Abstract
The Soviet Union’s approach to war crimes prosecution in Asia differed from their approach in Europe. The Japanese war crimes trials, on the other hand, were a means of projecting Soviet influence in the Pacific Rim despite the late entrance of the Red Army into the war against Japan. Even after a less than positive experience at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg and being shut out of the creation of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), the Soviets still willingly participated in the prosecution of the Japanese political and military leaders in Tokyo. The Soviets considered the IMTFE—with its lukewarm finding of ‘crimes against peace’ against the Soviet Union, and its failure to address Japan’s biological weapons program—inadequate. In order to correct this ‘failure’ and to address the crimes not properly considered at Tokyo, the socalled Khabarovsk Trial was held in the Soviet Far East in December 1949. The Japanese defendants were charged with aggressively ‘manufacturing and employing bacteriological weapons’ against the Soviet Union and China. While earlier Soviet military courts in Europe were seen as an extension of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Khabarovsk Trial was conceived as a corrective to the Tokyo Tribunal.
With the Khabarovsk Trial, Soviet and more generally communist propaganda discovered a useful tool: the specter of bacteriological warfare proved to be a powerful propaganda weapon that was successfully used later during the Korean War (1950–53). In the long run, the Soviet war crimes trials in Asia during the early Cold War were thus a combination of geopolitics and propaganda that were aimed at supporting the diplomatic efforts of the new Soviet superpower. They were meant to secure Soviet interests in the region while deterring the encroachment of the new archenemy—the USA.
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Notes
- 1.
Further reading: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), Boris N. Slavinskii, The Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact: A Diplomatic History, 1941–1945 (City: Psychology Press, 2004), Prasenjit Duara, ‘The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo in comparative perspective,’ in Japan Focus http://www.japanfocus.org/-Prasenjit-Duara/1715 (last accessed 10 March 2015).
- 2.
Philip R. Picigallo, The Japanese on trial: Allied war crimes operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979), xiii.
- 3.
See Prusin, in: Norman Goda, ed., Writing Retribution. Holocaust Justice and its Meaning (2016).
- 4.
Materials on the trial of former servicemen of the Japanese Army charged with manufacturing and employing bacteriological weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), 7.
- 5.
According to Andreas Hilger, there were 38 Soviet trials of Germans in 1945, 245 in 1946, 841 in 1947, 2,432 in 1948, 15,145 in 1949 and 1,416 in 1950. (Andreas Hilger, ‘Die Gerechtigkeit nehme ihren Lauf?’: Die Bestrafung deutscher Kriegs- und Gewaltverbrecher in der Sowjetunion und der SBZ/DDR, in Norbert Frei, ed. Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik. Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechern in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 182.
- 6.
‘Nota Sovetskogo Pravitel‘stva pravitel’stvam SSHA, Velikobritanii i Kitaia,’ Pravda, 3 February 1950, 2.
- 7.
Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,’ American Historical Review 2 (2008): 701–730.
- 8.
Moscow’s response to George Kennan’s invitation to participate in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) revealed that despite their unfamiliarity with the IMTFE, the Soviets assured that their “‘interest was more than formal,’ and they wanted to know much more about the role of the USSR in the proposed trial. Philip R. Picigallo, The Japanese on trial: Allied war crimes operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979), 145.
- 9.
Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization. Perspectives from now and then (London: Routledge, 2004), 2.
- 10.
See Elizabeth Wood, ‘The Trial of Lenin: Legitimating the Revolution through Political Theater, 1920–23,’ Russian Review 61 (2002): 235–48, Robert Argenbright, ‘Marking NEP’s Slippery Path: The Krasnoshchekov Show Trial,’Russian Review 61 (2002): 249–75, Michael Ellman, ‘The Soviet 1937–1938 Provincial Show Trials Revisited,’Europa-Asia Studies 8 (2003): 1305–21.
- 11.
Manfred Zeidler, ‘Der Minsker Kriegsverbrecherprozeß vom Januar 1946. Kritische Anmerkungen zu einem sowjetischen Schauprozeß gegen deutsche Kriegsgefangene,’Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2 (2004): 216.
- 12.
See Yudin, ‘Research on humans,’ 70–2; Nie, ‘The West’s dismissal,’ 35, 37; Suzy Wang, ‘Medicine-related war crimes trials and post-war politics and ethics’ in J-BaoNie J-B et al., eds., Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics (London: Routledge, 2010), 41; Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731, 230.
