Introduction
While on a tour of remote parts of Tibet and Central Asia in 1935, the British journalist and travel writer Peter Fleming came across an anti-imperialist poster depicting a fat and oafish fisherman (Japan) transferring a fish (Mongolia) from his hook into a basket that already contained a flaccid fish (Manchukuo).Footnote 1 After the so-called Manchurian Incident of 1931, Japanese forces had occupied Manchuria, renaming it the ‘independent’ state of Manchukuo in February 1932. However, in reality Manchukuo was under Japan's control, with Japanese military officers placed in crucial policy decision-making positions.Footnote 2 Manchukuo was not only contiguous to parts of northern China, such as Inner Mongolia, but it also bordered the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR)—or Outer Mongolia as it was frequently called at the time. The Japanese might have thought they would be able to deal easily with the local warlords and the Nationalist Chinese forces and government in the northern areas of China. But, by turning their focus further north onto Mongolia, increasingly they were to find themselves coming into conflict with a tougher opponent, the Soviet Union, which not only partly bordered the new state of Manchukuo, but also viewed Mongolia as strictly within its sphere of influence.
Mongolia in the 1930s was a vague concept, with ethnic Mongols spread across Inner and Outer Mongolia as well as western Manchuria and Siberia (where they were known as Buryat Mongols). A sparse population, limited natural resources, poor agricultural land, and borders which crossed mountains, deserts, forests, and shifting rivers created a region that was geographically and politically only vaguely defined. After the fourteenth-century collapse of the great Mongol empire, uncertainty reigned in the Mongolian heartlands until the seventeenth century when the Russians began to encroach from the west and the Chinese Qing dynasty intervened to establish control over most of the region. Uncertainty about the precise wording and scope of the various treaties concluded between the expanding tsarist Russia and the declining Chinese Qing dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sowed the seeds for disputes and led to differing interpretations of boundaries by the nineteenth century.
By the end of that century, Japan had joined in the struggle to carve out spheres of interest. For the Japanese, past historical interactions coupled with the mythology of a shared ethnic origin underpinned their strategic ambitions in the Mongolian area.Footnote 3 In the twentieth century, therefore, the ambiguity of Sino-Russian demarcations provided justification, or excuses, for attempts by both the Japanese and the Russians in turn to ‘determine’ the frontiers and extend their influence. To use the words of Japanese War Minister Araki Sadao in 1933, this was indeed an ‘ambiguous area’ which, from Japan's perspective, should not ‘be preyed upon by other countries’.Footnote 4
The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 provided an opportunity for the Mongols to declare independence; however, Russia and Japan had already begun drawing up secret treaties and continued to bring these to a conclusion, with the 1907 and 1910 agreements followed up by others in 1912 and 1916. These treaties aimed at reducing Chinese influence, while allowing little space for Mongolian autonomy. It was to be another decade before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the subsequent civil war provided opportunities for real independence. In 1921 Bolshevik soldiers combined with Mongolian partisans to drive out the invading White Russian forces who had earlier defeated Chinese forces. This led to the creation of a ‘people's government’ in July 1921. In November of that year a friendship agreement was signed with the Soviet government, and three years later, in November 1924, the MPR was formally established.Footnote 5
However, the Soviet Union was playing a double game, for it also wanted to placate the Chinese. Thus in the 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement, which established diplomatic relations, the Soviet Union acknowledged that ‘Outer Mongolia is an integral part of the Republic of China and respects China's sovereignty therein.’ Even though all Soviet troops were withdrawn from Mongolia in January 1925, close military links were in fact secretly maintained between the Soviet Union and the MPR.Footnote 6 As Josef Stalin consolidated control over the Soviet political system in the second half of the 1920s, he also endeavoured to extend Soviet ideological influence over the neighbouring MPR, which in effect abandoned the historical Chinese ‘order’ for the new internationalist Soviet model.Footnote 7 The MPR government, with Soviet guidance, began a process of trying to create a ‘socialist’ society, which was an onerous task given the primarily agrarian and underdeveloped nature of the economy. However, while the Soviets achieved significant success in eliminating Chinese influence from the MPR, regardless of the formal legal terms of the Sino-Soviet treaty, the early 1930s were to a bring a new, more militarily threatening challenge to the Soviets’ relationship with the MPR.
This article examines the increasing contact and growing friction in the early/mid-1930s between the Soviet Union and Japan over Mongolia, which was to culminate in the Soviets signing the 1936 Mutual Assistance Protocol with the MPR. Signed in early March 1936, but not made public until a month later, this agreement marked a significant step in the Soviet Union's efforts to dissuade the Japanese from advancing north. Although the existence of this agreement was known at the time, the recent availability of Russian, Mongolian, and Japanese archival sources as well as newly published research provides greater clarity about the policies and motives of the various players in this particular version of the ‘Great Game’. The prolonged battle of Nomonhan, fought out in several phases over four months in mid-1939 on Mongolian and Manchukuoan territory, but involving primarily Soviet and Japanese forces, was one of the key conflicts to occur on the eve of the Second World War. As such, it has received much scholarly examination.Footnote 8 But it was the events and actions of 1935–1936—when the first overt signs of Japanese ambitions to extend direct control into Mongolian areas and the formal expression of Soviet determination to protect its satellite state became apparent—that actually laid the groundwork for that later clash.
Social science, and in particular international relations, literature utilizes a number of terms for describing close relations between individual, often contiguous, states in which one state is dominant over another, even while the latter is nominally independent. While the term ‘puppet state’ is frequently employed in popular media discourse, academic analysis tends to use either ‘buffer state’ or ‘satellite state’. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes between a buffer state as ‘a small neutral country situated between two larger hostile countries and serving to prevent the outbreak of regional conflict’ and a satellite state as ‘a small country or state which is politically or economically dependent on another’. However, at least in the case of Cold War relations between the Soviet Union and the Central and East European states—for whom the term ‘satellite state’ is widely used as a descriptor—a degree of ideological allegiance is also a basic criterion. Although in the Asian context Afghanistan in the nineteenth century and North Korea in the second half of the twentieth century might conceivably qualify as buffer states, the MPR can be considered as a prime example of a satellite state. The MPR, while clearly not small in a geographical sense, qualifies in power-politics terms because of its sparse population and limited resources. Sandwiched as it was between three states hostile to each other by the mid-1930s, it was not neutral but strongly dependent on, and ideologically aligned, with just one of those states. This article will argue that despite Soviet efforts to generally characterize the MPR as a ‘fraternal state’ (implying equality) and, occasionally, through comments by officials and diplomats, as a ‘buffer state’ (whether against the Chinese or the Japanese), in reality the Soviet Union considered the MPR to be its ‘satellite state’ and worked hard in the 1930s to ensure that this remained the case.
