Thank you. Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 219, The Red Dawn, Part 3.

So after 1920, the Siberian intervention was very much Japan's game and Japan's game alone.

And honestly, things weren't looking pretty bad for the interventionist cause.

In European Russia, the only area where the white cause was really hanging on was in the Ukraine,

where anger over Russian rule combined with a moderately sized militant anarchist

movement, which called itself the Black Army, made it difficult for the Reds to make much headway.

This was complicated by the fact that the Red Army was also fighting a war against a newly

independent Poland. A war, in fact, it would end up handily losing.

Remember when I said the Russian Civil War was very complicated?

The Reds did eventually seize Ukraine, thanks to a good bit of treachery.

They made an alliance with the anarchist blacks,

used them to help push the white army out of Ukraine,

and then, of course, turned on the blacks and used them to help push the white army out of Ukraine, and then, of course,

turned on the blacks and killed them all.

In the Far East, meanwhile, the Colchak government was coming down.

In early January, Colchak himself was shot by the Bolsheviks.

That meant that in the Far East, the only remaining white leader of any serious consequence was the Cossack Ottoman Grigori Seminov.

That left the Japanese in a bit of a bind.

Prime Minister Haratakashi supported withdrawal from Siberia, though not immediately.

He wanted to phase out Japanese troop presence in the region.

On the grounds that long-term, Japan's position in Siberia was untenable.

Instead, he argued the Japanese should stay long enough to help set up a separatist white regime

...