- 13.
Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,’ American Historical Review 2 (2008): 703.
- 14.
Anatoliy Nikolaev, Tokio: sud narodov. Po vospominaniiam uchastnika protsessa (Moskva: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1990), 48–9.
- 15.
Mark Raginskii and Solomon Rosenblit, Mezhdunarodnii protsess glavnikh iaponskikh voennikh prestupnikov (Moskva-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1950), 79.
- 16.
Ibid., 78.
- 17.
Mark Raginskii, Militaristy na skam’e podsudimykh: po materialam Tokiiskogo I Khabarovskogo protsessov (Moskva: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1985), 42.
- 18.
Mark Raginskii and Solomon Rosenblit Mezhdunarodnii protsess, 49.
- 19.
Aanatoliy Nikolaev, Tokio: sud narodov, 61.
- 20.
Mark Raginskii Militaristy, 44.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Philip R. Picigallo, The Japanese on trial: Allied war crimes operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979), 156. More about the perception of the Khabarovsk Trial as a show trial in Valentyna Polunina, ‘Soviet War Crimes Policy in the Far East: The Bacteriological Warfare Trial at Khabarovsk 1949’ in Morten Bergsmo, CHEAH Wui Ling and YI Ping (eds.), Historical Origins of International Criminal Law: Volume 2 (FICHL Publication Series No. 21, 2014), 539–560, Valentyna Polunina, ‘The Khabarovsk Trial: the Soviet riposte to the Tokyo Tribunal,’ in Kirsten Sellars (ed.), Trials for International Crimes in Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 121–145.
- 23.
Lev Smirnov served as a state prosecutor during the Khabarovsk Trial.
- 24.
Mark Raginskii, Solomon Rosenblit and Lev Smirnov, Bakteriologicheskaia voina – prestupnoe orudie imperialisticheskoi agressii. Khabarovskii protsess iaponskikh voennykh prestupnikov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1950), 3.
- 25.
Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, ‘O merakh nakazaniia dlia nemetsko-fashistskikh zlodeev, vinovnykh v ubiistvakh i istiazaniih sovetskogo grazhdanskogo naseleniia i plennykh krasnoarmeitsev, dlia shpionov, izmennikov rodiny iz chisla sovetskikh grazhdan i ikh posobnikov’ (19 April 1943).
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, ‘O merakh nakazaniia dlia nemetsko-fashistskikh zlodeev, vinovnykh v ubiistvakh i istiazaniih sovetskogo grazhdanskogo naseleniia i plennykh krasnoarmeitsev, dlia shpionov, izmennikov rodiny iz chisla sovetskikh grazhdan i ikh posobnikov’ (19 April 1943).
- 28.
Aleksandr Epifanov, ‘Otvetstvennost’ za voennye prestupleniia, sovershennye na teritorii SSSR v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (istoriko-pravovoi aspekt)’ (PhD diss., 2001), 4.
- 29.
Mark Raginskii, Solomon Rosenblit and Lev Smirnov, Bakteriologicheskaia voina, 118.
- 30.
John Pritchard, ed., International Military Tribunal for the Far East, The Tokyo major war crimes trial, 124 vols. (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), Amended Charter, vol. 2, 1.
- 31.
John Pritchard (ed.) International Military Tribunal for the Far East, The Tokyo major war crimes trial, 124 vols. (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), Amended Charter, vol. 2, 2.
- 32.
Mark Raginskii, Solomon Rosenblit and Lev Smirnov, Bakteriologicheskaia voina, 116.
- 33.
Presidium Decree (19 April 1943).
- 34.
GARF, D 596, Op 1a, R 9492, 5270/k, ‘Results of the investigation into criminal activities of nine persons among accused Japanese generals and officers serving in the anti-epidemic Detachment 731’ (22 November 1949), 16. The decree was also applied by analogy to Austrian, Dutch and Belgian citizens (Epifanov, 53.)
- 35.
Article 16, Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1926).
- 36.
Materials, 466.
- 37.
Sheldon H. Harris Factories of death. Japanese biological warfare, 1932–45, and the American cover-up (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 227.
- 38.