The Manchuria-Mongolia problem
The establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Soviet Union in 1925 did little more than formalize a rather cool relationship. Relations between the Russians and Japanese had been uneasy since the 1850s, with territorial issues at the foreground of the fluctuating relationship over subsequent decades. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was a humiliating defeat for the Russians and was an enduring wound on nationalist pride. Memories of Japan's intervention in Siberia during the post-1917 civil war and subsequent efforts to subvert the Soviet-sponsored Far Eastern Republic were added later.Footnote 9 Even though the 1925 Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention recognized the existence of the pre-1917 Russo-Japanese treaties, it left their revision to some unspecified future. This gave the Soviets hope that they might have curbed Japanese ambitions over Mongolia, but they nevertheless remained wary of Japanese ‘machinations’ in Manchuria.Footnote 10 In the 1930s, these suspicions were augmented as Japan replaced China as the focus of Soviet strategic thinking about Northeast Asia.
In the two decades after the Russo-Japanese War, the majority of Japanese opinion, both civilian and military, had supported the ‘special rights and interests’ gained in the Manchurian area and the ‘importance of securing, maintaining, and expanding Japanese interests’ in southern Manchuria and the eastern part of Inner Mongolia.Footnote 11 Those voices within Japan that called for a solution to the so-called Manchuria-Mongolia problem (‘Manmo’ or manmo mondai), as it became known, always included Manchuria but were deliberately vaguer about what was meant by the Mongolian part of the equation. There was often ‘no clear definition of what precise area was encompassed’.Footnote 12 Initially Manchuria was the focus of Japanese attention. The September 1931 Mukden Incident, staged by the Japanese military, provided the excuse for Kwantung Army forces to move into Manchuria and later, in early 1933, into the neighbouring Chinese province of Jehol. The new administration decided to reconstitute part of western Manchuria and the northern part of Jehol into a new Mongolian province of Hsingan (Xingan), and it thereby became one of the five provinces of the newly created Manchukuo state. The principle of harmony between the five races within Manchukuo (which included Mongols) had previously been advocated by certain Manchuria-based Japanese groups but was taken up by the Kwantung Army as a pan-Asianist propaganda justification for the creation of Manchukuo. The Mongol-dominated Hsingan development was seen by the Japanese military as a means both to counter Chinese nationalism in the area and to potentially win the support of neighbouring Inner Mongolian princes and, conceivably, remaining conservative elements within the MPR.
However, initially the Inner Mongolian princes were not very responsive to these approaches from Manchukuo. Instead, during 1933–1934 an autonomy movement, led by Prince Teh (Demchugdongrub in Mongolian) from Chahar province, who for months had been trying to found a Pan-Mongolian self-rule movement, concentrated on extracting concessions from the Chinese government in Nanjing. After protracted negotiations, in April 1934 a political council was set up. It was authorized by the Nanjing government to coordinate Mongolian affairs in the three Chinese provinces earlier created out of Inner Mongolia, and it was with this organization that the Japanese then tried to cultivate links.Footnote 13 During 1935, Chinese influence in the region was weakened and the Kwantung Army came to an agreement with Prince Teh: financial aid from Japan for the new Inner Mongolian government in return for closer cooperation and, subsequently, a Japanese-Manchukuoan military presence.Footnote 14 As such, Prince Teh began to practise what Uradyn Bulag has characterized as ‘collaborative nationalism’: ‘collaborating with the Japanese as “friend” against some Chinese’ who were viewed as the most immediate threat to the Mongols.Footnote 15
Japanese strategic planning against the Soviet Union
Since the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese strategic planning had assumed that the major enemy in any ground war would be Russia. After 1931, and until at least 1937, there is virtual unanimity among Japanese Army writings that there would inevitably be hostilities with the Soviet Union at some stage, even though opinions differed over when that would occur and how best to prepare for that eventuality. In the spring of 1932 Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, chief of the Intelligence Section of the Kwantung Army, wrote: ‘War with the Soviet Union is inevitable … If the Soviet Union should decisively intervene against our policy in Manchuria and Mongolia or persist in its communist propaganda despite our protests, we must be prepared to settle the Soviet question fundamentally.’Footnote 16
Ironically, at the time that Itagaki was making his assessment in 1932, the Soviet forces on the Far Eastern borders were at a relatively low level—a mere 100,000 men east of the Urals and almost no frontier defences. However, the effectiveness of the previously untested Soviet military, as demonstrated in the Sino-Soviet conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929, had not only impressed the Japanese but also exposed the weaknesses of the Chinese leadership, which in turn were to be exploited by the Kwantung Army in 1931.Footnote 17 On the Soviet side, it was only from the spring of 1932 that an ever-increasing supply of men and material was funnelled to the Soviet Far East as part of the emphasis in the Second Five-Year Plan on building a powerful economy and strong defensive capability. By the end of 1934, according to Japanese military estimates, the Soviet Union had over 230,000 men and over 500 aircraft in the region by comparison with the Kwantung Army's 60,000 men and 100 aircraft.Footnote 18 The heightened rhetoric on both sides and growing suspicions of each other in fact fuelled a vicious circle of escalation—the classic ‘security dilemma’—whereby the Soviet side increased its military strength in response to the Kwantung Army's operations in Manchuria and nearby. This in turn allowed Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, appointed as chief of the Operations Section of the Japanese Army General Staff from August 1935, and others to argue for boosting their own forces. Faced with a disquieting imbalance in forces on the border, Ishiwara argued for increasing the Japanese troop strength up to 90 per cent of the Soviet forces.Footnote 19 Japanese military planners continued to monitor Soviet defence policy and a speech by the influential Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in December 1935, which highlighted the need to strengthen Soviet troop deployments in the Lake Baikal area as a crucial step in far eastern force improvements, was taken as symptomatic of what was seen as a ‘new defence policy’.Footnote 20
