When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near; When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise, When he veils the hate and cunning of his little swinish eyes; When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer, That is the time of peril--the time of the Truce of the Bear!

Following the Sino-Japanese War, the truce between Russia and Japan in “independent” Korea was broken by both nations whenever a favorable opportunity arose. Both of them intrigued constantly at Seoul. For a time, indeed, the Korean government was directed from the Russian legation with the backing of Russian troops.

Twice, in 1896 and 1898, Russia and Japan signed agreements reaffirming Korea’s independence and promising anew to withdraw their forces. These pacts were promptly violated by both contestants for power, but Japan prepared more realistically for the forthcoming struggle. On a February night in 1904, without the formality of a declaration of war, a Japanese squadron attacked the Russian warships anchored at Port Arthur. This surprise blow was followed shortly by the landing of Japanese troops at Chemulpo. They advanced to the frontier and defeated the Russians in the battle of the Yalu--a victory that has been compared with the battle of Valmy in the French Revolution as a landmark of history.

Certainly the West was made aware that an Oriental nation had risen to the stature of a world power for the first time in modern history. The value of Korea as a strategic springboard was demonstrated when Japanese land and sea forces isolated the fortresses on the Liaotung Peninsula. Port Arthur fell after a bloody siege of 6 months. Next, the Japanese invaders of Manchuria defeated an army of 350,000 Russians and inflicted 150,000 casualties in the four-week battle of Mukden. This was the decisive clash on land; and in the one-sided naval battle of Tsushima, Admiral Togo annihilated the Baltic fleet which the Czar had ordered on the long voyage to the Pacific.

The end came abruptly in the summer of 1905. In the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on 5 September, Russia ceded the southern part of Sakhalin Island to the victors while recognizing their “paramount” interests in Korea. All rights in the Liaotung Peninsula went to Japan as well as important concessions in Manchuria. Not much was left to Russia in the Far East except a precarious foothold in northern Manchuria.

Korea as a Japanese Colony

For 5 years Japan kept up a pretense of a protectorate in Korea. Then, in 1910, came outright annexation.

Europe’s “balanced antagonisms” soon flared up in World War I, leaving Japan free to exploit Korea as a colony. Western observers might have noted such evidences of modernization as new docks, railroads, factories and highways. But they were administered by Japanese overseers as Koreans sank to the level of coolies without a voice in the government.

Although Japan joined the fight against the Central Powers in World War I, her military efforts were made against allies as well as enemies. Using Korea as a beachhead, she attempted to enlarge her empire on the Asiatic mainland at the expense of Russia, then in the throes of revolution. Three years after the Armistice, a Japanese army still occupied the Vladivostok area; but the United States took such a firm diplomatic stand that Tokyo backed down.

This retreat was only a postponement. During the next decade Japan set up a strategic shield to the east and south by fortifying the mandated islands of the Pacific, awarded to her after the war. Treaties and agreements were violated whenever convenient, and in 1931 she turned westward again to satisfy her appetite for Russian and Chinese territory.

The time was well chosen. With the Western nations in the depths of an industrial depression, Japan began a series of aggressions against the Chinese in Manchuria. The gains were consolidated in a puppet state known as Manchukuo, comprising a fertile and populous area as large as California. China was unable to offer much resistance, and Soviet Russia could not risk a major war in the Far East. Even so, some of the Soviet border clashes with the Japanese in time of “peace” were actually battles fought with tanks and planes.

In 1937 came the Japanese invasion of China proper. Germany and Italy were launching aggressions of the same stamp in Europe and Africa, and the world was to know little stability until all three totalitarian states had been crushed in World War II.

Soviet Russia had a grim struggle for survival while resisting the full tide of Nazi invasion. But at the time of the Yalta Conference, Stalin was in a position to ask a stiff price for military aid in the Pacific. The United States agreed that the Port Arthur area and southern Sakhalin should be returned to Russia to redress the “wrongs” of 1905. Concessions were also made in Manchuria and outer Mongolia.

Stalin, for his part, consented to sign a treaty of friendship with Nationalist China as an ally of the United States. Later events made it evident that he had no intention of keeping his pledges. On the contrary, Soviet policy already visioned a Communist empire in the Far East which would include China as well as Korea.

The Yalta Agreement was stridently criticized in the United States after Stalin’s duplicity became apparent. But the War Department took a realistic view as early as the spring of 1945:

“The concessions to Russia on Far Eastern matters which were made at Yalta are generally matters which are within the military power of Russia to obtain regardless of United States military action short of war.... The Russians can, if they choose, await the time when United States efforts will have practically completed the destruction of Japanese military power and can then seize the objectives they desire at a cost to them relatively much less than would be occasioned by their entry into the war at an early date.”[4]

[4] U. S. War Dept memo for Acting Sec of State, 21 May 45, quoted in Joseph C. Grew, _Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 2:1457–1458.

This was precisely what happened. Moscow waited to declare war until 8 August 1945--6 days before the imminent collapse of Japan. Soviet forces fought only a few actions in Siberia with a Japanese army stripped of planes for home defense. As a consequence, Russian propagandists found it hard to paint a convincing picture of “the heroic deeds of our brave Far Eastern warriors.”[5] Obviously they had met little resistance while overrunning Manchuria and northern Korea to accept the surrender of nearly 600,000 Japanese troops, including 148 generals. These prisoners were sent to Siberia for years of servitude; and the “conquerors” despoiled Manchuria of heavy machinery, turbines, dynamos and rolling stock.[6]

[5] David J. Dallin, Soviet Russia and the Far East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 213.

[6] Ibid., 214, 244. Such seizures were in violation of international law, of course, and Soviet Russia had pledged the prompt repatriation of Japanese prisoners at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.

The value of this booty has been estimated at a billion dollars, and the forced labor of Japanese war prisoners during the next 5 years was worth at least another billion. Not satisfied with these spoils, Moscow also demanded a share in the occupation of Japan. This design was balked by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, supreme Allied commander, who made it plain that he needed no such assistance.[7]

[7] Ibid., 214, 239.

Even after the guns fell silent, there was no peace. One enemy had been exchanged for another, since Soviet Russia took advantage of war-weary allies to follow in the footsteps of Germany and Japan. There was the same familiar pattern of encroachment both in Europe and the Far East. There were the same violations of treaties, the same unfriendly acts falling just short of hostilities. The cold war had begun.

Oppression at home and aggression abroad--this had been the policy of Russia’s czars, and it became the policy of Russia’s dictators. Despotism had been replaced by Communism, but there was little difference. Communism proved to be an old tyranny presented as a new ideology, and Joseph Stalin succeeded where Nicholas II failed. Circumstances were kinder to Stalin, and he gobbled up territory in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Rumania, Mongolia and Manchuria.

Never before had one man ruled so much of the earth’s surface. Yet there was something neurotic and fear-ridden about the Kremlin’s outlook which success could not cure. It has long been a historical theory that this psychosis may be traced back to Russia’s bondage in the Middle Ages under the Mongols and Tartars. At any rate, victory and enormous spoils did not give Moscow a sense of security in 1945. Buffer state was piled upon buffer state, and thousands of World War II prisoners were enslaved behind the “iron curtain” to build new Soviet military installations.