The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

Conclusion Ë 201

served in Turkey until the end of the war and died in Japan in 1957.) Bezhan Giorgadze,

working for the Caucasus group, was arrested crossing the Iranian-Azerbaijan border

by Soviet border guards in July 1938. Although released from captivity in 1944 under

an agreement with the Soviet secret police, he was not trusted by the police, and was

arrested again in 1951, and sentenced the following year to twenty ve years in the

Gulag. Released in 1957 after Stalin’s and Beria’s deaths, he worked for the Institute

of History at the Georgian Academy of Sciences in Tbilisi, where he translated many

works from Latin, French, Italian, and Portuguese into Georgian. He died in Georgia

in the 1980s.¹⁸

History is rife with irony. Poland’s fate was much too familiar to the Caucasians.

Even though Britain and France went to war against Nazi Germany to protect Poland,

ultimately they sacriced it. In October 1944 in Moscow, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, prime

minister of the Polish government in exile (in London), was shocked to learn that

Britain and the United States had let Stalin have his way over the future territory of

Poland (the demarcation of Poland and the Soviet Union along the Curzon line). In

response to Mikołajczyk’s protest, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said,

If you think you can conquer Russia, well, you are crazy, you ought to be in a lunatic asylum.

You would involve us in a war in which twenty-ve million lives might be lost. You would be

liquidated. You hate the Russians. I know you hate them. We are very friendly with them, more

friendly than we have ever been. I mean to keep things like that. I tell you, we’ll become sick and

tired if you continue arguing. We shall tell the world how unreasonable you are. We shall not part

friends.¹⁹

As an Englishman present at the exchange observed, “This was not diplomacy. Nor did

it intimidate Mikolajczyk.”²⁰The Caucasus fared worse than Poland because its claims

were not even considered by the Great Powers. István Deák once said of Hungary’s

experience of World War II: “In Hungary, at least, one of the things history teaches

Hungarians is that it is a terrible mistake to be a small country in Central Europe.”²¹

This was also a lesson the Caucasians learned.

No small country itself, Japan was nonetheless small by comparison. Well before

the Pacic War began, the Great Powers (particularly the Soviet Union and the United

States) formed a united front covertly against a power (Japan) bent on subverting West-

ern colonial rule in Asia. To preserve their interests, they contained the only Asian

power capable of challenging them and ended up preserving the largest Asian em-

pires (China and the Soviet Union) intact. It was only after China was taken over by

18 See the le of B.G. Giorgadze, Archive of the Ministry of Internal Aairs of Georgia (Tbilisi).
19 Churchill Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965(Boston, 1966),
214–15.
20 Churchill Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran, 215.
21 István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds.,The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II
and Its Aftermath(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 68.