Ishiwara, like Itagaki, was a strong proponent of the so-called ‘strike north’ (hokushin-ron) philosophy, which became associated with one of the key factions within the Army, the Imperial Way (or Kodoha). He and other members of this faction argued that Japan should join with Manchukuo and China to form an ‘East Asian League’ to confront and defeat the Soviet Union (if necessary through preventive war), before moving on to remove Southeast Asia from Western colonial control and finally tackle the United States. Underpinning their strategic thinking was the notion that any reconciliation with the Soviet Union was impossible because of the incompatibility of interests and ideologies. In contrast, the Navy as well as some Army officers preferred the ‘strike south’ (nanshin-ron) approach associated with the Control (or Toseiha) faction, who argued that attacking and accessing the resources of the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia was crucial to Japan's future. This would require rapprochement or at least accommodation with the Soviet Union in Northeast Asia.Footnote 21
Japanese Foreign Ministry officials—and associated politicians—were to become increasingly sidelined into fulfilling the role of policy-executors not policymakers, as the military restricted policy options during the 1930s. Nonetheless, this was not a simple military versus civilians dichotomy, for, as Ian Nish has argued, ‘Japan was deeply torn; there were both military and civilians on both sides of the laceration.’Footnote 22 The differences in opinion within the military and, to a lesser extent, the Foreign Ministry and other civilian arms of the Japanese government had important implications for policy towards the Soviet Union. Serious internal controversy had been provoked over the appropriate response to the Soviet offer of a non-aggression pact in late 1931.Footnote 23 Ultimately rejected a year later by the Japanese side, the Soviets refused to give up and came back to the issue intermittently throughout the first half of the 1930s. The Soviets’ desire to sell off the Chinese Eastern Railway, a Russian-built shortcut across Manchuria from Chita to Vladivostok to avoid the long looping route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which had been the focus of the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict, similarly provoked debate within the Japanese government from mid-1933, before a decision to negotiate was reached.Footnote 24 The inter- and intra-ministry disagreements over policy also extended to Inner and Outer Mongolia. There was a general consensus that the MPR under Soviet influence was a harmful source of ‘red propaganda’, but views diverged on whether the answer was to construct a kind of cordon sanitaire in Inner Mongolia-North China, to come to some diplomatic settlement with the Russians regarding strict treaty provisions, or to directly reduce Soviet influence over the MPR by increasing Japanese-Manchukuoan leverage. These differences over policy preferences complicated Japanese policy planning towards the Soviet Union and the MPR in the first half of the 1930s.
Soviet perspectives
Like so much of Soviet external policymaking in the 1920s and 1930s, there were two dimensions to policy towards Japan: the revolutionary critiques from the Communist International (Comintern) of Japanese monopolistic-militarist ruling circles and the more measured diplomatic efforts from the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) to develop trade and cultural links with Japan. In contrast to the Comintern's slanted analyses and dreams of social revolution in Japan, Soviet diplomats were aware of the differences in opinion between the Japanese military and civilian leadership. Indeed, as Soviet documents show, Narkomindel detected discord among ‘militarists’ and ‘moderates’, and adduced this as the reason for the ‘zig-zags’ in Japanese policy.Footnote 25 As Deputy Foreign Commissar Boris Stomoniakov was to explain to the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo, Konstantin Yurenev, in March 1936, Japanese policy was ‘the resultant force of the aspirations of the Japanese militarists and moderate circles at any given time’.Footnote 26 Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov certainly was not averse to trying to leverage these differences by ‘deepening divisions within the ruling caste, winning over moderates and isolating the militarists through timely concessions, thereby lessening the likelihood of war’.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, this was easier said than done.
In the 1920s the Comintern had played a key role in Soviet links with the MPR and its ruling party, but its efforts to promote a more radical environment in the MPR in the late 1920s, through measures such as forced collectivization, had achieved mixed results. Therefore in 1932 the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party decided to take a more hands-on approach by setting up a special standing committee to direct policy towards Mongolia (Commission for Mongolia); a measure of its importance was that Stalin himself insisted on being a member.Footnote 28 Subsequently, the Soviet Union took steps to improve the Soviet-Mongolian trading environment, provided technical instructors for various sectors, and enacted a number of military measures to assist the MPR, including a military loan in 1934.Footnote 29
By the end of 1933 a growing confidence about its increasing military strength was beginning to underpin the Soviet Union's perceptions of the Northeast Asian region. The decision to sell off the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo, with Japanese assistance, depicted by Litvinov in March 1935, on completion of the deal, as ‘one of the greatest manifestations of peacefulness by the Soviet Government’, was an important step as it removed at least one festering source of dispute from the Soviet-Japanese relationship.Footnote 30 The Soviet Union therefore became the first major state to recognize the state of Manchukuo, to evident Japanese satisfaction.Footnote 31 However, the railway deal did not resolve all bilateral issues—fishing rights remained contentious and, more crucially, border issues took on an increasingly irritating and potentially conflictual role. This involved not just the 3,500-kilometre Manchukuo border with the Soviet Union but also the MPR's 700-kilometre border with Manchukuo.
