Welcome to episode 127 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.

We ended the last episode by noting the appointment of General Vasily Blyukher on August 6, 1929, to take command of the Special Far Eastern Army, which had been recently constituted in order to wage war in Manchuria. The appointment took place in Moscow. Blyukher didn’t arrive on the ground in the theater of operations until August 24. The way I worded this at the end of last episode might have been a little misleading, since I said that Blyukher ‘arrived’ on August 6, when in reality he was appointed on that date.

When we last saw Blyukher in episode 54, he was leaving China after his position serving as a military advisor to the National Revolutionary Army became untenable after the Guomindang started slaughtering Communists and anyone who they thought was a Communist. After leaving China, he was sent to study at the German general staff college, which was intended as something of a prelude to him taking up a position as senior Soviet military attaché in Berlin. This was an incredibly important position in the Soviet military, because of the importance of the military cooperation that had been established with Germany in 1922.

But Blyukher’s appointment in Berlin hit an unexpected snag, because of his name. He shared a last name with a famous Prussian general who had fought against Napoleon, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. The story behind Vasily Blyukher having the same name as the famous Prussian general was that back in the 19th century the landlord whose land Vasily Blyukher’s peasant ancestors lived on decided to nickname the family Blyukher in honor of the Prussian general, as a kind of sign of affection for his hard-working peasants. Decades later, when those peasants’ descendant, Vasily, became a Bolshevik militant, Vasily Gurov formally adopted the name Vasily Blyukher as his real name, as a kind of way of integrating his family history with the militant ethos of the revolution.

Anyways, the Germans considered it too provocative to have a Soviet military attaché in Berlin who shared a name with a Prussian war hero and initially inquired as to whether or not the name Blyukher wasn’t one of those fake names that Bolsheviks tended to adopt as part of the security culture that they had inherited from the pre-revolutionary days. There had, in fact, been other instances where Russians who were assigned to work in the diplomatic apparatus in Berlin had adopted fake names that the Germans found objectionable, and then just used another name instead and everything worked out ok. Blyukher, in fact, had used code names before (he used the nom de guerre name Galen while he was assigned to work in China, for instance), but he had come to consider Blyukher to be his real name now, so there was no going back to Gurov in order to take the position in Berlin. It’s interesting to think about at what point the adoption of a nom de guerre became a real name for some Bolshevik militants, what psychological threshold had been crossed in the identification of name and sense of self. After all, Lenin had been born Vladimir Ulyanov, and Stalin had been born Dzhugashvili, but at some point the people they were, or at least who they thought of themselves as, became no longer associated in their own minds with the name they were born with, their identities had undergone some kind of transition during the revolutionary process. Anyways, that point had been reached for Blyukher, and so he couldn’t serve in Berlin. Which meant that, when the war broke out with China, he was available to come and take over the command of the Special Far Eastern Army.

And you would think that, given his background in China, it was something of a no brainer to put him in command. Having once served as a senior advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, now he would be fighting forces serving Chiang’s regime. However, there was something of a struggle involved in the appointment of Blyukher to command the Special Far Eastern Army. When the Red Army leadership was meeting to discuss the situation in Manchuria in late July, another China veteran, Aleksandr Cherepanov, put forward Blyukher’s name to lead the Special Far Eastern Army. Cherepanov had served under Blyukher in China, and he was one of these Soviet guys whose biography reads like one long war story. He had been a junior officer in World War I, then joined the Bolsheviks early in the revolution and was one of the first officers of the Red Army, which led to fighting both the Russian civil war and the Soviet-Polish war. Then after a little more training, he was sent off in 1924 to be a trainer at the Whampoa Military Academy (whose creation we discussed back in episode 29) and stayed with the National Revolutionary Army in China until the Soviet advisors had to leave in 1927. Then he was sent to fight the Basmachi Jihadis along the Afghan border in Tajikistan and had only recently returned to Moscow in time to recommend Blyukher to command the army for the upcoming war in Manchuria.

But Blyukher had a political opponent in Moscow who was against his appointment. Andrei Bubnov, who we last saw in episode 39, had had a falling out with Blyukher while they were both in China in 1926 over the launch of the Northern Expedition. As we discussed back in episodes 36 to 40, the Soviet advisors in China and the Chinese Communists had wanted to delay the Northern Expedition for about a year so that more political work could be done to prepare the areas where the military would be advancing into to rise up, so that a social revolution of peasants and workers would accompany the military advance of the National Revolutionary Army. However, when the Guomindang Central Executive Committee decided to go ahead with the Northern Expedition anyways, Blyukher accepted the decision and threw himself into the planning and execution. Bubnov, however, opposed Blyukher and made the case that the Soviet Union should pull its support for the Guomindang and switch over to aiding the warlord Feng Yuxiang. Bubnov’s continued opposition to the course that had been decided on led to his recall to Moscow after he antagonized Chiang Kai-shek. But Bubnov still held a grudge three years later, and in 1929, while serving as head of the political administration of the Soviet Red Army, Bubnov tried to keep Blyukher from being appointed as head of the Special Far Eastern Army. However, at the end of the day, Blyukher’s supporters made the case that Blyukher was the best man for the job.

