Chinese in the Russian Revolution and in the Russian Civil War

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.

[13] The vast majority of these Chinese were apolitical and become soldiers solely in order to gain rights as workers in a foreign country.

"Others" refers to Buryats, Armenians, Cossacks, Tatars, Latvians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews and to some degree Chinese.

In the Almazno settlement, there were Chinese, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles in addition to Russians, Ukrainians and Cossacks.

They took their ranks from the pre-existing Bolshevik group, the MRC (the Military Revolutionary Committee), the Red Guards (the predecessor to the Soviet police (militsia), the pre-Revolution, Russian Army, mercenaries and recruits.

The Chinese with the Red Army were recruited from factory workers who had been attracted into Russia before the war and sided with the urban proletariat with whom they worked.

[5] Nonetheless, Brian Murphy asserts that "the number of Chinese troops did not constitute a significant fraction of the Red Army.

VNUS and VOKhR troops served as an internal security force on the military front in times of war.

CHON were mainly used to protect key military, political or state buildings, bases and installations, assisting Cheka operations, quelling uprisings and giving combat support to the Red Army.

[24] In 1918, Dmitri Gavronsky, a member of the Russian Constituent Assembly, asserted that the Bolsheviks based their power chiefly on foreign support.

He asserted that, "in Moscow, they have at their disposal 16,000 well-armed Lettish soldiers, some detachments of Finnish Red Guards and a large battalion of Chinese troops."

"[25] In his book Between Red and White, Leon Trotsky makes sarcastic reference to the charge that the Soviets held Petrograd and Moscow "by the aid of 'Lettish, Chinese, German and Bashkir regiments'".

[26] The Red Army commander Iona Yakir headed a Chinese detachment guarding Lenin and Trotsky.

[27] Some Chinese volunteers, who had fanatical devotion to the revolution, were allowed to join the Cheka and various military guard detachments.

[27][29] Ren Fuchen (任辅臣) (1884–1918) from Tieling was the first Bolshevik in North Liaoning and a commander of the Chinese regiment of the Soviet Red Army.