Chinese in the Russian Revolution and in the Russian Civil War

There are a number of reports about the involvement of Chinese detachments in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. Chinese served as bodyguards of Bolshevik functionaries, served in the Cheka, and even formed complete regiments of the Red Army. It has been estimated that there were tens of thousands of Chinese troops in the Red Army, and they were among the few groups of foreigners fighting for the Red Army. Other notable examples of foreigners serving in the Red Army include Koreans in the Russian Far East, Czech and Slovak nationals, Hungarian communists under Béla Kun, Red Latvian Riflemen as well as a number of other national detachments. By the summer of 1919, the Red Army comprised over a million men. By November 1920, it comprised over 1.8 million men. Foreign soldiers did not make up a significant bulk of the Red Army, and the majority of the soldiers of the Red Army fighting in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War were Russians. Large numbers of Chinese lived and worked in Siberia in the late Russian Empire. Many of these migrant workers were transferred to the European part of Russia and to the Ural during World War I because of the acute shortage of workers there. For example, by 1916 there were about 5,000 Chinese workers in Novgorod Governorate. In 1916-1917 about 2,000 Chinese workers were employed in the construction of Russian fortifications around the Gulf of Finland. A significant number of them were convicted robbers (honghuzi, "Red Beards", transliterated into Russian as "khunkhuzy", хунхузы) transferred from katorga labor camps in Harbin and other locations in the Far Eastern regions of the Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution, some of them stayed in Finland and took part as volunteers in the Finnish Civil War on the allied communist side. After 1917 many of these Chinese workers joined the Red Army. The vast majority of these Chinese were apolitical and become soldiers solely in order to gain rights as workers in a foreign country.