Russia at war 1941-1945

Ambassador in Berlin told Ribbentrop on March 6, 1943 that the Japanese

Government "considered it wrong to enter the war against the Soviet Union just now."

The subsequent developments of World War II did not change the situation in

Japan's favour: by 1943 the strategic initiative in the war in the Pacific passed into the hands of the United States forces... By the spring of 1944 the Japanese General Staff began to elaborate defensive plans in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.

[IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 526. Note the much greater credit given to the USA and Britain in this 1963 publication than in earlier Soviet histories of the war.]

There is good reason to suppose that even if the exact words uttered by the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin after Stalingrad were not known to the Russians at the time, they had an excellent idea of the real position: their espionage service in Japan was

exceptionally good. Up till 1942 they enjoyed the invaluable services of Richard Sorge, a German journalist, who had the confidence of Ambassador Ott himself!

The Russians had stored up by then quite a number of grievances against Japan: they had reason to suppose that during the earlier stages of the war the Japanese Embassy in

Moscow or Kuibishev had been transmitting much valuable information to the Germans

and, at least until Stalingrad, the Japanese had created great difficulties for Soviet shipping in the Pacific, especially for ships bringing supplies from the United States. 178

Soviet ships had been stopped and searched by the Japanese between the beginning of the war and the end of 1944 (mostly during the earlier period), and three Russian cargoes had been sunk by submarines which the Russians later claimed were Japanese.

[IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 529. It can, of course, be argued that Japan rendered Russia a great service in not attacking her (and many Russians were fully conscious of this at the time), but this was not a point to stress in 1945!]

For all that, in 1943 and 1944, diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Japan remained cool but correct, and the Japanese Ambassador continued to be invited to

official receptions. At Teheran and on many other occasions the British and Americans were told that there could be no question of the Soviet Union joining in the war against Japan until after the defeat of Germany. All the same, there were already some curious straws in the wind as early as the middle of 1944; one of them was the publication of a long novel by A. Stepanov called Port Arthur which, without actually justifying the Tsarist government's policy of imperialist expansion in the Far East, nevertheless

represented the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 as a "national" war, and as a humiliating national defeat which called for revenge. Anything less "Leninist" was hard to imagine.

It was not, however, till Yalta, in February 1945, that the Soviet leaders firmly committed themselves to entering the war against Japan; the Soviet Union was to receive Southern Sakhalin lost to the Japanese in 1905 and the Kurile Islands.

[Under a Russo-Japanese agreement of 1855 Sakhalin was to be administered jointly by the two countries, while the Kurile Islands were divided between them. In 1875 Japan abandoned her claims on Sakhalin, but received all the Kurile Islands. Under the 1905

peace treaty, Japan received the southern half of Sakhalin. The Russians now not only demanded the return of Southern Sakhalin, but all the Kurile Islands which they

considered as Japanese bases interfering with Russian shipping in the Pacific. Maybe they also suspected even then that the USA had an eye on the Kuriles as a potential air base.]

The clauses of the Yalta Protocol on the recognition of the status quo for Mongolia and on Russian privileges in China were subject to "concurrence" by the Chinese Government, i.e. by Chiang Kai Shek. It was agreed, however, at Yalta that in view of its top-secret nature, the Protocol on Japan could not be communicated to Chiang Kai Shek until after the defeat of Germany.

On April 5, 1945 the Russian people were left in little doubt that they would still have to fight Japan. On that day the Soviet Government denounced its Neutrality Pact with Japan; Molotov informed the Japanese Government that, since the conclusion of the Pact in