14. Semenov the destroyer
Gregori Semenov was a former Cossack general who ran what he designated as an independent government from the Siberian city of Chita, subsidized financially by the Japanese. Despite accepting the Japanese largesse, he declared himself to be allied with the Americans in Siberia. Among the crimes history has laid on his doorstep was the murder on his order of 1,600 civilians in Adrianoka in a single day. Eventually the Red Army and supporting partisans defeated Semenov (sometimes spelled Semyenov) and he fled to first Japanese, and then American protection. In the United States he was accused by veterans of the American Siberian intervention of crimes of violence against American troops.
Although Semenov was acquitted of all charges in American courts, he immediately fled the country and settled in China, where he made a living by spying for the Japanese until near the end of World War II. During the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, he was captured and tried for his crimes against the Soviet state. Convicted, he was sentenced to death and hanged in August, 1946. He was but one of the unsavory “allies” which the American intervention in Siberia sought out in the attempt to influence the shaping of the Russian government in the aftermath of the October Revolution, and his activities in support of the Americans remained – and many still remain – hidden from view in the United States.