In July 1900, at the time of the intervention against the Boxers, between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese were drowned at Blagoveshchensk when they were forced by whip-wielding Cossacks and local Russian police to swim across the wide and fast-flowing Amur to the Chinese side. No boats were provided and those who resisted or refused to get in the water were shot or cut down with sabres. This little-known incident, a harbinger of so many twentieth-century massacres, lay bare the utter contempt with which the Russians regarded all Asiatic peoples. As Nikolai Gondatti, the governor of Tomsk, explained in 1911: 'My task is to make sure that there are lots of Russians and few yellows here."
( Niall Ferguson )
[ The War of the World ]
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