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 Despotism had been replaced by Communism, but there was little difference.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.
The Partition of Korea
The importance of Korea in the Soviet scheme of things was indicated by the haste with which Russian troops crossed the frontier on 12 August 1945, three days after the declaration of war. They were the vanguard of an army numbering a quarter of a million men led by General Ivan Chistyakov, a hero of the battle of Stalingrad.