Ischeznuvshii gorod: tragediia Nikolaevska na Amure [The disappeared city: the tragedy of the city of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur] by Ech, V. [Chilikin, Vasilii Aleksandrovich]

Vladivostok: Tipo-litografiia Iosif Korot, 1920. Octavo (17.5 × 12.5 cm). Contemporary quarter-cloth over boards, with original wrappers not preserved; 70 pp. 21 photo-illustrations. Ownership stamp to title page. Slightly resized, about very good. First edition. Filled with rare photographs of the destruction brought on by the Russian Civil War in the Far East, this text was written by an eye-witness of the violence unleashed by the Red Army against the residents of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, Sakhalin Region. The town had remained largely unscathed during the raging Civil War, and was defended by a small battalion of Japanese forces as well as several hundred White Russian soldiers. After Admiral Kolchak's regime had collapsed toward the West, the region was approached by the young Bolshevik warlord Iakov Ivanovich Triapitsyn, along with a regiment of nearly four thousand partisan fighters, who were gradually "liberating" the towns on the Amur River. At Nikolaevsk, fighting erupted, leading to a massacre of Japanese and Russian officers, and the razing of a large part of the town. Most of the Japanese population was killed. Triapitsyn's role in the Far-Eastern Civil War remains controversial; yet even the Bolsheviks convicted him for his execution of Japanese officers, and both he and his close associates were executed in 1920. As described in the note by Andre Savine: "For three and a half months, red partisans reigned in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, introducing the "dictatorship of the proletariat" there. "For three months there were continuous robberies and violence, executions and murders that ended with the destruction of the whole city. Thousands of people killed, heaps of ruins, the devastation of the region - that's what the partisans gave the population ... the horrors created by Russian people over the Russian population, to raise the edge of the bloody veil that hides the real perpetrators of this case and, thus, personally show the real face of those who dare to call themselves "friends of the people." The text consists of press articles, field notes and period documents, some quoted in their entirety. Savine 03589. Listed by Andrei Savine as being "very rare.