Border incidents
From the 1931 Mukden Incident up to the end of 1934, there were 152 recorded incidents on the Soviet Union's far eastern borders; then in 1935 alone this number rose to 130.Footnote 32 The first serious episode occurred near to Lake Buir Nor in January 1935, when a group of Mongolian soldiers clashed with Manchukuo Army forces over a border post. In an attempt to settle this incident, the first of a series of Mongolian-Manchukuoan conferences was held in the Inner Mongolian border city of Manchouli (Manzhouli) in June 1935. While the negotiations were in progress, a further clash took place in the Hailastyn-gol area, when a Kwantung Army surveyor was captured by Mongolian forces.Footnote 33 This prompted the Manchukuo delegates, backed by the Kwantung Army, to issue what amounted to an ultimatum demanding the right for observers to be permanently resident in the MPR. This was reinforced by a threat to forcibly demilitarize the eastern part of the MPR.Footnote 34 There was a swift response from the Soviet side. Yurenev, the ambassador in Tokyo, informed the Japanese foreign minister on 6 July that the Soviets had ‘close, friendly relations with Mongolia’ and had ‘an interest in the inviolability of Mongolian territory’. He added that the Soviets were ‘greatly concerned about the provocative behaviour of the Japanese-Manchukuo forces’. Refusing to accept Yurenev's statement, Foreign Minister Hirota Koki responded by trying to argue that this was a problem between the MPR and Manchukuo and therefore neither Japan's nor the Soviet Union's responsibility.Footnote 35 Earlier, in February 1935, a diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Moscow had tried to reassure his Soviet counterpart that ‘the Manchukuo side have no intention of violating the territory of Outer Mongolia, not even a yard’, but actions on the ground seemed to belie this interpretation.Footnote 36
Nevertheless, the Soviets felt that the protest had some impact as the ultimatum was dropped and the Kwantung Army made no attempt to take military action.Footnote 37 A British diplomat reported that the Soviet consul-general in Mukden said in mid-July that ‘although he did not believe that the Japanese wanted war at present, they would find that the methods employed in North China could not be repeated in Outer Mongolia where the Soviet Government would not tolerate Japanese interference’.Footnote 38 One Japanese diplomatic report sent by the consulate in Kalgan, based on observations taken throughout Inner Mongolia during July 1935, argued that ‘in current Inner-Outer Mongolia relations lurks the danger of starting a Japanese-Soviet war’ so that ‘it would be best to play down the [policy of] opening up Outer Mongolia’.Footnote 39 While Foreign Minister Hirota's direct response is not clear, at the very least he decided that it was important to find out more about what was happening inside the MPR. In mid-August he sent instructions to the two ambassadors in China and Manchukuo as well as to all the consulates in the northern China/Manchukuo area for information on the internal situation within the MPR; over the next few months a wide range of reports on the economy, ethnic issues, the media, and even social problems were sent back to Tokyo.Footnote 40
What was not known to the Japanese was that the Soviet Union had already given a specific commitment to the MPR the previous year. In the summer of 1934, Lev Karakhan, one of the Foreign Commissariat's most senior experts on East Asia, had been sent on a mission to the MPR to examine the situation in detail at first hand. As a result, Peljidiin Gendun, the chairman of the Mongolian Council of Ministers (effectively the prime minister), was invited to Moscow in late October. During his meetings with Josef Stalin and other senior Soviet leaders Gendun requested Soviet assistance.Footnote 41 On 27 November 1934, a secret ‘gentleman's agreement’ was concluded, which stipulated that ‘there will be rendered mutual support by all methods to halt in advance the threat of military encroachments; moreover mutual support and aid will be rendered should there be an attack on either the Mongolian People's Republic or the U.S.S.R from a third party’.Footnote 42
According to a Mongolian source, Stalin told Gendun: ‘Your country is really independent, but it has been recognized only by the Soviet Union … Therefore your priority task is to strengthen your statehood. Only when due to a stronger army, a higher level of economy and culture you achieve stronger statehood, will it be possible to declare your independence from China.’Footnote 43 This seemingly contradictory phraseology reflected the nominal Soviet recognition of Chinese sovereignty, as embodied in the 1932 agreement to re-establish relations (and the earlier 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement), though it was clearly ignored in practice. Whatever the exact nature of Gendun's political problems within the MPR and with Stalin personally, the MPR leaders as a whole were well aware that the MPR's forces on their own were not a match for the battle-hardened and well-equipped Kwantung Army. Stalin was able to use several sources of leverage against the MPR leadership to push them to agree first to the ‘gentleman's agreement’ in 1934 and later the March 1936 Protocol: economically, the MPR was becoming almost totally dependent on trade and aid from the Soviet Union; politically, Stalin was already beginning to extend his domestic ‘terror’ against opponents within the Soviet Union into the MPR, with the arrest of at least two important MPR leaders during 1933–1934. In addition, secret military arrangements were made such as installing radio networks and extending military loans that were essential to assisting the MPR's own nascent military build-up.Footnote 44
After the breakdown of the Manchouli conference due to the ultimatum, it was not until early October 1935 that MPR-Manchukuo discussions resumed. Even then, deadlock soon ensued as the MPR side resisted Manchukuo's demands that three representatives from each side be posted in the principal towns of each country. Questioned about these demands, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that ‘Manchukuo is now knocking at Outer Mongolia's door as Commander Perry knocked at Japan's door in 1858 [sic].’ The door, however, remained firmly shut and the second Manchouli conference ended abortively in late November 1935.Footnote 45
This time the Soviet Union made no direct representations to Japan, but displayed its support of the MPR by inviting a delegation to Moscow in mid-December, after receiving an earlier written request for Soviet assistance from Gendun, who was still prime minister.Footnote 46 After two weeks of talks with Soviet leaders, Gendun was able to announce to Soviet press correspondents that ‘we will expect that the Soviet Union will support us in the event of our becoming the victim of attack from invaders’.Footnote 47 The Soviet ambassador in China, Dmitry Bogomolov, later felt able to inform a senior Japanese diplomat in Shanghai that the Soviet leadership had given a verbal commitment to assist the MPR during Gendun's visit.Footnote 48
During the winter of 1935–1936 minor border skirmishes continued to take place. Manchukuo's vice-foreign minister Ohashi Chuichi complained to a British diplomat that the ‘telegrams of protest and counter-protest exchanged with Outer Mongolia had become so numerous, and were invariably so barren of results, that they became part of the routine of his office’. Another British diplomat noted: ‘Patrols fire at sight and much loss of life has resulted. Diplomatic protests and identical counter-protests have been made. The newspapers and army communiques of both parties vilify and contradict each other. First one side, then the other, is accused of illegally crossing the borders, firing at patrols, kidnapping peasants, or flying over and landing in foreign territory.’Footnote 49 Both sides seemed to be testing out their respective border defences, but few, if any, such incidents were ‘solved’. For example, according to Manchukoan sources, during the 1934 to August 1935 period there were 184 incidents, of which 107 resulted in formal protests by the Manchukuo government; by the end of that period only four had been settled completely and 12 partially settled, leaving 91 still awaiting attention.Footnote 50
However, the Russians were also concerned about two other aspects of Japanese foreign policy. First, Japanese policy towards China was embodied in what came to be known as Hirota's ‘Three Principles’ of October 1935. The third one—namely, Sino-Japanese cooperation with Manchukuo to combat the ‘common menace’ of communism in Northeast Asia, mainly coming from the MPR—was the subject of particular Soviet concern. Accordingly, Hirota argued, China should cooperate in providing those facilities required by Japan to eliminate that menace in areas bordering the MPR; Hirota subsequently explained to the Chinese ambassador in Tokyo that he hoped that Japan, Manchukuo, and China could discuss a ‘joint policy’ to deal with the communist menace.Footnote 51 The Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek evidently kept the Soviet side informed of these Japanese demands and gave reassurances that he would ‘in no circumstances’ go along with the proposed anti-Soviet military alliance, but the latter's mistrust of Chiang led to an assumption that any Soviet agreement for further collaboration with China would be solely ‘for the expediency of encouraging the growing tendency in China to undertake armed opposition to Japanese aggression’.Footnote 52 Hirota's Three Principles were his attempt to clarify policy objectives, but these precepts were not welcomed by some circles within the Japanese Army, particularly among the Kwantung Army officers, who wished to continue with creating ‘autonomous’ regions, modelled on Manchukuo in North China.
