An uprising flared up in this part of
Yakutia in September 1921. About 200
White Russians were led by
Cornet Mikhail Korobeinikov. The
Communist Party sent more troops to deal with the revolt. Among the reinforcements was a contingent of the
Far Eastern Republic, led by
Nestor Kalandarishvili, which arrived to assist in counter-insurgency operations in January 1922. In March 1922, the Whites established the Provisional Yakut Regional People's Government in
Churapcha. On 6 March, Kalandarishvili's unit was ambushed and he was reportedly killed by the insurgents. However, historians have also proposed that he may have been murdered in an internal purge by local
Bolsheviks who regarded him as a potential threat to their power or politically unreliable. On 23 March, Korobeinikov's Yakut People's Army, armed with six machine guns, captured the major town of
Yakutsk. The
Red Army garrison was decimated. In April, the
White Army contacted the
Provisional Priamurye Government in
Vladivostok, asking for help. On 27 April, the
Russian Bolshevik government declared the
Yakut ASSR and sent an expedition to put down the uprising. In summer 1922, the Whites were ousted from Yakutsk and withdrew to the Pacific coast. They occupied the port towns of
Okhotsk and
Ayan and again asked Vladivostok for reinforcements. On 30 August, the
Pacific Ocean Fleet, crewed by about 750 volunteers under
Lieutenant General Anatoly Pepelyayev, sailed from Vladivostok to assist the White Russian forces. Three days later, this force disembarked in Ayan and moved upon Yakutsk. By the end of October, when Pepelyayev captured the locality of Nelkan, he learned that the Bolsheviks had wrested Vladivostok from the White Army and the Civil War was over. When the
Soviet Union was formed on 30 December 1922, the only
Russian territory still controlled by the White Movement was the region of the Pepelyayevshchina ("пепеляевщина"), so-called in the Soviet historiography, that is, Ayan, Okhotsk and Nelkan. A unit of Bolshevik forces under
Ivan Strod was sent against Pepelyayev in February 1923. On 12 February, they defeated Pepelyayev's forces near Sasyl-Sasyg; in March, the White Army retreated from
Amga. On 24 April 1923, the ships
Stavropol and
Indigirka sailed from Vladivostok for Ayan. They contained a contingent of the Red Army under
Stepan Vostretsov. Upon his arrival in Ayan on 6 April, Vostretsov learned that Pepelyayev had evacuated to Nelkan. The remainder of the White Army were defeated near Okhotsk on 6 June and near Ayan on 16 June. 103 White officers and 230 soldiers were taken prisoner and transported to Vladivostok. Pepelyayev himself was captured after the battle of Ayan, and he would spend the next 13 years in the
gulag camps before being executed during the
Stalinist purges in 1938. ==See also==