68 Ë A Lull
the spy mania originated not in the Soviet period but well before the Bolsheviks ever
came to power in 1917. It was deeply rooted in the memory of the Tsarist rout in 1904–
05, and was already available for Stalin to exploit in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s
Kurds, Koreans, and those of many other national groups came to be suspected as
foreign spies.
The mutual suspicion of Japan and Russia often led to curious events. After the
war, Imperial Japanese Army Lieutenant Colonel Giichi Tanaka, whose work in the
Caucasus and Russia before the Russo-Japanese War was discussed in the previous
chapter, began providing con dential military information to the Russian military at-
taché in Tokyo, General V. K. Samoilov. Exactly when Tanaka began helping Samoilov
is unclear. It was certainly before the 1907 rapprochement between the two countries.
In late 1906, for Tanaka’s great contribution, Samoliov even recommended to the Rus-
sian government that he be decorated with an order.⁶⁶How much con dential infor-
mation did Tanaka reveal to the Russians, and why? Tanaka was author of the draft
on the top-secret “Imperial Defense Strategy” of 1907, which detailed Japan’s funda-
mental military strategies. Was this also leaked to Russia? No one knows. It is di cult
to believe Tanaka sold out his own country; he even became prime minister in the
1920s. Did he provide disinformation to Samoilov? Was he a crypto Russophile? Was
he blackmailed by Russians for some reason? Whatever Tanaka’s intention, he almost
certainly revealed too much. Immediately after his death in 1929, he was described as
the author of the infamous “Tanaka Memorial” of 1927, which, though apparently a
Soviet forgery, purportedly laid out Japan’s strategy to conquer Asia.
3.5 The Caucasus on the Eve of World War I
Meanwhile, Caucasian national political forces continued to ght against Russian
domination. As Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, Tsar’s viceroy in the Caucasus, wrote: “In
Central Russia the police are rarely forced to act against an armed mass, in the Cauca-
sus, constantly.”⁶⁷Tsarist oppression of national sentiments following Stolypin’s coup
in June 1907 further complicated the already complex relations in the Caucasus. Still,
Georgian, Armenian, Polish, Ukrainian, Finnish, and other nationally oriented politi-
cal groups managed to maintain contact and work together.⁶⁸When the long-standing
autonomy of Finland (the Grand Duchy of Finland) within the Russian Empire came
66 See P.E. Padalko,Iaponiia v sud’bakh Rossiian: Ocherki istorii tsarskoj diplomatii i rossiiskoi dias-
pory v Iaponii(Moscow: Kraft+, 2004), 96–98.
67 Quoted in Firouzeh Mostashari,On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus
(London-New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 106.
68 See, for example the testimony of Giorgi Laskhishvili,memuarebi (1885–1915)[Memoirs] (Tbilisi,
1934), 246–248.