172 Ë War and Dénouement
Meanwhile, the international situation began changing dramatically in both East
and West. With the Anschluss in March 1938, Austria was absorbed into the Third Re-
ich. From July to August of that year, ghting erupted between Japan and the Soviet
Union along the Korean-Russian border (the Battle of Lake Khasan/Changkufeng/-
Ch ̄okoh ̄o). Both sides disagreed sharply on who was responsible for the battle and
who had won. Until recently, the Soviet claim that Japan was the aggressor and that
the Soviet side won the battle has been generally accepted in the eld. But newly de-
classi ed Soviet military sources have suggested that Moscow in fact provoked the
battle (to test Japan’s knowledge of Soviet military forces in the wake of the defection
to Japan’s side of Genrikh S. Liushkov, the Soviet secret police chief in the Far East,
who Moscow suspected had revealed vital information to Japan), and that Marshall
V.K. Bliukher, the Red Army commander in the Far East, had resisted it, for which he
was severely attacked by Stalin.¹²It has also become known that in the battle, more
Soviet ghters were killed (759, plus 95 missing and 100 who died in hospitals) than
Japanese (525 by Japanese accounts, and approximately 650 by a Soviet account).¹³
This battle was followed in September 1938 by the Munich Agreement, which per-
mitted Germany to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. This compromise was
worked out jointly by Europe’s major powers – Germany, Britain, France, and Italy –
without Moscow’s participation, prompting the Caucasus group to rejoice that the So-
viet Union had now been marginalized in the event of peace or war in Europe.¹⁴The
celebration was, however, premature.
The Munich Agreement also prompted Bammat, the leader of the Caucasus group,
to reach beyond the Caucasus and create a Ukrainian-Caucasian committee in Eu-
rope.¹⁵Simultaneously he attempted to make the journalKavkazinto this committee’s
organ.¹⁶Following Prague’s loss of the Sudetenland, both Slovakia and Carpathian
Ruthenia (Rus’) declared autonomy within Czechoslovakia. The latter was soon taken
over by Ukrainian nationalists, declaring itself “Carpatho-Ukraine.” Japan is known
12 SeeGlavnyi voennyi sovet RKKA. 13 marta 1938 g.–20 iiunia 1941 g.: Dokumenty i materialy(Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 2004), 138,Voennyi sovet pri narodnom komissare oborony SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy.
1938, 1940 gg.(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 211, 213, 255–56; and Nikolai Velikanov,Bliukher(Moscow:
Molodaia gvardiia, 2010), 266. Bliukher was soon arrested, tortured, and died in prison on 9 November
- For more detail, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, “The Battle of Lake Khasan Reconsidered.”The Journal
of Slavic Military Studies29, no. 1 (2016), 99–109.
13 G.F. Krivosheev,Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil. Statisticheskoe issle-
dovanie(Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2001), 173.
14 Kavkaz, 1938, no. 7, 4, and G. Mamoulia, K.M. Donogo, and M. Vatchagaev,Gaidar Bammat i zhurnal
“Kavkaz”(Makhachkala–Paris: Akhul’go, 2010), 399–401.
15 See the French police report: Service historique de l’armée de Terre (Château de Vincennes) Series 7
N-3086. For Bammat’s contact with the Ukrainians, see also NARA RG263, Entry A1-86, Box 22 (Michael
Kedia, 22 March 1948 intelligence report).
16 H. Bammat, Letter to O. Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz, 8 February 1939. Jan Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz
Papers, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.