Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 14 – Almost from
the beginning of the Khabarovsk protests, some of the demonstrators have talked
about the possibility of restoring something like the Far Eastern Republic
which existed as a buffer state between Soviet Russia and Japan in the early
1920s (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/07/protesters-in-khabarovsk-now-talking.html).
The FER is an almost mythical
structure, given that the Soviet government played down its importance lest
anyone get any ideas and that Western scholars seldom focused directly on it,
preferring to study the White Movement or the Siberian Civil War rather than
what was an intriguing compromise in which many forces were represented.
A happy exception to this appeared
two years ago when Ivan Sablin, a Russian professor of history at the
University of Heidelberg, published his Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far
Eastern Republic (London, 2018) and provided the most comprehensive
discussion yet of the forces which led to its appearance and to its demise.
Drawing on archives and the memoirs
of those who took part, Sablin showed that the various forces involved, Bolshevik,
Siberian regionalist, and various political parties in the region, all made use
of the FER and thus justify the interest if not always the interpretations
their successors have placed on it.
Few Russians know much about the RFE,
but now that can change as a Russian translation of Sablin’s book has been
published in Russian and is available as an e-book for as little as 4.79 US dollars.
The accessibility that provides should spark new interest in this important
part of regionalist history.
The bibliographic details are as
follows: Ivan Sablin, Dalnevostochnaya Respublika. Ot idei do likvidatsii
(Moscow: NLO, 2020, 480 pp., ISBN: 978-5-4448-1240-2; electronic versions are
available from various outlets.
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