Moscow versus Tokyo Ë 131
Simultaneously, Moscow sought to strengthen the home front in the Far East. In
January 1932, for example, the Japanese general consul in Vladivostok reported to
Tokyo that the Soviet secret police had been “feverishly” arresting people. On the night
of 17 to 18 January 1932, as many as four hundred politically suspect people were ar-
rested in the city, and the atmosphere there had become “very disquieting.” Accord-
ing to the consul’s secret agent, the situation in Nikol’sk (Nikol’sk-Ussuriiskii, today’s
Ussuriisk) in the north of Vladivostok was similar: all schools were closed to accom-
modate mobilized soldiers, and government facilities were evacuated to surrounding
villages.¹⁴Here and there the Soviet secret police “uncovered” espionage-diversionary
groups allegedly organized by the Japanese.
Moscow also sough to use the United States against Japan. Since the end of the
Russo-Japanese War, American-Japanese tensions in the Far East had become ever
more pronounced (see p. 62). Shortly after the war’s end, Washington began drafting
war plans against Japan, the rst such undertaking by the United States in peace
time. After the October 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks disclosed the many secret
treaties the Tsarist government had concluded with imperialist powers and deliber-
ately sought to pit the United States against Japan by misrepresenting the 1916 secret
convention between it and tsarist Russia.¹⁵Although the secret convention was aimed
against Germany, the two countries’ common enemy at the time, the Soviet govern-
ment published it under a sensational headline: “Secret Convention between Russia
and Japan Had in View a Joint Armed Action against America and England in the Far
East before the Summer of 1921.”¹⁶This claim was, as Peter Berton has noted, a “patent
falsehood and propaganda.”¹⁷The participation of Japan and the United States in the
Civil War in Russia’s Far East had made their con icting interests all the clearer,¹⁸and
Moscow was keen to exploit the con ict to maximal eect. With this in mind, Leon
Trotsky frankly noted in 1919 during the Civil War:
The strengthening of Japanese forces in Siberia, in conjunction with the eclipse of Kolchak, would
mean for America the Japanization of Siberia, and this she cannot accept lying down. In this event
we probably might even reckon on direct support against Japan from the scoundrels in Wash-
ington. In any case antagonism between Japan and the United States would create a situation
favorable to us in the event of our advancing into Siberia.¹⁹In the wake of the Mukden Incident, Japan’s aggression further spread to Shanghai
in early 1932, greatly disquieting and ultimately antagonizing other imperial powers
14 RGVA, f. 4, op. 19, d. 13, ll. 191–92.
15 See p. 78 for the 1916 treaty, which included a secret convention.
16 Gazeta Vremennago Rabochago i Krest’ianskago Pravitel’stva, 8 (21) December 1917, 2.
17 Peter Berton, “A New Russo-Japanese Alliance?: Diplomacy in the Far East During World War I.”
Acta Slavica Iaponicano. 11 (1993), 72.
18 See p. 103 of the present book.
19 Jan M. Meijer, ed.,The Trotsky Papers, 1917–1922, pt. one (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1964), 622–23.