202 Ë Conclusion
communists that the Western powers began questioning China’s occupation of non-
Han lands (particularly Tibet and Xinjiang).
There is another important irony in the outcome of Japan’s long engagements
against the Russian Empire and Soviet Union in which the Caucasus played a vital
role. Once the Cold War started, the United States borrowed heavily from Japan’s ex-
perience. In the 1930s Japan, Germany, and Poland, all seeing the Soviet Union as
an enemy, devised strategies to dismember it. Of these, Japan’s plan was the oldest
and grandest. Nazi racist ideology prevented Germany from fully exploiting the Soviet
Union’s national minorities living on the periphery of the country. Poland, meanwhile,
raised a serious political challenge to the Soviet Union in the form of the Promethean
movement, and worked with Japan to devise plans to utilize the ethnic Ukrainians
living in the Soviet Far East (see p. 144). Yet Poland could not cover all parts of the
Soviet Union, especially in Asia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan cov-
ered most of the Eurasian periphery more broadly, a truly Eurasian scheme. But while
it must have expended enormous resources, both human and material, in the end it
proved too small a match for its gigantic neighbor. The United States, on the other
hand, a country with vast resources, adopted Japan’s old Eurasian strategies during
the succeeding years of the Cold War.
It is well known that after World War II the United States recruited many of the Ger-
man spies and specialists of the Caucasus and Soviet Union.²²Less known is that the
United States also recruited many former Japanese intelligence o cers after Japan’s
surrender.²³During the war Washington had secretly studied Japan’s work with the
peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia,²⁴and after the war it sought Japanese ex-
pertise. Thus, the Americans emulated, re ned, and expanded Japan’s use of the Cau-
casus and the Muslim world as a “citadel against Communism” during the Cold War.²⁵
22 See, for example, the classic work by Hermann Zolling and Heinz Höhne,Pullach intern: General
Gehlen und die Geschichte des Bundesnachrichtendienstes(Hamburg: Homann u. Campe, 1971), and
Jerey Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4.”Journal of
Contemporary History42, no. 2 (2007), 309–313.
23 See, for example, Tetsuo Arima,Daihonei sanbo ha sengo nani to tatakattanoka ̄ (Tokyo:
Shinchosha, 2010) and Mikio Haruna, ̄ Himitsu no fairu: CIA no tainichi kosaku ̄ (Tokyo: Ky ̄od ̄o
tsushinsha, 2000). ̄
24 See United States O ce of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch no. 890.2,Japanese
Attempts at In ltration among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands(Washington, D.C.: Dept. of State
O ce of Intelligence Research, 1944).
25 See Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nation-
alism and World Power, 1900–1945.”The American Historical Review109, no. 4 (2004), 1169.