Two White Army officers were in attendance as observers: Captains Murgabov and Nemchinov. The Japanese were forced to sign an agreement on neutrality, on the basis of which parts of the Red Army entered the city. Under the agreement, parts of the Japanese Army were to maintain neutrality and remain in the places of their deployment. At the funeral of 19 former Soviet and party officials who were arrested and executed by White and Japanese forces earlier that year, Tryapitsyn addressed a speech to the inhabitants of Nikolayevsk: In the hands of the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), were almost all documents of the White counterintelligence, with which nearly all employees implicated were arrested and subsequently shot. Those officials and representatives of the pre-revolutionary city council, who in 1918 signed a joint petition to the Japanese Emperor with the request to send troops to the Amur to aid them in defeating the Red Army were also arrested and executed. On 12 March 1920, a congress of Soviets of the Sakhalin Region was held in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, which marked the restoration of Soviet power in the whole region and enshrined the legal sovereignty of the Russian SFSR over the territory of Northern Sakhalin and the Lower Amur. Far Eastern Command On 10 March 1920, Tryapitsyn issued an ultimatum to the Japanese garrison to voluntarily disarm and turn over their weapons and ammunition to the Red Army, to which he was sure the Japanese would refuse, giving the Red Army the excuse it needed to expel the garrison from the city. In the early morning hours of 12 March, however, Japanese soldiers launched an attack on the central command of the Nikolayevsk Front, stationed in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. As a result of the sudden attack by the Japanese, Tryapitsyn himself was seriously wounded and received two injuries as a result, while his deputy, Mizin, and his Chief of Staff, T.B. Naumov, were both killed. At least 150 soldiers and commanders of the Nikolayevsk Front were killed and more than 500 soldiers were wounded. At the first stage of the fighting in the city, the initiative, thanks to the surprise attack and the loss of leadership by units of the Red Army, belonged to the Japanese garrison, which was supported by a large part of the Japanese population. But a day later, the Gorno-Amguno-Kerbinsk regiment, dislocated in the village of Kerbi, led by its commander, I.A Budrin, approached