After Japan invaded Northeast China, it soon took a fancy to these Russians.
The Japanese set up a so-called "Russian Aliens Affairs Bureau", which is responsible for registering and examining Russian expatriates living in the northeast of China, and supervising these exiles.
Because the Russian fighting nation can be good at fighting, the Japanese also hope to open up more troops from Russian expatriates, especially when the second generation of Russian expatriates have grown up. They were all born in China, and many people can speak Chinese, which is more convenient to manage.
At that time, there were also organizations such as the Imperial Orthodox Church and the Far East Military Association among the expatriates, all of whom had guns, and most of them were officers in the pre-Russian era.
The Japanese absorbed these organizations and recruited a large number of Russian expatriates. 1937, they formed a Russian team, stationed at the second Songhua River station near Harbin, with 2000 people. All the soldiers are Russian, but the detachment leader is Japanese Asano Nagaakira, so this detachment is also called "Asano Nagaakira detachment". Until 1944, this unit is made up of.
The most striking feature of this Russian detachment is that it has a Cossack cavalry team of 400 people. During a patrol, they accidentally met a cavalry unit of the Soviet Red Army, which led to a very interesting encounter in the world military history. People wearing Japanese military uniforms are all white people with blond hair and blue eyes, and those wearing Soviet military uniforms are all yellow people with black hair and yellow skin-that Soviet Red Army unit is made up of Mongols.
As a result, the Cossack cavalry killed all the Mongolian cavalry, only 1 man.
This battle made the Japanese more convinced that arming Russian expatriates was the right choice.
This Russian detachment, in particular, was cruel to the China people, and even more relieved to the Japanese.
However, the fate of this unit is very tragic. 1945, the Japanese Kwantung Army had a premonition that the Soviet Union would attack on a large scale, so it ordered the Asano Nagaakira detachment to be reorganized into a labor force, put down the gun and only do logistics. One of the squads stationed near the Soviet border was also wiped out by the Japanese army.
None of the veterans of the Asano Nagaakira detachment who survived later came to a good end, and were sent to the Far East for reform-through-labour on charges of treason by the Soviets.