Stalin, Japan, and the Struggle for Supremacy over China, 1894–1945

Front matter

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3 Rok it a k ay & fe i a |

Stalin was a master of deception, disinformation, and camouflage, by means of which he gained supremacy over China and defeated imperialism on Chinese soil. This book examines Stalin’s covert operations in his hunt for supremacy.

Contents

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List of Maps and Illustrations vii

Abbreviations, Transliterations, and Bibliographic References ix

Index

434 451 454 456

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List of Maps and Illustrations

Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin with his lieutenants, Viacheslav Molo- Ozaki Hotsumi, a Japanese journalist, political adviser, and Soviet'agent: AA IA Bt, Se AOS ke ee AN Richard Sorge, a German journalist and Soviet agent in Japan (1946) Wa ane WAAMUE UBU ee a eS Tanaka Rytkichi, a Japanese intelligence operative and suspected Soviétagent: nonas warae a Mab ee a a BS Karl Radek, a Polish-German-Soviet Bolshevik and Sinologist bra MA tices etc ted ete ets aes le Shr Omer de Gece Gena: BS diate ase Okawa Shūmei, a prominent Japanese nationalist ideologue Kuhara Fusanosuke, a pro-Soviet industrialist who had a secret Sun Yat-sen, co-founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party . . . Ataman Semenov, leader of Russian émigré community in

Trans-Siberian Railway at the time of the Russo-Japanese War

(map) a aba at dh ak IA AA a ae WAA a elie A French image of the Russo-Japanese War...

Inner Mongolia (map)... ooa Manchuria and Inner Mongolia between Russia and Japan

(1916) (map) ee Aa a aie ag ap KAE AA

Vasilii K. Bliukher, a Soviet military commander in the Far Fast, and Soviet marshals (1937) . . -oo o ee Mikhail Borodin, a Soviet adviser in China, in Wuhan (1927) . Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition (1926-28) (map). . . A scene after the bombing of Zhang Zuolin’s train (1) (1928)

vii viji

2.7 A scene after the bombing of Zhang Zuolin’s train (2) (1928) . 2.8 Naum I. Eitingon, now suspected as the organizer of Zhang 2.10 Cover page of Kanda Masatane’s secret report to Komoto Daisaku (1927) a nani aa oped YA EA aa

3.2 Wang Jiazhen, a Chinese diplomat who claimed to have ob- 3.4 Ishiwara Kanji, architect of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria 3.6 Eugene Chen or Chen Youren, a Chinese diplomat and admirer 3.9 Konstantin Iurenev, the Soviet ambassador to Japan (1933-37), under Soviet arrest iN 1937 . . . s ooo oeo a 3.10 Soviet book predicting war between Japan and USA (1933) . . 3.1 Nikolai Raivid, a Soviet diplomat and secret operative (1937)

4.2 Song Zheyuan, a military commander in north China 4.4 Dmitrii Bogomoloy, the Soviet ambassador to China (1933-37), 4.6 Soong Ching-ling, Sun Yat-sen’s widow, who worked as a secret GOmiIntern agent. a san pak da Ka haa E AAA 4.7. Kazami Akira, Premier Konoe Fumimaro’s chief cabinet secre- RAE bese eae Rye Rang ae ee Ao Soo SP 4.9 Prominent Chinese Communists, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai 4.10 Zhang Zhizhong, China’s military commander and secret CCP member IA acta b's eh tee Award a eed

51 Letter from Stalin and Voroshilov to Chiang (July 1939) 5.2 Sejima Ryuzo, a Japanese military official and suspected Soviet PCT AVC UA ie Sh Hh MIN ON BE GIR A Aegean. a KEN

Cı Yin Jukeng/Yin Rugeng, a Chinese politician accused and exe-

Abbreviations, Transliterations, and Bibliographic References

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1. Abbreviations

AAN, AVP, RGASPI, and other abbreviations for specific archives are listed, and their full names are spelled out in the Bibliography.

