156 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
Using its extensive intelligence network, Moscow was well versed in the Japanese-
German negotiations leading to the conclusion of the pact and was well aware of its
content and secret supplementary protocol.¹¹¹Moscow also certainly understood that
the Anti-Comintern Pact was in fact an anti-Soviet pact. Given the supposition, as dis-
cussed earlier, that Moscow was in possession of the Japanese codebook stolen from
the Japanese embassy in Turkey, there is little doubt that theOshima-Canaris agree- ̄
ment quickly became known to Moscow.
In 1937, just as Germany and Japan began collaborating, Poland and Japan also
started working together more closely in anti-Soviet intelligence. The two countries,
united by common interests, had already been working closely for some time, al-
though uno cially. In 1937 Japan began to work, if tentatively, with the Poland-
sponsored Promethean movement. From Stalin’s point of view, this almost certainly
signi ed a grand espionage alliance of Germany, Japan, and Poland (even though, as
far as can be judged, at the time Germany and Poland did not o cially collaborate in
intelligence against the Soviet Union). At least, this is the picture Stalin presented to
the Soviet nation.¹¹²
6.5 The Great Terror
Moscow used the German-Polish-Japanese nexus to justify the Great Terror in 1937. The
Anti-Comintern Pact of November 1936 and theOshima–Canaris agreement of May ̄
1937 appear to have been important factors. Another was Japan’s threat in the East,
combined with renewed Muslim rebellions in Xinjiang.¹¹³The Caucasus, ethnically
complex to an extraordinary degree, was probably the most politically unstable border
area in the Soviet Union. It was there that all the major powers schemed against the
Soviet Union — Germany, Poland, Italy, Britain, France and, of all countries, Japan. It
was in the summer of 1937, precisely at the onset of the Great Terror’s mass operations,
that Japan and Germany began cooperating in the Caucasus in anti-Soviet subversion.
The Soviet Union thus saw Japanese hands all over the eastern and southern Soviet
border areas.
As early as February 1937, “Turko-Tatar peasants” were deported from the Azer-
baijan–Iranian borderlands, as witnessed by an English diplomat who happened to
111 Moscow’s acquisition of the content of the pact and its secret protocol is explained in W.G. Krivit-
sky,I was Stalin’s Agent(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1939), 32–36.
112 See Hiroaki Kuromiya and Andrzej Pepłoński, “Stalin, Espionage, and Counter-espionage,” in
Stalinism and Europe: Terror, War, Domination, 1937-1947, ed. by Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon
(Oxford University Press, 2014).
113 See Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin’s Great Terror and the Asian Nexus.”Europe-Asia Studies66, no. 5
(July 2014), 775–793.