White Russians in China, Part 2

By Peter Harmsen
14 April, 2019
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When Japan occupied northeast China in 1931 and 1932 and turned the area into the puppet state of Manchukuo, it also took over a minority of several thousand ethnic Russians who had fled their homeland following the Communist Revolution a little more than a decade earlier. Some of these Russians became loyal citizens of the new state of Manchukuo, and others seem to have been active outside its borders.

The photos on this page are from the late 1930s and show a Russian military or paramilitary formation attached to the Far Eastern Academy in the city of Tianjin, carrying out various types of drills. Unlike the Asano Detachment, set up at about the same time in Manchukuo with Russians in Japanese uniforms, the soldiers here are wearing what appear to be a variation of the uniforms typically worn by Russian soldiers in World War One, or by the White forces in the subsequent Russian Civil War.

The photos are part of a large batch of images taken in north China in the period from 1936 to 1945 that have recently been made available by Kyoto University. Many have never before been seen in public.