CCP: Chinese Communist Party (Communist Party of China)

CER: Chinese Eastern Railway (KVZhD in Russian)

Comintern: Communist International

FDR: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)

FER: Far Eastern Republic (1920-22)

GRU: Soviet military intelligence (Glavnoe razvedyvatel noe upravlenie)

IMTFE: International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1946-48)

JCP: Japanese Communist Party

KMT: Kuomintang/Guomindang or Chinese Nationalist Party

MPR: Mongolian People’s Republic

OKDVA: Soviet Special Far Eastern Army

SCAP: Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers

2. Transliterations

Russian and other languages that use one of the Cyrillic alphabets are romanized according to the Library of Congress systems. Chinese is romanized using the pinyin method, except for some familiar cases, such as Chiang Kai-shek (instead of Jiang Jieshi) and Taipei (instead of Taibei). Japanese is generally romanized according to the modified Hepburn system, except with a hyphen (-) instead of an apostrophe (°) after n before a vowel or y (e.g., Kan-icht).

3. Bibliographic references

The Bibliography provides full bibliographic information for every source cited in the footnotes. In each chapter, the first footnote citing a specific source provides the full citation, except for the name of the publisher. Subsequent footnotes citing that source use shortened citations.

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Introduction AZA

AFTER the successful Russian Revolution of 1917 and the failed revolutionary attempts in Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe over the next few years, the Soviet dictator Iosif V. Stalin (Joseph Stalin, 1878-1953) was determined to take the revolution to China. Almost all the world’s imperialist powers had a large stake in China. There Stalin faced the largest imperialist power, Great Britain, and the most ambitious one, Japan, a neighbor of both China and the Soviet Union. The United States, meanwhile, carefully monitored its stake in China so as not to lose out to other powers. Stalin’s greatest weapon in this struggle for control was to use China’s nationalism against these two imperialist powers. In the end, Britain came to accept Chinese nationalism, but Japan did not. Thus, by the 1930s, the competing interests of Soviet Communism and Japanese imperialism led to a momentous rivalry whose nature and geopolitical ramifications are still not fully understood to this day. To investigate this period properly requires a fresh understanding not only of the Soviet Union and Japan during this time but also of the United States—which under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) came down decisively on the Soviet side. In essence, this power struggle caused Stalin to turn to the United States as a proxy— and with a deft sleight of hand, to guide Japan toward self-destruction in China and thereby create an immediate backdrop for the victory of Communism in China in 1949. Meanwhile, at the end of World War II, Japan found itself at war with an unexpected foe in the Soviet Union, with whom it had deceived itself into believing it could have a political romance. This book examines the battle for supremacy in China, particularly between the Soviet Union and Japan, and investigates the secret histories of this period that those in the West and Asia alike have been content to leave hidden.

The genius of Stalin’s political strategy in China evolved during the long years of the Bolsheviks’ underground conspiratorial work before 1917, during which they developed a highly sophisticated art of disinformation, camouflage, and deception. During the revolution, they emerged as the sole ruling party and opened their ranks widely to mass membership. Nevertheless, the party’s political operations remained highly conspiratorial. Decision-making was confined to a narrow circle of individuals (the Politburo) and often to just the dictator—first Vladimir I. Lenin (1870-1924) and then Stalin. Although policy implementation

‘On the long struggle for hegemony in China, see Bruce A. Elleman, International Competttion in China, 1899-1991: The Rise, Fall, and Restoration of the Open Door Policy (London, 2015) and S.C.M. Paine, Wars for Asta, 1911-1949 (New York, 2014).

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Figure 1. Soviet dictator Stalin with his lieutenants, Viacheslav Molotov (left) and Voroshilov Kliment (right), 1937 was accompanied by mass campaigns, its actual mechanism was often opague, with hidden forces (the secret police) working behind the scenes. When it came to international politics and diplomacy, the Bolsheviks were necessarily constrained by foreign forces they could not control. The sense that the Soviet Union was surrounded by hostile capitalist countries, far mightier in economic power than the first socialist state, reinforced the Bolshevik conviction that any and all means were justified to fight against the enemy camp. From the earliest days of the Soviet government, its guiding principle was deception unhindered by any pretense of fair play—and deception that fully utilized all the might of espionage and counterespionage.” At the same time, the Bolsheviks disdained democracy as institutionalized deception of the masses based on hypocritical principles. Stalin had a stated affinity for Asia. He is known to have declared himself to be “Asiatic,” a “Russified Georgian-Asiatic,” and the like. As an avid reader, he was familiar with Asia, and although there is little evidence that his knowledge was substantial, he turned out to be a master of both ninjutsu (Bi)—the Japanese art of ninja (stealth, camouflage, and sabotage)—and jajutsu (Jti), a quintessentially Japanese martial art that attempts to use an opponent’s own

