The creation of the RFP coincided with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the creation of a puppet state, Manchukuo. The Japanese established a Bureau on the Affairs of Russian Emigrants in Manchuria (BREM) to manage the huge Russian population in Harbin.27 A Russian needed BREM’s (i.e., Japanese) approval to be hired, to open a business, and even to visit relatives in another city. The staff of BREM consisted of Cossacks and monarchist émigrés. In 1943, Major General Lev Vlasievsky became head of BREM, while Mikhail Matkovsky, the son of another White General, Aleksei Matkovsky, was his assistant. In fact, Mikhail Matkovsky was a Soviet intelligence agent, and through him, the Soviets learned a lot about the Russian community in Harbin.28 Despite his service, SMERSH arrested Matkovsky and later he was sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment in labor camps.
Between 4,000 and 20,000 Russians joined the RFP in Manchuria, while the total Russian population in Harbin was about 80,000.29 In 1939, the RFP changed its name to the Russian Fascist Union or RFS. The RFS widely used terror against members of the Russian émigré community and soon became part of the Japanese-Manchurian mafia. In October 1941, Japanese security arrested Richard Sorge, head of the Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, and then started vetting the Russian population in China.30 The Japanese detained and intensely interrogated Rodzaevsky and two other RFS leaders for a month. In 1943, the Japanese administration banned the RFS.
But in the 1930s, the Japanese enthusiastically supported the RFP’s anti-Soviet terrorist activity. In 1936, the Japanese assisted a group called ‘The First Fascist Unit for Saving Russia,’ under the command of Rodzaevsky’s bodyguard, Matvei Maslakov, in crossing the Soviet border.31 The NKVD troops immediately discovered the group and killed forty of its members.
In 1937, General Yoshijiro Umezu, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army and, from 1939 to 1942, Japanese ambassador to Manchukuo, ordered the establishment of a special school to train Russian terrorists, appointing Rodzaevsky as its head.32 Soviet intelligence heard about the school’s activity through Ivar Lissner, a reporter for Völkischer Beobachter and a prominent anthropologist, who pretended to work for the Abwehr but was, in fact, a Soviet agent. In June 1940, the Japanese arrested Lissner on suspicion of espionage. He was released after the war. As for General Umezo, in July 1944 he was appointed chief of the Japanese general staff. In 1948, the International Military Tribunal in Tokyo sentenced him to life in prison and he died in prison in 1949.
The Japanese military leaders planned the active use of émigré Russian military formations in the coming war against the Soviet Union. In 1938, Ataman Semenov organized the first detachment, called the Asano Brigade after the Japanese Colonel Takashi Asano.33 Subordinate to the HQ of the Kwantung Army, the brigade fought against Korean partisans. In 1939, a unit of 250 men from this brigade participated in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol against the Red Army. In 1943, the brigade, renamed the Russian Military Unit of the Manchukuo Army, included infantry and Cossack cavalry units. From 1944 onwards, Cossack Colonel Smirnov commanded the formation, which had grown to 4,000 men by 1945.
Another Cossack corps, ‘Zakhipgapsky,’ formed under the command of General A. P. Baksheev in 1943, was subordinate to Japanese Lieutenant Colonel Takashi Hishikari, the Kwantung Army ambassador to Manchukuo. Three additional small units of approximately 250 men each consisted of young Russian volunteers in three Manchurian regions. While Japanese officers commanded these units, the junior officers were Russians.
Contrary to Japanese hopes, after the first Soviet paratroopers landed in several Manchurian cities, young Russians actively assisted them in capturing Japanese military commanders. Rodzaevsky and Vlasievsky, along with several loyal men, moved to the town of Tientsin, where they met with a group of NKVD representatives. The NKVD officers told the escapees that they would be pardoned if they went to the Soviet Union voluntarily. Vlasievsky flew to Manchuria, where he met with Marshal Malinovsky. After the meeting, he was brought to the Soviet city of Chita, where SMERSH operatives arrested him and sent him to Moscow.
On September 22, 1945, Rodzaevsky wrote a letter to Marshal Vasilevsky, who handed it over to the Soviet Embassy in Beijing (then known as Peking).34 After reading it, Soviet representatives brought Rodzaevsky to Changchun, the capital of Manchuria, where SMERSH operatives arrested him. Many other émigrés were arrested in Harbin and other cities. Prince Nikolai Ukhtomsky, a journalist and writer in Harbin, later told his fellow prisoners in the Vorkuta Labor Camp that a group of Soviet paratroopers had landed in the center of Harbin and immediately arrested him and several other White émigrés.35 In September 1945, Abakumov reported to Beria:
The SMERSH Directorate of the Transbaikal Front has found and arrested leaders of the anti-Soviet White Guardist movement in Japan and Manchuria:
RODZAEVSKY, K. V., the ideologue and leader of the ‘Russian Fascist Union,’ born in 1908 in the town of Blagoveshchensk, a Russian, former member of the VLKSM [Communist Youth Union], in 1928 escaped from the Soviet Union to Manchuria;
VLASIEVSKY, L. F., head of the anti-Soviet central ‘Bureau of Russian Emigrants’ in Manchuria [i.e., BREM], born in 1889 in the village of Chindan (Transbaikal Region), a Russian, escaped with the rest of the gang of Ataman SEMENOV to Manchuria, Lieutenant General of the White Army.
Therefore, at present we have arrested all leaders of the White Guardists in Manchuria: SEMENOV, G. M.; RODZAEVSKY, K. V.; VLASIEVSKY, L. F.; Ataman SEMENOV’s Deputy, Lieutenant General of the White Guard Army, BAKSHEEV, A. P.; leaders of the White Cossack and anti-Soviet organizations, generals of the White Army BLOKHIN, P. I.; DRUIN, F. B.; GARMAEV, Urain; MOSKALEV, T. P.; KUKLIN, M. V.; Prince UKHTOMSKY, N. A.; and others.
RODZAEVSKY and VLASIEVSKY have already been brought to the Main SMERSH Directorate, where they will be carefully interrogated.
I have already reported the above to Comrade STALIN.36
More arrests, especially of the ROVS representatives in China, followed. Later most of the above-mentioned arrestees were convicted in show trials.
Also arrested was Boris Bryner, a businessman with a Swiss passport and an affiliation to the Swiss Consulate in Tientsin (Tianjin), who was the father of the famous Hollywood actor Yul Brynner. Boris Bryner was a son of Jules (Julius) Bryner, a Swiss citizen who moved to Russia and became a successful businessman, and a Buryat (Mongolian) mother.37 Later Yul and his sister Vera added the second ‘n’ to the family surname after arriving in the United States. After graduating from St. Petersburg Mining Institute, Boris worked as a manager of the Tetyukhe Lead and Zinc Mines Company established by his father not far from Vladivostok. He married a Russian woman, Maria (Marousia) Blagovidova, who gave birth to Yul, the future actor (born Yulii Borisovich Bryner), and Vera. Boris maintained the rights to the family mines until 1931, which made his enterprise the longest-running private company in the Soviet Union.
In 1931, Boris was forced to leave Vladivostok for Harbin, where his wife Marousia had moved a few years earlier after Boris abandoned her and their two children; in 1934, they moved to Paris. Since the Soviets considered Boris a ‘Russian capitalist,’ in 1945 SMERSH operatives arrested Boris together with his second wife and their small daughter. Mr. and Mrs. Bryner were imprisoned and interrogated for six months. They were released after negotiations between the Swiss authorities and the Soviets.