The Far Eastern Republic and Historical Memory
Humanities
HIS 199
The Far Eastern Republic (henceforth FER) was a liberal democracy which existed within the Russian Far East from 1920-1922. It was established as a way to prevent armed conflict between Imperial Japan and the Russian Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics (henceforth RSFSR) and to paradoxically preserve the territorial the integrity of the Russian Empire. The FER was distinct from other Russian Civil War polities in two ways:; the first was that it was explicitly a buffer state, and the second was that it was a state based around regional boundaries rather than national identity. After the FER served its purpose as a buffer state and as a vehicle for the Bolshevik Party to interact diplomatically with the rest of the world it was voluntarily reabsorbed into the nascent USSR. However, the memory of the FER can be used as a tool to trace trends in how the Russian Civil War and allied intervention is remembered; through the memory of the FER found within state- sanctioned media such as textbooks and maps one can follow contemporaneous attitudes towards the Russian Civil War, the allied intervention, as well as the strange polity which was the FER