*For a good exploration of this subject, see Bruce A. Elleman, Diplomacy and Deception: The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, 1917-1927 (Armonk, NY., 1997).

force against him or her. It was precisely these stealth tactics that Stalin would use against Japan to defeat it resoundingly and gain hegemony in East Asia.

Asa military tactician, Stalin’s understanding of ninjutsu may well have been influenced by the famous dictum of Sun Tzu (Sun Zi, RF, ca. 544-496 BCE): “War is deception” (RA, Patt). In a March 1937 speech that he delivered shortly before Marshal Mikhail N. Tukhachevskii (1893-1937) and numerous other Red Army commanders were executed, Stalin declared:

To win a battle in war, several corps of Red Army soldiers may be needed, but to ruin the victory at the front a few spies will suffice somewhere in army headquarters or even in the division headquarters who can steal an operation plan and pass it to the enemy.’

For Stalin, deception was not simply a tool of war but also a guiding principle. Nor were these mere words. A strategy of deception was almost certainly a key element of his approach to Japan. Take for example the “small war” at Khalkhin Gol (also known as the Nomonhan Incident) in 1939, in which the Soviet Union and the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) defeated Japan and Manzhouguo (Manshtkoku in Japanese, a puppet state created in 1932 in Manchuria in northeastern China). Komatsubara Michitaré (SIE ABB, 1886-1940),* the commander of Japan’s main fighting unit, the Twenty-Third Division, was likely a Soviet agent.”

Likewise, in 1924 Stalin expressed his belief in jøjutsu quite clearly to China’s leader-to-be Chiang Kai-shek (Hf, Chiang Chung-cheng, Jiang Jieshi, 1887- 1975). According to Suzuki Teiichi (FA A—, 1888-1989), a China specialist in the Japanese Army who knew Chiang well, when Chiang asked Stalin for help in creating an army of fourteen divisions, Stalin apparently rebuffed him: “You don’t need excessive forces. The armed forces are the last resort. You must exhaust all other means to lead the enemy to collapse before using arms.” The commander of the Red Army, Lev D. Trotskii (1879-1940), and his deputy, E.M. Sklianskii (1892-1925), gave similar advice to Chiang: What mattered was not so much the size of a military force as the deployment of subversion behind enemy

IM, Stalin, Sochineniia (Stanford, CA, 1967), 1:219.

“Here and elsewhere, the name order is family name-given name for East Asians unless they refer to themselves in the Western order (given name followed by family name).

‘See Hiroaki Kuromiya,“The Mystery of Nomonhan, 1939,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 24, no. 4 (December 2011): 659-77. On the “honey trap” against him, see also A.G. Zorikhin, “Iapono-sovetskaia voina . . . dolzhna byt’ provedena kak mozhno skoree,” Voenno-istoricheskit zhurnal, no. 1 (2000): 54.

‘Quoted in Suzuki Teiichi, “Hokubatsu to Sho-Tanaka mitsuyaku,” Bessatsu chisei 5: himerareta Showashi, December 1956, 21-22. Although no record of Chiang’s meeting with Stalin has been found, it is possible that he did meet Stalin but deleted any mention of him later. See Yuan Nansheng, Sidalin Mao Zedong yu Jiang Jieshi (Changsha, 2003), 44; VKP(b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae. Dokumenty. T. 1. 1920-1925 (Moscow, 1994), 312-13.

