150 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
Fig. 6.3.General Giorgi Kvinitadze with his wife and daughters, the sons of Haidar Bammat, and
Shigeki Usui, Chatou, France, 1936.
ing the pact, both hoped that other countries, especially Great Britain, Poland, and
Italy, would join. Such proved not to be the case, however, except for Italy. Two events
signi cantly in uenced this turn of events. One, in Europe, was the Franco-Soviet
Treaty of Mutual Assistance of May 1935. (This pact was concluded in response to Ger-
many’s rearmament, symbolized by the introduction of conscription, which violated
the terms of the Versailles Treaty.) Indeed, its rati cation by France in March 1936 was
used by Hitler to justify his military advance into the demilitarized Rhineland, again in
violation of the Versailles Treaty. In the East, the Soviet Union and the Mongolian Peo-
ple’s Republic concluded in March 1936 a mutual assistance pact, which o cially al-
lowed Soviet military forces to be stationed in Mongolia in opposition to Manchukuo-
Japanese forces across the border.⁹²(Although this treaty violated Chinese sovereignty
in Outer Mongolia, which Moscow acknowledged, Moscow and the international com-
munity ignored Chinese protests.) The Anti-Comintern Pact was concluded against
this background of international alignment.
92 See Jakub Wojtkowiak, “Kontyngent Armii Czerwonej w Mongolii w latach 1936–1938.”Dzieje na-
jnowsze40, no. 3 (2008), 3–13. In fact, already in 1935 Moscow had sent a military detachment to the
Mongolian People’s Republic. See Ts. Batbaiar,Mongolia i Iaponiia v pervoi polovine xx veka(Ulan-Ude:
VSGAKI, 2002), 110.