Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism by Tatiana Linkhoeva (review)

Writing about stereotypes of Russia, historians and observers in Japan often point to the existence of two Russias in the minds of ordinary Japanese. The first is attractive, even fascinating: it is the Russia of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev, of beautiful nature and honest people. It is a Russia from which Japan has learned a great deal, inspiring the eminent historian Wada Haruki to call it "Russia as a Teacher." The second Russia is the "mysterious country" that the Japanese seemingly cannot fathom and hence find strange and scary. It is the "terrible Russia" (Roshia osoroshia), or, according to Wada, "Russia as an Enemy/Threat."¹

The protagonists of Tatiana Linkhoeva's Revolution Goes East also faced two Russias: one a nation like any other, with national interests and aspirations, a territory, and a people—in short, one that you could do business with. The other Russia was the Soviet Russia that was born to the Russian Revolution; it was built by Bolshevik revolutionaries to spark a global revolution and hence was not an ordinary nation-state. The first Russia had long been Japan's rival, the two nations having spent many decades in a contest for influence in East Asia before finally crossing swords in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Rivalry aside, this Russia could become Japan's partner, as the decade between 1907 and 1917 demonstrated. The new Russia that emerged from the ruins of the tsarist empire, however, was a different beast. To Japan's old apprehension about a powerful rival with vast territory and resources, the Russian Revolution of 1917 added the worry about dangerous ideology that threatened the very essence of the Japanese nation (kokutai).

This dilemma between the old Russia with a new ideology is at the center of Revolution Goes East, which is a study of Japanese responses to the challenge and promise of the Russian Revolution. The first of the book's two central claims is that in analyzing these responses, Western scholars have overestimated the importance of ideology. For Linkhoeva, geopolitics and geography were as important as ideology: "Western historians have considered anticommunism in imperial Japan as a given, without questioning its internal and external origins, its evolution as Soviet state building progressed, and nuances in interpretation of the Russian Revolution and Soviet communism within Japanese political, military, and intellectual elites" (p. 8). Linkhoeva claims, for example, that few Japanese leaders viewed communism as a menace to Japan around the time of the revolution, seeing it as a product of foreign—primarily German—propaganda, and the Bolshevik rule in Russia as a temporary phenomenon. Even after it became clear the Bolsheviks were there to stay, and the image of Russia as a source of "dangerous thought" became entrenched in 1920s Japan, there remained pragmatic leaders who made the distinction between the activities of the world communist party, the Comintern, and the interests of the Soviet nation-state.

The book's second claim is that, while communism did not really have a chance in Japan, the Japanese left—insofar as one can talk of one, unified left—had only itself to blame for losing the fight for Japan's future in the 1920s. This was because for all their attraction in Japan, leftist ideas "were stymied by a simultaneous commitment to the nation and the national community" among Japanese liberals and some leftists (p. 10). To this reviewer, this claim is illustrated best in chapter 7 on the life and thought of Takabatake Motoyuki, the leader of Japanese state socialists.

Linkhoeva's book thus aims to revise long-standing notions in Anglophone scholarship on the Russian factor in Japanese politics and society, providing a much-needed reevaluation of existing—and rather outdated—scholarship on the Japanese left in the interwar period. It largely delivers on its promise, filling in the blanks of a topic that has long looked like a patchwork in the English...