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Figure 2. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s political leader, 1943 lines—a strategy that would weaken the enemy, which then could be crushed.” Undoubtedly, their advice reflected the view of the Soviet leadership as a whole. Here, too, Stalin, Trotskii, and Sklianskii may well have been influenced by one of Sun Tzu’s other famous dictums: “To break the enemy without fighting is the best of the best” (##kmi/ AZ, 2228). In the same vein, Stalin gave

Bulgarian Communists the following advice in 1948:

You should not be afraid of any “categorical imperative” regarding moral responsibility. We are not bound by any “categorical imperatives.” The key issue is the balance of forces. If you are strong, then strike a blow. If not, do not enter the fray. We agree to fight not when the adversary wants us to, but when it is in our interests to do so.”

In the 1930s, Stalin lured Japan ever deeper into China, used Chinese and U.S. forces to exhaust the Japanese military, and then in 1945 struck a coup de grace against Japan. It turned out to be a masterful stroke.

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This book makes bold claims about the history of the interwar struggle for supremacy over China: It was Stalin who had the Manchurian warlord Zhang

’VKP (b), Komintern i natsional ’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhente v Kitae, 280, 306-8. Chiang’s account is in Jiang Zhongzheng xiansheng nianpu changbian, ed. Lii Fangshang (Taipei, 2014), 1:226-27.

*Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, CT, 2003), 442-43.

Zuolin (5R/ER, 1875-1928) murdered in 1928 and blamed Japan for his assassination. With the ultimate aim of destroying Japan’s aggression on Chinese soil, Stalin induced Japan to invade Manchuria in 1931. To the same end, Stalin engineered the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937, which led to an all-out war between Japan and China. Simultaneously, Stalin engaged in provocative and diversionary activity to exhaust Japanese forces in China. For example, he was responsible for the major border clashes between Japan and the Soviet Union, beginning with the Kanchazu Incident (which took place just before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident) and ending with the Battles of Lake Khasan in 1938 and Khalkhin Gol in 1939. Perhaps above all, Stalin dictated how the world and history would understand the events, in large part because he took extraordinary measures to hide his hand. Even though it was the Soviet Union that in August 1945 broke the 1941 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and started a war against Japan, Moscow managed to secure a seat on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, which held Tokyo responsible for conflicts that Moscow had actually caused. This deflection of blame was Stalin’s tour de force.

Although this book radically reinterprets the history of interwar East Asia, it does notin any way absolve Tokyo for its crimes of aggression. Rather, it attempts to chart systematically Stalin’s hidden hand in the history of Japan’s aggression in Asia. Stalin engaged Japan with such skill and foresight that even now it is difficult to discern his presence.’ Virtually no credible account of Stalin’s covert actions has been written in Japan, China, or the West. The unfortunate result is that the world essentially repeats the Stalinist accounts of international history.” Moreover, although Japanese nationalist circles peddle conspiracy theories about the Soviet Union, China, and the United States on the flimsiest of evidence, what these circles fail to imagine is that their heroes, imperial Japanese radical nationalists, in fact worked with (and in some cases actually worked for) the Soviet Union in undermining the Anglo-American liberal world order that they insisted stood in the way of Japanese imperialism.

Although it is possible that some of the Japanese nationalists unwittingly carried out Stalin’s bidding, others consciously did so. Within this latter category, some Japanese nationalists were Soviet agents, while others were not; yet, they knowingly worked with the Soviet Union in the hopes of advancing the agenda of Japanese imperialism. The prominent journalist Ozaki Hotsumi (ERAR, 1901-1944), the right-hand man of the German journalist and now-infamous Soviet spy Richard Sorge (1895-1944), is well known to have been a Soviet agent and was executed for treason in 1941. Under the guise of being a patriotic nationalist, he penetrated the highest echelons of the Japanese government and

Even the latest Russian account of Stalin and the Far East has nothing new to say on the subject. See Oleg Mozokhin, Stalin i Dal’nit Vostok (Moscow, 2020).

“Even the most recent accounts of Stalin’s strategic moves in Eurasia make no substantive break with them. See for example Alfred J. Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia (Cambridge, 2015).

