The complete debacle of General Wrangel's forces in Crimea put France in a very awkward position. Japan at once approached the French Government with a project to evacuate the remainder of Wrangel's forces to the Russian Far East, but in exchange-for this claimed all territory which was now declared as the Far Eastern Republic. Simtonov, who resided la Port Arthur, became the Japanese candidate to resume the supreme command over this army, but the United States interfered hampered this new bellicose Franco-Japanese adventure.
In the meantime, at the conference of February in Chita, the Government of the Far Eastern Republic was elected and under the supervision of a commission that was elected on a coalition basis, the elections of the Constituent Assembly were proceeding. In spite of all difficulties and attacks on behalf of the reactionaries and Japanese, the democratic Far Eastern Republic became a new independent state in the world, free of Japanese and the Russian counterrevolutionists. Only the Southern part of the Maritime Province remained in the possession of the White Guards and their supporters, the Japanese, who gradually concentrated their forces in that, region in order to start a decisive campaign against the newly-born democratic Russian state, with the object of crushing its young mitary force and annexing it for ever to the Japanese Empire. This was the real cause of the gloomy situation in the Far East in 1922, which brought the waraiet with the self-styled Mer-Tar Eastern Republic into armed kuloff's government of Vladivostok, and later, with the Japanese troops This very' possibly will throw Russia into the most terrible war with Japan, a war which will be the beginning of a new sanguinary tragedy in the Eastern part of the Great Asiatic Continent.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.