Manchurian “California” — the Zheltuga “Republic” of Adventurer-Bandit Prospectors

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Political geography, Regional History
Amur/Heilong River basin (Photo: WWF–Russia/Y Darman)

In 1883 in a remote region of Northeast China gold was discovered near a tributary of a tributary of the great Amur River by hunters from the local Orochen (or Oroqen) tribe➀. Once word got out, aspiring prospectors flocked to the location on the Zheltuga stream from far and near. The bulk came from Russia, peasants and workers from Siberia and beyond. Many chancers came from Blagoveschensk, by boat to the Cossack station at Ignashino, just across the river from the gold strike spot. Many of these were miners who had deserted from the Amur goldmining district (of which Blagoveschensk was the centre). The gold discovery also became a magnet for all sorts of criminal elements including escaped convicts and deportees from the Far East including Sakhalin Island.

A multi-ethnic mix
As more and more miners joined the hunt for gold, a community given the name of Zheltuga grew up, by 1885 there was around 10,000 miners in residence. Russians were the dominant group but the Chinese (mainly Manchus but also some coolies from Shandong province) made up possibly as much as 10% of the population. Others who joined the diggings included Koreans, Orochens, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, Poles, Jews and Siberians. The population of the mining community was very fluid, the chancers would dig frenetically for the precious nuggets and if favoured by fortune, they wouldn’t hang around, no one stayed long at the goldmining caper in the Zheltuga camp, a couple of months being about the average➁…the mining community was in “a state of constant flux” [Gamsa, Mark. “California on the Amur, or the ‘Zheltuga Republic’ in Manchuria (1883-86).” The Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 2 (2003): 236–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213684].

Nine of the 10 headmen of Zheltuga (Photo: Earth Science Museum & Moscow State University)

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Administration and rough-hewn code of civic duties
Despite (or because of) the wildness of the camp and the dubious morality of many of its residents, Zheltuga didn’t function in an ungoverned, anarchical manner. To maintain order and keep Zheltuga’s rampant violence, murder and mayhem in check, a political structure was established with an elected leader and an executive of ten headmen or foremen. A code was promulgated with harsh penalties for breaches of the community’s law – execution for murder, flogging and banishment for lesser crimes. Major decisions affecting the community as a whole were made democratically, meetings of miners (Orlinoe poe) were held in the central field (Orlovo pole/“Eagle Field”) with the entire assembly voting on the matter at hand.

Colours of the Zheltuga republic’s flag

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Leaders (rather grandly termed “presidents of the republic”) also tended to come and go in regular fashion…the first leader went by the name of Adolf Karlovich Fass, a man with a mysterious background, variously thought to be German, Italian (Karl Fassi?) or Jewish in origin. Fass’ short tenure in charge was terminated when he was arrested by Cossack forces and disappeared. Briefly filling the void apparently was an equally shady figure from the Cossack stations named Sakharov. One of the camp’s last leaders was the better known Russian lawyer Pavel Prokunin who led armed resistance against the Chinese assault on Zheltuga before being deposed as well (Gamsa).

Photo: Earth Science Museum & Moscow State University

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Commerce in a frontier proto-state
As the camp’s population swelled, a rudimentary township grew rapidly. To service the burgeoning numbers on the goldfield there were 160 shops by 1885 including 18 hotels and taverns, bath houses, a theatre, a church, a hospital, a billiards saloon and even a circus. A sex industry for the miners (Zheltuga was decreed a male-only community) was set up on the Russian side at Ignashino. Also popular on the goldfield were the spiritonosy (“alcohol carriers”) merchants—mainly Jews and and “Old Believers” from Transbaikalia—who sold vodka to the miners. Businesses in the Zheltuga ’republic’ were required to pay tax [‘ Zheltuga Republic’, Wikipedia,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org].

With the mining of gold Zheltuga’s raison d’être the camp was inevitably tagged with the nickname “California on the Amur” in reference to the more famous, earlier American gold rush. Another name it acquired was Novaia Kalifornia (“New California”). Similarly Ignashino’s proximity to the Manchurian prospecting epicentre earned it the sobriquet Ignashinskaiia Kalifornia.