Figure 3. Ozaki Hotsumi, a Japanese journalist, political adviser, and Soviet agent, before 1940 made incalculable contributions to keeping Japan mired in China after 1937. In contrast, Komatsubara was almost certainly an unwilling collaborator. Having fallen into a “honey trap” while he was a military attaché in Moscow in the late 19208, he appears to have been blackmailed into working for Moscow." Kémoto Daisaku (WASAN, 1883-1955), an ultra nationalist, is widely believed to have been responsible for the assassination of Zhang Zuolin in 1928. He is also one of the men who engineered the Mukden Incident, Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Although K6moto confessed to Zhang’s murder and even published his confessions, there is substantial doubt about his part in the assassination. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow admitted that its secret services were, in fact, responsible for Zhang’s murder and that it had shifted the blame onto Japan. Although we cannot know for sure whether Komoto was a Soviet agent, we can at least say that he consciously collaborated with Soviet operatives. Chapter 2 discusses this case in detail. There are other similar collaborators, many of whom are discussed in the book. These men worked with Communist foes of Japanese imperialism because they had a common interest in fighting against a world order dominated by the West. Other figures are more difficult to understand, such as Tanaka Rytkichi (HHS, 1896-1972), an enigmatic Japanese intelligence officer involved in Japan’s numerous conspiratorial operations in China (most notably the spread of Japan’s military operations to Shanghai in early 1932). Russian historians have now acknowledged that Tanaka was a Soviet agent.” At the IMTFE after the war, Tanaka proved to be an invaluable asset for the prosecutors (including those from the Soviet Union). He incriminated his former army colleagues and later died after suffering a nervous collapse. The Russian acknowledgment does not necessarily prove that Tanaka was actually a Soviet agent—but if he was, many of the unaccountable Japanese operations in

"See Kuromiya, “Mystery of Nomonhan.”

“A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov, KGB. Prikazano likvidirovat’. Spetsoperatsti sovetsktkh spetssluzhb 1918-1941 (Moscow, 2004), 199. Their account includes inaccuracies that are discussed in Chapter 3.

Figure 4. Richard Sorge, a German journalist and Soviet agent in Japan, 1940 interwar China begin to make perfect sense. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore these cases in detail.

The fact that the Communist Bolsheviks sought out right-wing nationalists for subversive operations is not in the least surprising. They repeatedly made it clear that they were willing to work with the right under certain conditions. Here the Soviet-German collaborations in the 1920s and 1930s are particularly instructive. In 1923, a German nationalist and member of the paramilitary Freikorps (“Free Regiments”), Albert Leo Schlageter (1894-1923), was executed by the French military for sabotage in the French-occupied Ruhr. Karl B. Radek (1885-1939), a Polish-German-Soviet Bolshevik who would play a prominent role in the failed German revolutionary uprising in the autumn of 1923, came out in praise of Schlageter as “a courageous soldier of the counter-revolution” who “deserves to be sincerely honoured by us, the soldiers of the revolution.” In June 1923, Radek delivered a speech at a plenum of the Communist International (Comintern) Executive Committee:

But we believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to these masses. We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind; that they should not spill their hot, unselfish blood for the profit of the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their emancipation.

This truth the Communist Party will declare to the great masses of the German people, for it is not a party fighting for a crust of bread on behalf of the industrial workers, but a party of the struggling proletariat fighting for its emancipation, an emancipation that is identical

Figure 5. Tanaka Ryūkichi, a Japanese intelligence operative and suspected Soviet agent with the emancipation of the whole people, of all who toil and suffer in Germany. Schlageter himself cannot now hear this declaration, but we are convinced that there are hundreds of Schlageters who will hear it and understand it.”

Radek suggested that in opposing foreign capitalist forces, the Communists and nationalist patriots like Schlageter could find common political ground. Thus, for a brief period in 1923, joint nationalist-Communist actions did take place, and “posters with the Soviet star and swastika appeared together” in Germany.” Radek was keenly interested in German-Soviet cooperation. Already in 1919-1920, while sitting in a German jail after taking part in the failed revolutionary attempt, Radek was courted by Germans, including Heinrich Laufenberg

“Karl Radek, “Leo Schlageter—The Wanderer into the Void,” Labour Monthly 5, no. 3 (September 1923): 157. Radek’s speech was published with a preface by the journal’s editor, who said that it was “likely to become one of the historical documents of the European revolution” at the “very moment when fascism and Communism were on the point of coming to grips [sc] for the soul of the tortured German masses.” Ibid., 152.

“Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA, 2015), 196. This kind of Nazi-Communist hybridization was not uncommon in interwar Germany. For example, in 1931, Richard Scheringer (1904-86) famously defected from the Nazi Party and joined the German Communist Party; see Louis Dupeux, National bolchevisme. Stratégie communiste et dynamique conservatrice (Paris, 1979), 415, 565-68. Scheringer’s conversion led to a Communist campaign to recruit leftist Nazi members and the creation of “so-called ‘Scheringer Staffeln’ from units of the banned Rotfrontkémpferbund, whose members sported Soviet armbands with their SA uniforms.” See Timothy Scott Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists Between Authenticity and Performance (New York, 2009), 117, 182. The campaign was not too successful, with more people defecting from the Communist Party to the Nazi Party than the other way around. See Otto-Ernst Schiiddekopf, Nattonalbolschewismus in Deutschland 1918-1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 285. Nevertheless, the Communist interest in right-wing radicalism never ceased. Scheringer studied Russian in the Reichswehr and believed that from a military point of view, the Soviet Union was Germany’s ally. See his memoir, Das Grofe Los. Unter Soldaten, Bauern und Rebellen (Hamburg, 1959), 187-88, 226-27. Scheringer remained devoted to Communism for the rest of his life.

Figure 6. Karl Radek, a Polish- German-Soviet Bolshevik and Sinologist, 1925

(1872-1932) and Fritz Wolffheim (1888-1942), who sought to collaborate with Soviet Russia against the post-World War I order that the Treaty of Versailles had created in 1919. Radek was impressed by these German “National Bolsheviks,” and he and other Bolsheviks saw the potential for an alliance.” This sentiment certainly helped sustain the alliance established by the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, in which Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union stood together against the Versailles world order for a decade until 1932. Famously, the two countries secretly collaborated on military matters.

Even after Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) came to power in 1933, Radek courted Germany, certainly with Stalin’s approval. In 1934, he and Nikolai I. Bukharin (1888-1938), an old Bolshevik, met “Professor Oberlander,” a young National Socialist professor from the University of Königsberg who was visiting Moscow and was a “trusted friend” of Erich Koch (1896-1986), the East Prussian gauleiter (Nazi regional leader). Radek and Bukharin expressed their fulsome admiration for the “wonderful German people,” with Radek going so far as to say: “There are magnificent lads in the SA [Strumabteilung, storm troopers] and SS [Schutzstaffel, protection squadrons]. You'll see, the day will come when they'll be throwing hand grenades for us.” Radek and Bukharin also “expressed

“See Otto-Ernst Schiiddekopf, “Karl Radek in Berlin: Ein Kapitel deutsch-russischer Beziehungen im Jahre 1919,” Archiv fiir Sozialgeschichte 2 (1962): 101.

IO STALIN, JAPAN, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY OVER CHINA their firm conviction that the Nazi regime would collapse in economic and social crisis.” Within a few years, after they had rendered excellent service to Stalin, the Soviet dictator had both men killed for supposedly being German (as well as Polish and Japanese) “spies.”

In retrospect, the Molotoy-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 can be traced to Moscow’s peculiar infatuation with fascism.” In fact, Radek, who in the first half of the 1930s served as Stalin’s personal diplomat, repeatedly suggested that Moscow would be willing to work even with Nazi Germany in opposing the imperialist powers that dominated the world. Before Hitler came to power, Radek had predicted Hitler’s victory and did not rule out the possibility of Nazi-Soviet cooperation, although he regarded Hitler and the Nazis as “too politically stupid” (“politisch viel zu dumm”) to comprehend such a possibility.” In August 1934, Radek openly expressed his admiration for German students wearing the Nazi SA uniform and their willingness to sacrifice. He compared them to the young Communists in the Red Army and the Prussian volunteer forces who had fought against Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) in 1813. Radek insisted that Nazism was an “unwitting pacesetter of Communism” (“unfreiwilliger Schrittmacher des Kommunismus”). That same year, Radek told the German ambassador that Moscow would not do anything that would jeopardize the possibility of returning to a political rapprochement with Germany.” These remarks reflected Stalin’s political thinking at the time. Radek was extremely useful to Stalin, who allowed him to put out political feelers that Stalin himself could not or would not utter publicly. Culturally refined, pleasantly eccentric, and sharply cerebral, Radek possessed the rare verbal ability to express provocative and even taboo ideas with disarming charm and wit. For that reason, Radek’s remarks are an important guide to Stalin’s thinking.” Yet, Stalin viewed Radek as a loose

