Against Empires and Wars: Exiles, Escapees, Artists, and Communists between Russia and Japan

In his 1894 essay “Patriotism and Christianity,” Lev Tolstoi proclaimed, “in all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.”1 The link between empire and war that the great writer emphasized explains, perhaps, the preoccupation with conflict in the histories of Russo-Japanese relations. These accounts have largely followed the ebb and flow of geopolitical rivalry and military confrontation between the two nations. Surveying the period from the mid-19th century unequal treaties that pried open Japan to global trade, to the 1875 Treaty of St. Petersburg that delineated Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in East Asia, to Japan’s earth-shattering victory over Russia in 1905 and the USSR’s revanche 40 years later, historians have tended to portray Russo-Japanese entanglements as one long struggle for domination in East Asia. The Russo-Japanese War, the most fateful of