Conclusion Ë 199
nied the existence of famine.⁷There is also testimony that he regularly reported to
the Soviet secret police in the 1930s.⁸Roosevelt also mobilized the services of Armand
Hammer, who, it is now widely believed, was a Soviet agent, or at least an agent of
in uence for the Soviet government, working as its mouthpiece in the United States.⁹
Ostensibly Roosevelt’s rationale was that recognizing the Soviet Union would
boost trade and help improve an American economy still reeling from the Great De-
pression. Yet his real reason was to use the Soviet Union to oset Japan’s growing
power in the Far East.¹⁰In 1934, Karl Radek, who was serving as Stalin’s personal
diplomat, frankly stated that Moscow’s intention was to sabotage US-Japanese rela-
tions.¹¹Thus, Japan was at the center of the American-Soviet rapprochement, a point
almost universally neglected by historians of the Soviet Union. After Japan started a
full-scale war against China in 1937, Moscow and Washington secretly consulted with
each other and together helped China against Japan.¹²
Confronted by a perceived “siege” by the Great Powers, Japan became disoriented.
Stalin aptly noted in 1939:
As a result of the now two-year-old war with China which hasn’t been won, Japan has lost its
balance and has begun to get nervous and act out of gear, now attacking Britain, now the Soviet
Union, and now the People’s Republic of Mongolia. Its action has no reason. This has revealed
Japan’s weakness. Its conduct may unite all others against it.¹³Moscow made every eort to use the United States against Japan, and Washington
did not betray Moscow’s expectations.¹⁴Ultimately, Japan decided to engage militarily
with the United States instead of the Soviet Union. It was a huge boon for Stalin and
a big disappointment to Soviet émigrés and Germans alike.
7 See S.J. Taylor,Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in Moscow(New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990).
8 Carl Blumay and Henry Edwards,The Dark Side of Power: The Real Armand Hammer(New York:
Simon & Schunster, 1992), 48.
9 Blumay and Edwards,The Dark Side of Power, 48.
10 On the United States, see Beatrice Farnsworth, William C. Bullitt and the Soviet Union
(Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1967), ch. 5; on the Soviet Union, see Stalin’s
coded telegram on Litvinov’s visit to the United States, RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 82, l. 43, and the
Politburo directive to Maksim Litvinov (25 October 1933), f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, l. 119.
11 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 792, l. 1.
12 For the secret US-Soviet consultations over China and against Japan, see Pavel Sudoplatov,Raznye
dni tainoi voiny i diplomatii. 1941 god(Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2001), 150.
13 Zhonghua min guo zhong yao shi liao chu bian—dui Ri kang zhan shi qi. Di 3 bia, Zhan shi wai jiao
(Taipei: Jing xiao zhe Zhong yang wen wu gong ying she, 1981), 425.
14 For details, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, “The Promethean Movement and Japan’s Diplomacy,” inRuch
Prometejski i walka o przebudowę Europy Wschodniej (1918–1940), ed. by Marek Kornat (Warsaw: In-t
Historii PAN, 2012), 144–45.