Source: MAMM / MDF / russiainphoto.ru

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Heightening political instability on the border
The Zheltuga gold mine was located within the northern frontier of imperial China. The Qing authorities’ slowness to act on this trespass on sovereign Chinese land was due to Peking’s ignorance of the goldmining activity. Russia conversely was well aware of the situation and the local region command tended to usually turn a blind eye to it. When the veil dropped from Chinese eyes, the governor (amban) of Aigun (Dongbei China) protested to the new Russian governor-general of Priamur region Baron AN Korff about the illegal gold mine on Chinese territory. Finally forced to take some action, Korff in 1885 moved to bring the community under rein…supplies were cut off and a Cossack cordon was imposed to block Russians passing to the Chinese side and the miners were compelled to sell their gold to the Cossack commander Prince Wittgenstein at a set price. (Gamsa).

Curtains for the “Amur California”
The Chinese Qing government issued warnings to the Zheltuga community to disband its operations on Chinese soil. Initially the miners retreated to the surrounding taiga (boreal forest), pretending to have vacated the camp, only to return to their diggings afterwards. Peking eventually got jack of the miners‘ refusal to heed its demand they vacate the camp, finally taking decisive military action. In early 1886 a detachment of 1,600 Chinese soldiers attacked the mining camp, dispersing the Russian miners who were allowed to skedaddle back over the Amur➂…the Chinese miners were not so fortunate, those caught while fleeing were summarily massacred by the troops. The camp was subsequently razed to the ground. The following year an officially-run Chinese gold mine was established nearby in the village of Mohe (today China’s northernmost city).


Postscript: Hóng-húzi, an imagined “Red Beard” republic of proto-communist Chinese brigands
A curious sidelight to the Zheltuga story is the mythical “Hóng-húzi republic”, the invention of two late 19th century French writers (Messieurs Ular and Mury) both of who travelled to the region and wrote separate accounts. Both concocted alternative versions of the Zheltuga episode as Chinese outlaw republics in northern Manchuria (Ular: ”Feltuga republic”| Mury: “Cheltuga republic”). The essentially “Russian enterprise with a proportionally limited, though nonetheless intriguing, Chinese participation” was recast as “an egalitarian republic of Chinese ‘red beards’” based on communist principles. The myth gained some traction at the time and persisted well into the 20th century. Mark Gamsa described the “Red Beard” saga as “a jumble of myth, rumour and unverified bits of factual information…(fuelled by) “an inventive spirit” [Gamsa, Mark. “How a Republic of Chinese Red Beards Was Invented in Paris.” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 993–1010. www.jstor.org/stable/3876481].

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➀ a Manchu-Tungus linguistic ethnic minority of forest hunter-dwellers in Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia

➁ some got no further than the local (Chita) casino, set up to relieve them of their hard-earned moolah (‘How Russians secretly set up their own ‘California’ in China’, Boris Egorov, Russia Beyond, 03-Feb-2021,
www.rbth.com/history/333347-russians-secretly-set-up-california)

➂ leniency was shown to the Russian miners as Peking didn’t want to antagonise Moscow and worsen relations with the Russian Bear

The Blacks Between the Reds and the Whites: A Ukrainian Anarchist Entity in a “Stateless Territory”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

The Russian Revolution in 1917 fostered a desire for self-determination within the Ukraine (as with other national minorities inside the empire), setting up the impetus for a conflict in Russia’s ‘underbelly’ which would become economically and geopolitically crucial to Soviet ‘imperial’ statehood. The Ukrainian conflict that followed (1917-21)✱ was a complicated affair involving a civil war, foreign interventions by countries from both the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, the White Armies (a loose confederation of international anti-communist forces), the Bolsheviks (the Red Army) and from neighbouring countries Poland and Romania with their own territorial ambitions in the Ukraine. The struggle for political control in Ukraine involved the succession (and sometimes the co-existence) of 14 separate governments◘, before the Bolsheviks finally established the country as a constituent republic of the USSR [The Times Guide to Eastern Europe, (Edited by Keith Sword), (1991); Encyclopedia of the USSR, (Warren Shaw & David Pryce), (1990)].

 

Reds, Whites and Blacks  
Various social and political groups within Ukrainian society—peasants, Cossacks, nationalists, socialists, communists, anarchists—formed into autonomous partisan detachments and embroiled themselves in the southern front showdown between the Red (Russian) and the White (foreign) armies. Of these groups, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, colloquially known as the Black Army, in particular found itself in the middle of the White versus Red warfare.

