Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism

Abstract

As the spectre of armed defeat drew near in 1945, renowned philosopher Nishida Kitarō mused to Marquis Hosokawa Morisada on his view that in the post-war Japan would be Sovietised: ‘I think that Japan’s true shape more resembles the Soviet system than capitalism’ (Hosokawa 1953: 340). The hope among important segments of the ruling elite in the final phase of Japan’s Greater East Asia War for Moscow’s mediation has too commonly been dismissed by historians as a sign of how desperate the war situation had become, rather than part of a deep and layered history that antedated the war. Tatiana Linkhoeva unsettles these conventional assumptions, making a series of far-reaching historiographical interventions which reframe the empire’s relations with Soviet Russia, anticommunism, and the Japanese Left. Revolution Goes East offers a striking counter narrative of the impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution on Japan, tethering together the geopolitical and intellectual worlds. Theoretically circumspect, rich in detail, and superbly documented, this work of historical imagination is anchored in the extraordinary period of the 1920s when Soviet Russia was the crucible of Japanese political thinking about the state, economy, and empire. The proclamation of the revolution in 1917 served as an inflexion point for Japan’s political, military, and intellectual worlds. Was Soviet Russia a conventional state—a cynical great power and heir of the Tsarist state—whose interests were determined by its permanent geography and interstate competition? Or was it a radically new and predatory actor seeking to replace the state system?