The second aspect of Russia's concern was the growing closeness between Japan and Germany. Towards the end of 1935 Soviet intelligence intercepted telegrams containing some information about the secret negotiations being held in Berlin between Major-General Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese military attaché, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Party diplomatic expert and close confidant of Adolf Hitler.Footnote 53 The published Soviet diplomatic documents show that Soviet information on the precise details of the course of these negotiations seems to have been inconsistent, judging from the information relayed from Moscow to Soviet diplomats overseas during the first half of 1936. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to raise further suspicions about Japanese intentions, which were to be justified later in 1936 when the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact was revealed.
Towards the Soviet-Mongolian alliance
In early 1936, therefore, there existed a certain nervousness on the Soviet side—and in the MPR—as to Japan's future intentions. Not long after Gendun returned to the MPR in early January 1936 he had requested that the 1934 gentlemen's agreement be turned into a formal written document, but there was no immediate response from the Soviet side. A more formal request from the MPR government for military assistance was made on 23 January 1936.Footnote 54 Consequently, in late January/early February 1936, Lazar Kaganovich, the commissar for railways and a close confidant of Stalin, was sent on an inspection tour of the Soviet Far East. Japanese diplomats stationed at the various cities that he visited reported to Tokyo that his main objective seemed to be to promote the ‘militarization’ of the Trans-Siberian Railway, but as the first senior Soviet official to visit the region for four years, he was surely also considering the links to the MPR.Footnote 55
Later in February there was yet another border incident, this time at Orahodoga, but it was events in Tokyo that finally cemented the Soviet-Mongolian relationship. At daybreak on 26 February 1936 in a Tokyo blanketed by heavy snow, 1,400 Army officers and men launched a mutiny under the leadership of young officers of the Imperial Way faction. Several leading politicians were killed.Footnote 56 Although the revolt collapsed within four days, the uncertain situation in the aftermath amplified Soviet concerns. The spy ring being patiently constructed by Soviet master-spy Richard Sorge was not yet at its most effective, so, although he did his best to tap into sources within the German embassy in Tokyo as well as draw on the information supplied by the Japanese members of his group, he required some time before a full-length report on this incident could be sent back to Moscow.Footnote 57 Instead, the Soviets had to rely on their diplomats and various international sources. Certainly the ‘obvious breakdown in discipline in the [Japanese] army’ raised Soviet fears that the Kwantung Army, taking advantage of the ‘paralysis’ in Tokyo, might precipitate further aggressive action in northern China—the ‘direction of least resistance’. While the Soviet Union would not be subject to an aggressive policy ‘in the near future’, nonetheless ‘tremors’ were expected in Soviet-Japanese relations; the Japanese forces in Manchukuo remained ‘a permanent source of complication and apprehension’.Footnote 58
Stalin, therefore, decided to go public with a warning. In a rare interview granted to a foreign media outlet, Stalin told Roy Howard, chairman of the American newspaper company Scripps-Howard, on 1 March that ‘if Japan should venture to attack the Mongolian People's Republic and encroach upon its independence, we will have to help the Mongolian People's Republic’.Footnote 59 Then, Soviet Foreign Commissar Litvinov and his deputy Stomoniakov met separately with the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Ota Tamekichi, on 4 and 9 March respectively to reinforce the message. Despite Ota's reassurances that the February 26 Incident would have no impact on bilateral relations, senior Soviet officials remained convinced that were ‘unfavourable influences’ at work on Japan's overall foreign policy. Even when Foreign Minister Hirota was installed as the new prime minister, the Soviets remained cautious, given their assessment that Hirota was an ‘unprincipled careerist’.Footnote 60 Additionally, the Soviet authorities were also receiving information that a secret Japanese-German agreement might soon be signed, although in fact the negotiations were temporarily suspended in the spring of 1936 because of the confusion surrounding the February 26 Incident.Footnote 61
Consequently, on 12 March the Soviet-MPR Protocol of Mutual Assistance was signed in Ulan Bator by Gendun and Anandyn Amor, chairman of the Little Khural (an executive body of the parliament), representing the MPR, and the Soviet ambassador to Mongolia, V. K. ‘Ter’ Tairov. The Protocol consisted of four short articles, after a preamble which referred to the friendly relations that had existed between the two states since 1921 and noted the decision of the two sides to formalize the 1934 gentlemen's agreement for the purpose of ‘averting and preventing military threats’. The first article provided that ‘in the case of the threat of an attack on the territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Mongolian People's Republic by a third country’ the two governments ‘should immediately confer regarding the situation and adopt all measures that may be necessary for protecting the security of their territories’. The second article stated that the two governments were ‘obliged in the case of a military attack against either party, to help one another with all means, including military assistance’. The third article provided for the immediate withdrawal of any troops sent into either country under the terms of articles one and two ‘as soon as the period of necessity is over’; it then specifically cited the example of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from MPR territory in 1925 as a model. The fourth article simply stated that the Protocol would remain in force for 10 years.Footnote 62 The phraseology employed implied a fraternal agreement between equals, but there was little doubt that it was the Soviet Union that laid down the terms and conditions of the Protocol.
