practice had not been so finely developed then and the accused refused to make any confessions. The trial went on for some days and then the accused were convicted. The leaders were sentenced to death, although this was later commuted to a long term of imprisonment. Some of the defendants succeeded in escaping and making their way to Harbin.

In that city they continued their work. At first they were able to communicate with their compatriots across the Soviet border. This steadily became more difficult and almost impossible after 1929 when the friction between the Chinese and the Soviets developed into open warfare. During these years, however, the Ukrainian group kept its independence and did not co‑operate with the Russian and Siberian groups working in Tokyo, although this course was urged upon them by some of their members.⁠7

With the Japanese occupation of Manchuria new difficulties arose. Japanese policy wavered between encouraging the Ukrainian activities and discouraging them as hostile to a  p104 single Russian monarchist movement which they might be able to to create. The prolonged uncertainty barred active work and finally in 1940 the Japanese suppressed almost all the Ukrainian societies and stopped their news­papers.

The occupation of the city by the Soviets in 1945 put a decisive end to the movement. As in Great Ukraine proper, although the Ukrainian element of the population continued to grow because of new deportations, it was systematically suppressed. Those of the old leaders who had not succeeded in escaping from Manchuria disappeared and the Iron Curtain closed over another attempt of the Ukrainians to secure their rights. Some finally got to Shanghai and a fortunate part of these escaped from that city before its capture by the Chinese Communists. These are now in the Philippine Islands, where they share the lot of other displaced persons. The vast majority have, however, like so many of their compatriots, disappeared without a trace.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 F. M. Dostoyevsky, Zapiski iz Mertvago Doma, Part II, Chap. V.

2 Ivan Svit, Zelena Ukraina (New York-Shanghai, 1949), pp11 f.

3 Svit, op. cit., p12.

4 Petro Zeleny, Petro Ivanovich Horovy (New York-Shanghai, 1949), 11 pp.

5 Svit, op. cit., p13.

6 Zeleny, op. cit., pp9 f.

7 Svit, op. cit., pp20 ff.

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