2 Ë Introduction
Fig. 1.1.The Caucasus and Japan.
outline the clandestine operations of Japan and various Caucasian political groups.
Published and archival sources – Russian, German, American, French, Georgian, Pol-
ish, British, and Japanese – document the lengths to which Japan and peoples from
the Caucasus went in planning and executing subversion against their common en-
emy as well as the lengths to which the Soviet Union went to subvert such activities
by penetrating the Caucasian groups supported by Japan. Then, as now, international
schemes of this sort were not unusual. Many have simply never come to light. Yet the
story of the Japanese-Caucasian connection raises issues of more than mere episodic
signi cance in the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: indeed it sym-
bolizes the globalization of the regional aairs of Asia and the Caucasus in the twen-
tieth century.
The nexus between Russia and the Caucasus is centuries old. By the second half of the
nineteenth century, the bulk of the Caucasus had come under Russian domination.
During the Civil War of 1918–21 that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, some
southernmost areas (such as the city of Kars and its region) of the Russian Caucasus
were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Sandwiched between the Black Sea and