The signing of the Protocol was not made public at that time. But, with further border incidents taking place at Tauran, when tanks and aircraft were deployed,Footnote 63 and Changlingtsu in late March, Stomoniakov was instructed to call in Ota on 31 March. He explained that this Protocol had been signed, and the key elements of the text were then made public on 8 April.Footnote 64 Stomoniakov later explained to Yurenev in Tokyo that this Protocol ‘is a new link in the chain of successive actions by which we are curbing Japanese aggression against the U.S.S.R. Now Japan surely has no longer any doubts about the fact that a conquest by her of Mongolia would result in war with the Soviet Union.’Footnote 65
The revelations about this new agreement impacted on the Soviet Union's relations with both China and Japan. With China, the signature again brought to the fore the contradictions in the Soviet diplomatic stance since, as the Chinese government argued in its two protest notes, it represented a clear violation of both Chinese sovereignty and the 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement. In public the Soviets rejected the Chinese claims as ‘groundless’, but privately Soviet officials did endeavour to explain their viewpoint to the Chinese.Footnote 66 By the end of May 1936, therefore, Chiang's government had come to regard the MPR issue as settled and he indicated that he was prepared to resume conversations about a new Sino-Soviet agreement. However, the Soviets, as always suspicious of Chiang's real intentions, clearly attached more importance to securing the exposed Mongolian flank, even at the cost of upsetting Chiang, than to any benefits that might be obtained from any future agreement with the Chinese.Footnote 67 Moreover, the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the other instrument of Soviet policy in China, was not considered by Stalin to be an effective factor at this stage. Contact with the CCP had been interrupted in 1934–1935 during the latter's strategic retreat—the epic Long March—and although CCP forces did come close to the borders of Inner Mongolia towards the end of their northward march, direct contact with Moscow had barely resumed by early 1936.Footnote 68 Later, in July 1936, Mao Zedong, presumably thinking about the CCP's own pretensions to equality with the Soviet Union, was to tell American sympathizer Edgar Snow that ‘the relationship between Outer Mongolia and the Soviet Union, now and in the past, has always been based on the principle of complete equality. When the People's Revolution has been victorious in China, the Outer Mongolian republic will automatically become a part of the Chinese federation, at its own will’.Footnote 69
As for Japan, technically it was in no position to lodge a protest with the Soviet government and, indeed, officials within the Foreign Ministry advised against making any public statement that would imply Japanese recognition of the Soviet Union's special position in the MPR. When a senior Japanese diplomat based in Shanghai did finally raise the issue with Soviet Ambassador Bogomolov in mid-April, the latter argued that the Protocol was ‘not at all threatening’ to Japan and Manchukuo, and that ‘as long as [they] had no intention of advancing into Outer Mongolia there would be no problem’.Footnote 70 A Foreign Ministry policy paper, dated 28 April, argued that since, in principle, the MPR was part of China, the official Japanese response should be that the Soviet-MPR pact had treated the Chinese position with ‘contempt’; in reality, it was impossible for Japan to ignore the fact that this military pact represented a ‘new turn’ in Manchurian-Mongolian relations.Footnote 71
However, Manchukuo Foreign Ministry officials could not resist issuing a statement of protest over this ‘military alliance against Japan and Manchukuo’.Footnote 72 They depicted the Protocol as an ‘outrage’ that was ‘tantamount to the absorption of Outer Mongolia by the Soviet Union’, claiming ‘on the grounds of propinquity and blood relationship’ the right to a voice in the conduct of Mongolian affairs.Footnote 73 At the end of April the Kwantung Army arrested and executed the governor of Hsingan Province and former head of the Manchukuo delegation to the Manchouli conferences, Ling Sheng, on the grounds of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.Footnote 74
There was a notable decrease in the number of border incidents during the remainder of 1936, although they did not cease altogether. Itagaki, the newly promoted chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, told the media at the end of April 1936 that ‘tranquillity’ prevailed on the border; he ascribed this to ‘the heavy losses inflicted on the Outer Mongolian army’ during the recent border clashes.Footnote 75 It is more likely, since the losses inflicted seem to have been rather minor, that the reason lay in Tokyo's efforts to reign in the Kwantung Army in the light of the Soviet-MPR accord. The new Japanese foreign minister, Arita Hachiro, told Ambassador Yurenev in late April 1936 that ‘strict orders’ had been given to the Kwantung Army, but the exact scope of these new orders cannot be ascertained from surviving documentation.Footnote 76 Nevertheless, a comparison of Japanese policy documents from before and after the publication of the Soviet-MPR Protocol provides evidence of signs of a change in emphasis.
