148 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
(Kavkasia) and French (Le Caucase) as well, and from autumn in English (The Cau-
casian Quarterly) and German (Der Kaukasus).⁷⁸
It appears that not only Japan but also Germany and Italy nanced the journal at
some point.⁷⁹In all likelihood, this was after Germany and Japan signed in November
1936 the Anti-Comintern Pact against Moscow, which Italy joined a year later.
In Riga, capital of Latvia, where Japan had stationed an intelligence center, its
military attaché, who also served as military attaché for Estonia and Lithuania, em-
ployed two Georgians: Nina Shvangiradze, who subsequently married an American
and moved to Cairo, and Mrs. Maria Maglakelidze, wife of the well-known Georgian
emigrant leader Shalva Maglakelidze.⁸⁰In his memoirs Maglakelidze notes that he
was very close to Japan’s master spy Makoto Onodera, who “spoke perfect Russian”
and who in 1936 advised him to break with both the Georgian Social Democratic gov-
ernment in exile and the Promethean movement and create a right-wing Georgian
monarchist organization. Maglakelidze immediately followed his advice, founding in
February 1937 the Georgian monarchist group Kartlossi, which was politically oriented
toward Japan and Germany.⁸¹
It is not at all surprising that the Caucasus group (assembled around the journal
Kavkaz) joined forces with Japan. Their common interests against the Soviet Union
united them, just as Poland and Japan closely collaborated in intelligence against
Moscow throughout the 1930s.⁸²But although the journalKavkazwas clearly pro-
Japanese and pro-Germany, it does not appear that it uncritically accepted Japanese
imperialism or Nazism. In its rst issue,Kavkazdeclared that “our enemy today is
the Soviet Union.”⁸³Yet the Caucasus group did not reject Russia as such. It would
have been folly to ignore geography or deny the cultural and economic ties of the Cau-
casus to Russia.⁸⁴It also took Turkophilism as politically more expedient than Rus-
sophilism because Turkey was the only neighboring power that could pose a counter-
weight to Russia.⁸⁵The group was critical of the “political and social structure asso-
ciated with classical capitalism that had gone bankrupt,” but expected to utilize for
a better world “all the experiences of political and economic creation in Europe and
78 Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens, 211.
79 von zur Mühlen,Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern, 29, 40.
80 NARA RG263, 2002/A/10/3 (Makoto Onodera), v. 1, 3 (we are grateful to Professor Jerey Burds for
providing us with a copy of this document). During the Second World War in 1942-43, Maglakelidze
commanded the Georgian legion of the Wehrmacht. Bammat was in touch with the two Georgians.
81 See Shalva Maghlakelidze, “mogonebebi” [Memoirs], in V. Rtskhiladze,kartvelebi meore msoplio
omshi germanuli droshis kvesh[Georgians in the Second World War under the German Banner] (Tbilisi:
Ganatleba, 1994), 142.
82 See Hiroaki Kuromiya and Andrzej Pepłoński,Między Warszawą a Tokio: Polsko-Japońska współ-
praca wywiadowcza 1904–1944(Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2009).
83 Mamoulia, Donogo, and Vatchagaev,Gaidar Bammat i zhurnal “Kavkaz,”49.
84 Mamoulia, Donogo, and Vatchagaev,Gaidar Bammat i zhurnal “Kavkaz,”, 276, 558–59.
85 Mamoulia, Donogo, and Vatchagaev,Gaidar Bammat i zhurnal “Kavkaz,”, 277.