On March 28, 1938, the Chinese living in Vladivostok, the capital of the Primorsky Krai in the Soviet Union, were collectively plunged into a state of great panic.
They were taken away directly from the streets, from buses, and even from their homes by the Soviet government’s organized arrest teams. The arrest process involved no official documents, no interrogation, and did not distinguish between women, children, and the elderly.
This was a large-scale cleansing campaign targeting all Chinese people in the Far East. The arrests began at the end of 1937, with intermittent arrests, sometimes relaxed and sometimes tightened, lasting for four months. March 28, 1938, saw the largest scale of arrests, marking the end of the cleansing campaign. On March 29, the Chinese Consulate General in Vladivostok described the arrests in a telegram to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Nationalist Government:
“The street corners are filled with posts, and houses are searched door to door, with few escaping. … Overseas Chinese who want to escape to the consulate for temporary refuge are intercepted midway. Today, not a single overseas Chinese has come to the consulate, and the streets are also deserted, as if they have been completely wiped out. What wrong have the overseas Chinese done to suffer such a torment?”
The reason the Soviet side wanted to cut off the Chinese’s access to the consulate was because in the previous arrests, the consulates of the Nationalist Government in Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, and other places sheltered refugees, hindering the Soviet side’s cleansing plan. For example, the consulate in Blagoveshchensk protested against the Soviet side’s arbitrary arrests and torture, emphasizing that according to the consulate’s investigation, many of those arrested had legal entry status and formal jobs, and were not the so-called “spies” claimed by the Soviet side. The consulate in Vladivostok sheltered thousands of Chinese people seeking refuge from the arrests in February 1938.
The fact that no Chinese person could enter the Chinese Consulate General in Vladivostok to seek refuge meant that the cleansing campaign had achieved a “decisive victory”.
During the Second Opium War, Russia took advantage of the situation and, through the Treaty of Aigun, the Treaty of Peking, and a series of boundary treaties, seized more than 1.44 million square kilometers of Chinese territory. This included Vladivostok. However, after the loss of territory, a considerable number of Chinese people still made a living in the Far East. In 1897, there were about 40,000 people, with the most in Primorsky Krai, where Vladivostok is located, about 30,000 people. In 1910, the number of Chinese residents in the Far East exceeded 110,000, and it increased to 200,000-250,000 before World War I. After the establishment of the Soviet regime, many Chinese people chose to leave. In 1926, there were about 65,000 Chinese people in the entire Far East. Afterwards, due to various unfriendly policies of the Soviet government, the number of Chinese people in the Far East continued to decrease. By 1937, the eve of the “Great Purge”, there were still about 25,000 Chinese people in the Far East. (See Yin Guangming’s “Historical Study of the Soviet Union’s Handling of the Far East Chinese Issue (1937-1938)”)
On March 31, 1938, the Great Purge was “successfully completed”. The Chinese people disappeared from Vladivostok and the entire Soviet Far East.
Where did these missing Chinese people go?
What is currently known is: a portion of those arrested were rescued by the Nationalist Government and were collectively repatriated to Xinjiang (the channel south along the coast from Vladivostok had been cut off by the Japanese army). According to a report from Geng Kuang, the acting consul general in Vladivostok, to the Nationalist Government on January 26, 1939, 8,025 Chinese people were collectively repatriated from Vladivostok, 3,004 from Blagoveshchensk, and 1,815 from Blagoveshchensk, totaling 12,844 people. In addition, about 1,500 Chinese people returned to China on their own during the four-month-long terror arrests.
In other words, if we count 25,000 Chinese people in the Far East in 1937, there are still about 10,000 Chinese people whose whereabouts are unknown in this Great Purge. Among these people, some died from torture in prison, and some were shot by the Soviet government as so-called “spies”, such as Gao Panying (transliteration), born in 1900, who worked as a club waiter in Vladivostok and was accused of working for a Japanese intelligence agency and sentenced to death; Gao Yunqing (transliteration), born in 1892, who worked as a restaurant waiter in Vladivostok and was accused of participating in terrorist activities and sentenced to death. Most of them were sent by the Soviet government to concentration camps to perform heavy manual labor and eventually died there.
The Russian writer and Gulag concentration camp prisoner Lev Emanuelovich Razgon has a memoir, “Not Fictional”. It mentions a group of Chinese victims of the 1938 Great Purge. He wrote:
“In November 1938, another 270 Chinese people came from the Far East to our concentration camp. These people were residents of Manchuria. They wore big wolfskin hats, long fur coats, and special cotton boots. … They were sentenced to 8 years in prison for ‘illegal border crossing’ and sent to the concentration camp. The boss here arranged for them to carry large logs. They had to transport the logs from the forest to the road in deep snow. According to the volume of the logs, they were carried in groups of six, eight, or ten people. Everyone’s eyes were wide open, and they had only one thought, to quickly unload this backbreaking thing. Such weight, no one could survive for more than a week. The Chinese people worked silently day after day… By February 1939, 269 Chinese people had died, and only one cook remained in the kitchen.” (Quoted from Zhang Zonghai’s “The ‘Yellow Peril’ That Spread Misinformation – The Historical Roots of the Chinese People’s Difficulty in Establishing a Foothold in Russia”)
Unfortunately, today we cannot know the names, ages, and places of origin of these Chinese people, nor can we know what they specifically experienced in the concentration camps – the Nationalist Government at the time was overwhelmed by the invasion of the Japanese army and had neither the ability nor the time to hold the Soviet Union accountable. The Soviet government also anticipated that the Nationalist Government could not abandon Soviet aid, so it always maintained a high-handed attitude throughout the entire negotiation process. Thus, these approximately 10,000 Chinese people who originally lived peacefully in Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, and other places became the nameless and missing people in history.
This period of history has also long been in a state of disappearance.
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