At the end of 1935 Japanese policy in Inner Mongolia seemed to be bearing fruit: Prince Teh yielded to Japanese pressure and in November 1935 he agreed to break off relations with the Chinese government in Nanjing and form an Autonomous Mongol Council—formally constituted in February 1936—under Kwantung Army guidance.Footnote 77 Parallel to these moves to separate Inner Mongolia from Chinese central governmental control, in January 1936 the Kwantung Army proposed to the Army Ministry back in Tokyo that active measures to promote tendencies within the MPR to ‘separate’ from the Soviet aegis should be undertaken, for example, by establishing an ‘Outer Mongolian Independence Army’ of 500 cavalrymen.Footnote 78 This was followed up by policy requests from the Kwantung Army to the Army Ministry in Tokyo during February 1936 that the Manchukuo government's protests to the MPR about border infractions should be backed up with an increase in the number of troops guarding the border as well as the construction of better border defences; a positive response was received from Tokyo.Footnote 79
Furthermore, on 28 March, Itagaki and Arita discussed the Mongolian situation. Itagaki explained:
If Outer Mongolia be combined with Japan and Manchukuo, Soviet territory in the Far East will fall into a very dangerous condition, and it is possible that the influence of the Soviet Union in the Far East might be removed without fighting. Therefore, the Army aims to extend Japanese-Manchukuo power into Outer Mongolia by all means at hand, and, as its first step, to establish normal and complete diplomatic relations between Manchukuo and Outer Mongolia, regarding the latter as an independent country, without considering Soviet Russian will.Footnote 80
A noticeably different tone is discernible in policy statements issued after the April announcement of the Soviet-MPR Protocol. The Kwantung Army sponsored a Mongolian State-Founding Conference in April which supported the unification of Inner and outer Mongolia. By the end of that month, though, a Kwantung Army report on the Inner Mongolian situation called for the strengthening of Prince Teh's movement. It argued that any union with the MPR should be built ‘as far as possible by peaceful means’, primarily by encouraging Mongols to flee over the border into Inner Mongolia, thus destroying the MPR economy through population loss.Footnote 81 In mid-May, Foreign Minister Arita told the Japanese Privy Council that the immediate priority was the establishment of a ‘firm sphere of influence in Inner Mongolia, dependent on Japan and Manchukuo … and the promotion of ideological, social and political operations against Outer Mongolia … rather than frontal operations based on Manchukuo’.Footnote 82 For the Army, though, their preparations for a war against the Russians to overthrow Soviet control in the MPR remained of the greatest significance. Even the relationship with Inner Mongolia needed to handled carefully. A few days later, Arita wrote to General Ueda Kenkichi, the Japanese ambassador to Manchukuo, setting out his—and the civilian government's—opposition to any independent efforts to conclude a mutual security agreement between Manchukuo and the Inner Mongolians without first consulting closely with Tokyo, not least because of the impact of the Soviet-MPR agreement. Arita added that a similar message was also being sent from the Army General Staff to the Kwantung Army.Footnote 83 A British diplomat based in Harbin in northeast China reported in late July that border incidents on the Manchukuo-Mongolian border ‘appear to have ceased completely’ and speculated that this was undoubtedly due to ‘strict instructions from the Japanese high command’.Footnote 84
Moreover, the Japanese position on the establishment of border commissions shifted slightly. No significant progress was made during 1935, despite the two conferences held at Manchouli, primarily because of opposition from the Kwantung Army. However, a few days after Stalin's comments to the journalist Howard, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow signified that the Japanese would be prepared to participate in a joint border commission, although only for the 200-mile section of the Soviet-Manchukuo border from Lake Khanka to the Korean border. The Soviet side counter-proposed a more wide-ranging demarcation and dispute-settling commissions along the whole border with the MPR.Footnote 85 This finally received Japanese approval in principle in the summer of 1936 after a proposal in May by the Japanese to create a ‘neutral zone’ along the borders was scathingly rejected by the Soviets, who suspected that it was merely a device to leave the flank of the Trans-Siberian Railway exposed.Footnote 86 Despite this more conciliatory attitude from the Japanese, the border commissions were never formally constituted and a third Manchouli conference ended unproductively in November 1936.Footnote 87 Not until the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Treaty of 1941 was there to be even limited progress on the demarcation of these controversial borders.Footnote 88
Apart from the setbacks in penetrating the MPR, Japan's policy towards Inner Mongolia also began to suffer problems. Prominent Mongolian chiefs had conducted a ‘state-founding conference’ at the end of April 1936, after which the Kwantung Army agreed to give military support to Prince Teh's nominally independent Mongol military government. This was followed by Japanese Cabinet decisions in August 1936 that officially sanctioned a ‘Mongolia for the Mongolians’ movement. But Prince Teh's Mongolian forces were routed by the Chinese Nationalist Army after a week-long battle at Pailingmiao in November 1936, a defeat which proved fatal to the vision of an autonomous Inner Mongolia under Kwantung Army guidance.Footnote 89
Conclusion
It has been argued that one of the main purposes of the Anti-Comintern Pact, finally signed by Japan and Germany in November 1936, was to ‘moderate Soviet activities in China and Outer Mongolia’.Footnote 90 Whatever the effect on China, where the growing strength of the CCP remained a wild card that even the Soviets could not fully control, the later effect of the Pact on the MPR and wider Mongolia was almost negligible. While fear of agreement between the Japanese and Germans was one factor in the Soviet decision to go ahead with signing the 1936 Protocol with the MPR, by the time the Anti-Comintern Pact was finalized, the Soviets had already consolidated their role vis-à-vis the MPR. Although the MPR still remained closed to Japanese and Manchukuoan representatives, Soviet control was rendered complete through the rise to power of Khorloogiin Choibalsan, one of Stalin's protégés, who replaced Gendun. Encouraged by Soviet agents, as a senior minister, Choibalsan had pushed through the forced collectivization of farmland and advocated strong measures against the Buddhist lamas in the early 1930s, which brought him into direct conflict with his rival Gendun. Stalin, however, used his leverage to install Choibalsan as a marshal of the Mongolian Army in addition to his role as minister of internal affairs. Gendun was relieved of his posts as prime minister and foreign minister in March 1936 almost immediately after the Soviet-MPR Protocol was signed, allegedly for sabotaging Mongol-Soviet relations by rejecting Stalin's demand that he eliminate the lamas, but conceivably also because he opposed the stationing of Soviet troops on MPR soil.Footnote 91
Under Choibalsan's leadership a series of purges of senior politicians was begun and the lamas were crushed; at the same time, the MPR's defence budget was doubled during 1936 and its border forces were consolidated. During 1937–1938 the Soviets also launched a large-scale programme of economic assistance.Footnote 92 Gendun was sent to Moscow under guard, imprisoned, and finally executed in 1937.Footnote 93