Makhnovia AKA ’Makhnochina’
Of the assortment of homegrown players in the conflict in Ukraine, the Black Army was the most intriguing ideologically. Led by a brilliant military commander, Nestor Ivanovitch Makhno, and composed of peasants and workers, they were an army of revolutionary anarchists (or anarcho-communists). Makhno was engaging in a social revolution experiment by trying to establish a stateless, libertarian society in “free territory”. The Makhnovist Movement was based on the principle of self-government, a “federation of free soviets” without recourse to a dominant central authority◔ – a defiantly anti-statist position that was of course anathema to the Soviets. Aside from anarchists, the movement’s ranks were also swelled by Left Social Revolutionaries, Maximalists and maverick Bolsheviks [Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917-1921, (Alexandre Skirda), (2004)]. At its high-water point Makhnovia boasted an army some 100,000-strong [‘The forgotten story of the Free Territory’, (John Dennehy), Contributoria, July 2015, www.contributoria.com].

The Bolsheviks in their Ukraine military campaign alternated between forming alliances with the Black Army against the White Army when it suited them, and warring with them at other times. Makhno’s effective use of guerrilla tactics and his own martial innovation, the tachanka◘, played a decisive role in stopping the advance of Anton Denikin’s White Army on Moscow by cutting its lines of supply. When the Reds eventually got the better of the Whites in the war, Leon Trotsky (Soviet Commissar of War) reneged on the agreement with the Makhnovists, vilified Makhno as a “bandit warlord” and a “counter-revolutionary”, and proceeded to crack down on the Blacks ruthlessly [‘Free Territory of Ukraine’, Libertarian Socialist Wiki, www.libsoc.wiki.fandom.com]. With the Black Army’s strength decimated by the desertion of thousands of soldiers, the Red Army, superior in numbers and better equipped✧, ultimately defeated and dispersed the Blacks, forcing Makhno to flee Ukraine, eventually taking refuge in France.

Footnote: Makhnovia’s geographical base in eastern Ukraine
Makhno’s powerhouse was on the left bank of the River Dniepr, in the provinces of Ekaterinoslav and Northern Tavrida and in part of neighbouring provinces…an area forming a rectangle measuring 300 km by 250 km and populated by seven-and-a-half million people (Skirda).

⇣ A 1919/20 pictorial map of Ukraine (Image source: Christophe Reisser & Sons)

Postscript: Ukraine, ‘Malorossiya’ and historic ‘Great Russia’ assumptions of hegemony
The perception historically of Ukraine as “Little Russia”—held by by both Russians and the outside world—as a geographic entity falling naturally within the realm of “Great Rus” or even as indivisible from it, has acted as a handbrake on Ukraine’s aspirations for independence❂. In the present Ukraine/Crimea imbroglio, Russia’s military intervention and support for separatism in Ukraine (ie, the 2014 idea of eastern Ukraine as ‘Novorossiya’, (“New Russia”), the encouragement of the separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic”), is the Soviet strategy redux of what happened in 1917 – the setting up of an alternative authority in the country to that of the Ukrainians, namely a pro-Russian regime in Kharkiv. The Europeans in 1917, perhaps with an underlying sense of the vast, sprawling Russian Empire as amorphously heterogeneous, had a poor awareness of the difference between Ukrainians and Russians (the Soviet policy of Russification was designed to further blur those differences)⧆ [‘Illusion of a friendly empire: Russia, the West, and Ukraine’s independence a century ago’,  (Ihor Vynokurov), Euromaidan, 02-Sep-2017, www.euromaidan.com].


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✱ because of the causal link the conflict in Ukraine is sometimes characterised as the southern front of the Russian Civil War. Invading White Army leader General Denikin referred to the region as “Southwestern Krai”, a name with Russian imperial overtones

◔ Makhnovia relied on the adherents to an anarchist model to self-organise into peasant communes and worker co-operatives (Dennehy)

◘ horse-drawn machine guns

✧ the Bolsheviks routinely and deliberately underarmed Makhno’s army (the Black Army always had more volunteers than guns) (Skirda)

❂ this is a part of a continuum which had its genesis with Muscovy’s supplanting of Kyiv as the centre of the Russian state

⧆ when the Ukrainian war for independence broke out, the western powers, in striking contrast to their ready endorsement of Polish self-determination and independence after WWI, failed to offer the same support to the Ukrainians’ aspirations (Vynokurov)