The Expansion of War Ë 183
decision had its rationale: compared with the south, the Soviet Far East appeared too
barren to secure the life-lines of the Japanese war machine.
By mid-October 1941, Stalin came to be reasonably certain that Japan, planning to
strike the United States, would not attack the Soviet Union in the near future. Moscow
had received a number of con dential reports from spies placed high in the Japanese
establishment. This allowed Stalin to transfer from the Far East eight divisions of So-
viet military forces to ght against the Germans in the West. Such transfers had taken
place before, but this was the largest and most decisive.⁴⁹These forces helped Stalin
defend Moscow from the German onslaught. Of course, there was no guarantee that
Japan would not attack the Soviet Union in case the situation changed, and indeed
Japan retained such plans. Moscow was therefore forced to continue to maintain con-
siderable forces in the Far East even at the direst moment of the war against Germany
in the West. Meanwhile, Japan attacked the United States on 7/8 December 1941 (Pearl
Harbor), and the war thus spread to the Paci c.
Clearly Germany’s war against the Soviet Union emboldened the Caucasian émi-
grés, whereas Japan’s war against the United States mattered little to them. The sit-
uation had altered dramatically from that of the period after the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact: for the Caucasian émigré groups Japan was virtually out and Germany was de -
nitely in.
In the Soviet Caucasus, the specter of armed uprising was already present even be-
fore the German attack. In 1940, for example, Hasan Israilov (“Terloev”), a Chechen
barrister, openly broke with Soviet power and took control of parts of Southern Chech-
nia. In February of that year, the insurgents set up the Provisional People’s Revolu-
tionary State of Chechnia-Ingushetia. Although by the beginning of 1941, the area had
been retaken by Soviet forces,⁵⁰between January and 22 June 1941, there were thirty-
one cases of insurgencies in Chechnia and Ingushetia.⁵¹
After the German attack in June 1941, the specter of insurgency in the Caucasus
became a nightmare for the Soviet government. The day the war broke out, Chechen
insurgents declared war against the Soviet government in the name of the Chechen
people.⁵²It appears that in Chechnia and Ingushetia, roughly ninety percent of men
49 See V.M. Petrenko, “Dal’nevostochnyi front nakanune i v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny
1941–1945 gg.”Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal2010, no. 10, 21.
50 S.S. Magamadov and S.A. Kislitsyn,Politicheskaia vlast’ i povstancheskoe dvizhenie na Severnom
Kavkaze. Ocherki istorii 1920–1930-kh gg.(Rostov-na-Donu: Iuzhno-Rossiiskii institut- lial RANKh i GS
pri Prezidente RF, 2011), 301 and Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’,” 293–94. For the
political situation in the Caucasus at the time, see a rsthand account by a Chechen who defected to
the West, though an account not always reliable: Aleksandr Uralov (A. Avtorkhanov),Narodoubiistvo
v SSSR. Ubiistvo chechenskogo naroda(Munich, Svobodnyi Kavkaz, 1952).
51 See V.P. Galitskii, “Velikaia otechestvennaia voina 1941–1945 gg. ‘... dlia aktivnoi podryvnoi diver-
sionnoi deiatel’nosti v tylu u Krasnoi Armii’.”Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal2001, no. 1, 18.
52 See Georges Mamoulia,Gruzinskii legion v bor’be za svobodu i nezavisimost’ Gruzii v gody Vtoroi
mirovoi voiny(Tbilisi: private publication, 2007), 277.