Soviet Russia in the Pacific

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the Soviet government’s efforts to spread the ideology of communist revolution in Asia, and then to establish the USSR as a more conventional Pacific great power. The discussion traces events in the immediate post-revolutionary period, when a Far Eastern Republic was established and Japan invaded Russian territory; the period following World War II when Joseph Stalin attempted but failed to realize fully his ambitions for Soviet expansion into China, Japan, and Korea; tensions with China and the Far East military buildup under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev; concluding with Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms of the late 1980s. Soviet influence in the Asia Pacific was constrained by geopolitical realities, political institutions, economic practices, and foreign policy norms, many of which can be traced back to pre-revolutionary times. Key limiting factors included the Kremlin’s preoccupation with military power, a perception of the Russian Far East as a distant and vulnerable frontier, the autarkic and flawed economic model of central planning, Soviet inability to find a niche within the Asian economic miracle, and the traditional Russian position as a land power centered on the Eurasian continent.