Gustav Hilger and Alfred G. Meyer, The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-History of German- Soviet Relations, 1918-1941 (New York, 1953), 268.

Certain philosophical and institutional affinities between fascism and Communism sustained relatively friendly relations between Italy and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and their political “rapprochement” in 1933-1934. See J. Calvitte Clarke III, Russia and Italy against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement of the 1930s (New York, 1991).

Ernst Niekisch, Evinnerun gen eines deutschen Revolutionars (Köln, 1974), 217. On Niekisch and “national Bolshevism,” see David-Fox, Crossing Borders, chap. 7.

Quoted in Deutschland und Sowjetunion 1933-1941. Dokumente aus russischen und deutschen Archiven. Bd. 1: 30 Januar 1933-31 Dezember 1934 (Oldenbourg, 2014), 1319. Some Nazis became covert but witting “pacesetters” of Soviet Communism. Walther Stennes (1895-1983), an SA officer who in 1930-1931 rebelled against Hitler’s “legalism,” was expelled from the Nazi Party, became Chiang Kai-shek’s bodyguard and personal intelligence man, and worked for the Soviet secret police under the code name Drug (Friend). See V.L. Peshcherskii, “Vrag moego vraga .. . ,” Voenno-tstoricheskit zhurnal, 1998, no. 3, 59-71; Jerrold Schecter and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Washington, DC, 2003), 15-16. For other cases of Nazis becoming Soviet agents, see Kurt Possanner von Ehrenthal (1898-1933) and Karl-Giinther Heimsoth (1899-1934), see Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi razvedki (Moscow, 1996), 2:181-195.

“See Jean-Francois Fayet, Karl Radek (1885-1939). Biographie politique (Bern, 2004), 685.

“However, Stalin almost certainly did not share the following ideas Radek expressed (but cannon who knew too much and spoke too much; once his political utility had been exhausted, Stalin had him killed in jail in 1939.”

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In tracing Radek’s work, we can see how the Bolsheviks carefully cultivated nationalists as political allies as a strategy to advance their Communist aims. It is no surprise, then, that their willingness to collaborate with nationalists became even more manifest in Asia. From the mid-1920s, when Sino-Soviet relations were normalized after the chaos caused by the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war (1918-20), Moscow subordinated the Chinese Communists to the hegemony of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang/Guomindang, or KMT RIR). This strategy was based on careful studies of Asia in general, and China in particular, where industry was embryonic and the proletariat small. Radek was an influential and knowledgeable figure among the Bolsheviks in Asian as well as European affairs. In 1909-1911, while living in Leipzig, he had studied the history of China (and international politics) and collected a vast number of maps,” suggesting an interest in geopolitics. Later, Radek became the founding president of the Sun Yat-sen Communist University of the Toilers of China, established in Moscow in 1925. His studious, diligent reading** and prolific writing show that he was also intimately familiar with Japan and its history.” Radek was an admirer of Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), a noted Japanologist and geographer who is considered the father of the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum (living space, the belief that Germany needed “living space” to survive) and who taught both Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess (1894-1987). Radek kept a copy of Haushofer’s book The Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean (Geopolitik des Pazifischen that Radek himself may not have believed in): “We actually do not work at all according to a ‘theory,’ do not have any ‘ideology,’ rather we have only an aim.” Quoted in Schtiddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus in Deutschland, 13.

The ever jocose Radek was one of those whom Stalin characterized as “slaves of their tongue— their tongues manage them.” With Radek, one could never know when and what his tongue was “liable to blurt out.” See Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin, Profiles in Power (Harlow, 2005), 63.