While Chinese and Soviet forces began engaging in skirmishes at the border already in July, the first major fighting occurred in August, when the Soviets launched a series of raids on coal mines with the goal of depriving the Chinese forces of the coal that they needed in order to operate the Chinese Eastern Railway. Because the railroad was central to the functioning of the Manchurian economy, shutting it down would have brought immense economic pressure to bear on the Chinese side. The mines also had a lot of Soviet citizens who worked at them. And, up into August, many of these Soviet citizens had kept on working at the mines, and at other enterprises closely linked to the operations of the railroad.

Some of these Soviet citizens had made homes for themselves in Manchuria and were reluctant to leave. In early August, Soviet agents put up posters on walls and telegraph poles around Harbin ordering Soviet employees to resign within four days or lose their Soviet citizenship. Many quit, while others took leaves of absence in hopes of hanging on to their jobs regardless of who retained control of the railroad. At one of the mines, Soviet workers waged a strike in an attempt to shut down operations. A major problem, though, was that the large differentials in pay and treatment between Soviet and Chinese workers had created a big gulf between the workers, and they were unable to unite in the strike. The strike was defeated because the Chinese workers mostly didn’t join in. After all, the Chinese workers might reasonably expect better treatment under Chinese ownership, given that they faced explicit discrimination under Soviet ownership. Anyways, despite the disproportionate number of skilled workers being Soviets, the mine was able to keep on operating after the arrest of many of the strikers. Then, later in August, came the Soviet military raids on the mines. But these also were basically unsuccessful. So, the Soviet effort to end the war early by bringing economic pressure to bear on the Chinese side by shutting down the coal mines essential to the functioning of the Manchurian economy didn’t work.

Neither side carried out another major offensive during September, but that month did see continued fighting, as well as acts of sabotage carried out inside Manchuria by Soviet agents. The acts of sabotage mainly consisted of bombs placed along rail lines. The biggest fighting in September occurred at Suifenhe, a border town where the Chinese Eastern Railway crossed from China into the Soviet Union. The town was basically flattened by soviet aircraft, although ground assaults by Soviet troops were repelled.

The first big Soviet offensive didn’t take place until mid-October. The reason for the delay had to do with Soviet trepidation over how Japan would react if Soviet forces pushed deep into Manchuria. Once the Soviet embassy in Tokyo had ascertained that Japan would be alright with a Soviet offensive into Manchuria so long as Soviet forces stayed within the boundaries of the old Russian-Japanese division of Manchuria into spheres of influence (with Russia having a sphere in the north and Japan in the south), Moscow gave Blyukher the go ahead to move. (This was not really unexpected, since when Japan and the Soviets established diplomatic relations in 1925, they had confirmed the old division of Manchuria into spheres of influence that Tsarist Russia had settled on with Japan in the peace treaty that ended the 1904-1905 war between Russia and Japan.)

Once they had the go-ahead for military operations beyond the border in Manchuria, the Soviets needed to move fast, before the brutally cold north Manchurian winter froze the rivers. There were a few rivers which served along with the Chinese Eastern Railway as northern Manchuria’s major transport arteries, and the Soviet strategy hinged on driving up on of those rivers, the Songhua River (which is known as the Sungari River in Russian and is listed only under that name on many maps), toward Harbin. And winter was coming fast. An American journalist who reported on the fighting on the Songhua river on October 12 noted that “the paddlewheel and rudder of our steamer [was] so covered with ice that we had difficulty in moving against the current.”

This first major operation of the war had three main objectives: to seize the border town of Tongjiang, which was located five kilometers upriver from the confluence of the Amur and Songhua rivers, and then to push up the Songhua about fifty kilometers to seize Fujin City. In the process of accomplishing both of those objectives, the third objective was to destroy the Songhua flotilla, which was China’s naval force on the river. The idea was that accomplishing these three objectives would leave Harbin vulnerable to a further Soviet assault up the river, should the Guomindang fail to sue for peace.

The battle for Tongjiang began at 5:30 am on October 12 (it’s known as the Battle of Lahasusu in history books, after the name of Tongjiang in the local Nanai language). And although the war would last almost two months longer, this was really the decisive engagement in breaking the Guomindang forces. Michael Walker’s book The 1929 Sino-Soviet War includes a very detailed account of the fighting, and I’m going to quote from that book to give you an account of how this battle progressed. People wanting more information on the military details of the war will get all they want, I think, by checking out that book. I’m always amazed at just how much detail first rate military historians can reconstruct about even little-known battles like the one I’m about to recount here. Anyways, here are some excerpts from Walker’s account of the battle, with some minor edits.

Walker excerpt from chapter 9

Eighteen days later, the Soviet forces followed up their success at Tongjiang with an attack on Fujin City, fifty kilometers upriver. Here, the remaining ships with the Songhua flotilla fled the Soviet advance, but were annihilated by aircraft as they fled. And, in what would become a major theme, rather than fight the Soviets, the Manchurian warlord/Guomindang troops looted the city and preyed on the local civilian population before retreating.

The Soviets paused their offensive at this point, expecting that the Guomindang might sue for peace. But despite the Soviet victory in the campaign along the northern Songhua River and the prospect of the military collapse of the Manchurian warlord armed forces allied with the Guomindang, the Chinese side was determined to fight on, perhaps betting that the Soviets would not push further into Chinese territory after seeing the Soviet troops withdraw back to Khabarovsk after a short occupation of Fujin City.

Alright, that’s it for now, we should be able to wrap up our discussion of the military and diplomatic aspects of the war next episode and begin discussing some of the ways in which it intersected with the development of the Chinese Communist Party.

Until then, be well.