The Soviet attitude towards the MPR was conditioned by political, ideological, and, above all, by strategic considerations. Despite the fact that at one stage in the early 1930s the MPR was actually the Soviet Union's third largest trading partner, economic concerns were of minor importance. With its influence over the MPR growing strongly after 1924, the Soviet Union had initially looked upon the MPR as a revolutionary experiment that could serve as a model for other ‘oppressed’ Asian states and colonial territories to copy. When the Mongolian revolution failed to be replicated in other Asian states—most dramatically in China in 1927—the Soviets increasingly began to look upon the MPR as a key component in the defence of a strategically insecure region of the Soviet Far East. As such, by the mid-1930s the Soviets were determined to protect their only ideological ally in Asia by turning it into a satellite state. Soviet concerns about Chinese influences in the 1920s were clearly replaced by the threat from Japanese ‘adventurism’ in the 1930s. Therefore, rather than political or ideological affinity with the MPR, it was strategic planning that underpinned Soviet thinking. The MPR became crucial to the defence of the western sectors of the Soviet Union's far eastern frontiers, for Japanese control of the Mongolian salient would have allowed speedy access to the Trans-Baikal region, thus splitting the Soviet Far Eastern Army into two. As the Soviet ambassador in China, Bogomolov, noted in November 1935, ‘ventures into Outer Mongolia must seem highly attractive to Japanese militarists, [for] in the event of success and the creation of an “independent” Mongolian Government, including both Inner and Outer Mongolia, they would obtain a large advantage strategically in the great war with us’.Footnote 94 According to information that reached the British ambassador in Moscow in March 1936, Stomoniakov had told the Chinese ambassador in Moscow that, while the ‘Soviet Union had no territorial or even economic designs’ on the MPR, ‘it was, however, strategically of the utmost importance to the Soviet Union to maintain their influence in Outer Mongolia and to keep it as a buffer state against aggression’.Footnote 95 These words may have been intended to ameliorate Chinese sensitivities, but in reality Soviet actions indicated that its intention was that the MPR, rather than being simply a buffer state, would become more closely integrated with the Soviet Union as its satellite state.
Stalin seemed to have little faith in diplomatic support from other states. Although diplomatic relations with the United States were established in 1933 and the Soviet Union entered the League of Nations in 1934, bickering over Comintern activities and tsarist debts was an irritant in US-Soviet relations. In Europe the value of Britain and France had declined in Soviet eyes during the Abyssinian crisis of 1935, and the March 1936 Rhineland crisis did nothing to alter that assessment. The consolidation of Adolf Hitler's power in Germany had ruptured the Soviets’ long-standing ‘special relationship’ with that state, with the spirited language of the Seventh—and last—Congress of the Comintern in 1935 about a united popular front not offering much in the way of practical support. Consequently, Stalin put his greatest efforts into building up the size and efficiency of the forces on the far eastern borders. Comments by two Soviet diplomats give an indication of how Soviet confidence grew with this military build-up. In October 1933, contrasting the current situation with that at the time of the 1931 Mukden Incident, Deputy Commissar Stomoniakov wrote to Yurenev: ‘The situation now is really different from what it was one and a half or two years ago, and we are far from feeling defenceless in the event that the enemy were to try to feel us out.’Footnote 96 However, by February 1936, Yurenev was able to tell the British ambassador in Tokyo that ‘every violation of the frontier will be forcibly resisted’ and that the ‘only way of dealing with the Japanese was, when they hit, to hit back harder’.Footnote 97
Within the Japanese military and civilian leadership, the debate about striking North or going South continued to rage. The ‘Fundamentals of National Policy’ drawn up and approved by the Japanese Cabinet in August 1936 set out a list of diplomatic and military policies that would enable Japan to restructure Asian international relations in a ‘spirit of co-prosperity and co-existence based upon the Imperial Way’, but in reality the lack of specific detail masked the continuing disagreements between the Army and Navy about strategic priorities.Footnote 98 However, Japanese civilian governmental planning was upset by the military-inspired Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937, which led to the Japanese government decision in January 1938 to wage a ‘war of annihilation’ against Chiang's Nationalist China. However, this objective was not to be easily achieved and, despite some early military successes, the Japanese Army soon became bogged down in a long war of attrition, especially as the CCP joined forces with the Nationalists against the Japanese. Local Japanese troops did try to test the Soviet border defences in both 1938 and 1939, but the strong Soviet military response to the latter—especially during the Nomonhan Incident on the MPR-Manchukuo border—resulted in a ‘total defeat’ for the Japanese forces.Footnote 99 Paradoxically, this setback was to lead to the Japanese decision in 1941 to conclude a Treaty of Neutrality with the Soviet Union to protect the Japanese northern flank (this implied de facto Japanese recognition of the MPR). At the same time, they also turned their attention towards Southeast Asia and the eventual conflict with the United States and the western colonial powers.
Soviet thinking on the MPR was well characterized in a telegram from Karakhan, the Foreign Commissariat's most senior Asian expert, to the ambassador in Tokyo in May 1933 about the Japanese: ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway and questions with Manchuria, that is problems outside our territory, are one thing, [but] their claims concerning questions inside the territory of the Soviet Union are another.’Footnote 100 Implicit in the manner in which the Soviet side reacted to the Japanese probings into the Mongolian territories in 1935–1936 was the understanding that the Soviet perspective was that the MPR was a problem that fell into the second category. Although the Soviet Union never attempted to formally absorb the MPR, Stalin was nonetheless determined that the MPR—his sole ally in Asia and a crucial satellite state on the far eastern borders of the Soviet Union—was not going to be lost to the Japanese.
Later, during the Sino-Soviet negotiations at the end of the Second World War, the Soviets secured Nationalist China's endorsement of the complete independence of the MPR. Having stared down—and even fought—the Japanese, Stalin had no intention of giving up the MPR to any Chinese government, even one formed by the CCP. Consequently, regardless of his expectations back in 1936, Mao had no choice but to accord de jure recognition to the MPR within the first few weeks of achieving power in October 1949 and, begrudgingly, confirm that status in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship in 1950.Footnote 101 As Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated in the 1960s, Soviet troops returned to the MPR in 1966, where they were to remain until Mongolia's ‘democratic revolution’ of 1990. The MPR, therefore, remained a Soviet satellite until almost the bitter end of the Soviet system.
