when the Japanese Army announced on 24 June 1922 that it would remove all of its troops from Siberia by the end of October. A July 1922 Zemsky sobor deposed the Merkulov brothers and named a Russian general who had served with the Czechoslovak Legion, M.K. Dieterichs, as military dictator. FER victory and demise, 1922 With the Japanese exiting the country throughout the summer of 1922, panic swept through the White Russian insurgents. As the Red Army, thinly disguised as the , moved eastwards, thousands of Russians, including Dieterichs and his remaining troops, fled abroad to escape the new régime. The army of the Far Eastern Republic retook Vladivostok on 25 October 1922, effectively bringing the Russian Civil War to a close. With the Civil War finally over, Soviet Russia absorbed the Far Eastern Republic on 15 November 1922. The government of the Far Eastern Republic dissolved itself and transferred all its authority and territory to the Bolshevik government in Moscow. Aftermath Japan retained the northern half of Sakhalin Island until 1925, ostensibly as compensation for Nikolayevsk incident - the massacre of about 700 Japanese civilians and soldiers at Nikolaevsk-na-Amure in May-June 1920. This "compensatory" motive for holding the territory belied the fact that Japanese retaliation for the actions of Russian partisans had taken between two and three times as many Russian lives. Territory and resources The Far Eastern Republic consisted of four provinces of the former Russian empire—Trans-Baikal, Amur, the Maritime Province, and the northern half of Sakhalin island. Primarily, it represented the boundaries of the regions of Transbaikal and Outer Manchuria. The frontiers of the short-lived nation followed the western coastline of Lake Baikal along the northern borders of Mongolia and Manchuria to the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. The total area of the Far Eastern Republic was reckoned at approximately and its population at about 3.5 million people. Of these an estimated 1.62 million were ethnic Russians and just over 1 million were of Asian extraction, with family lineages originating in China, Japan, Mongolia, and Korea. The Far Eastern Republic was an area of substantial mineral wealth, including territory which produced about one-third of the entire Russian output of gold as well as that country's only source of domestically produced tin. Other mineral reserves of the Far Eastern Republic included zinc, iron, and coal. The fishing industry of the former Maritime Province was substantial,