GARF, R 9492, Op 1a, F 596 ‘Otkrytyi sudebnyi protsess nad iaponskimi prestupnikami v g. Khabarovske 25-30/XII 949 goda.’
- 39.
It should be mentioned that creating special working groups was a common practice for organizing the most important war crimes tribunals in the Soviet Union. For example, a ministerial commission, consisting again of Sergei Kruglov, the head of the People’s Secretariat for State Security (NKGB) Bogdan Kobulov, and the head of counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ Viktor Abakumov was created by the Politburo of the Communist Party in November 1945 with the aim to establish and monitor eight war crimes trials against German perpetrators in the period from December 1945 to February 1946. As in the case of the Khabarovsk Trial, Stalin’s closest circle consisting, among others, of Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov were in charge of the overall progress of the trials and decided upon the persons to be tried, indictments and verdicts.
- 40.
Philip R. Picigallo, The Japanese on trial: Allied war crimes operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979), 154.
- 41.
Materials, 515.
- 42.
Materials, 519.
- 43.
See for example, Boris G. Yudin, ‘Research on humans at the Khabarovsk war crimes trial. A historical and ethical examination’ in J-Bao Nie J-B et al., eds., Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics (London: Routledge, 2010).
- 44.
Materials, 511.
- 45.
Materials, 516, 519.
- 46.
Kirsten Sellars ‘Crimes against peace’ and international law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 190.
- 47.
GARF, R 9492, Op 1a, F 595 ‘Perepiska po otkrytomu protsessu nad iaponskimi prestupnikami v gorode Khabarovske (18.11.1949–28.02.1950),’ 44.
- 48.
Prusin, Alexander ‘“Fascist Criminals to the Gallows”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946.’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17,1 (2003): 17.
- 49.
GARF, R 9492, Op 1a, F 596 ‘Otkrytyi sudebnyi protsess nad iaponskimi prestupnikami v g. Khabarovske 25-30/XII 949 goda.’
- 50.
Boris G. Yudin, ‘Research on humans at the Khabarovsk war crimes trial. A historical and ethical examination’ in J-Bao Nie et al., eds., Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics (London: Routledge, 2010), 69.
- 51.
Materials on the trial of former service men of the Japanese Army charged with manufacturing and employing bacteriological weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), 534.
- 52.
Materials, 534–535.
- 53.
Ogoniok, (8 January 1950), 9.
- 54.
Ogoniok, (8 January 1950), 9.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Mark Raginskii, Solomon Rosenblit and Lev Smirnov, Bakteriologicheskaia voina, 9.
- 57.
Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), quoted in ‘Chinese newspaper on the trial of former military of the Japanese Army,’ Pravda, 1 January 1950, 4.
- 58.
Justin Jacobs, ‘Preparing the People for Mass Clemency: The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in Sehnyan and Taiyuan,’ The China Quarterly 205 (2011): 160.
- 59.
Sheldon H. Harris Factories of death. Japanese biological warfare, 1932–45, and the American cover-up (New York: Routledge, 1994), 225.
- 60.
Ibid. 226.
- 61.
Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s secret biological warfare in World War II (New York, NY: Free Press, 1989), 187.
- 62.
See, for example, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) IWG Reference Collection, Selected Documents on Japanese War Crimes and Japanese Biological Warfare, 1934–2006, RG 9999, Entry ZZ-106, Box 4, State-War-Navy Coordinating Subcommittee for the Far East, ‘Request of Russian prosecutor for permission to interrogate certain Japanese’ (26 February 1947), 1.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731, 230.
- 65.
Materials, 15–6.
- 66.
Nota Sovetskogo Pravitel‘stva pravitel’stvam SSHA, Velikobritanii i Kitaia, Pravda (3 February 1950).
- 67.
Mark Raginskii, Militaristy, 46–7.
- 68.
Nota Sovetskogo Pravitel‘stva pravitel’stvu SSHA, Pravda, 13 May 1950.
- 69.
Sheldon H. Harris Factories of death. Japanese biological warfare, 1932–45, and the American cover-up (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 230–1.
- 70.
Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, ‘Ob otmene smertnoi kazni,’ 26 May 1947 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1950), reprinted verbatim in Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR (Moscow: Ripol Klassik, 2013), 140–11.
- 71.
Kirsten Sellars ‘Crimes against peace’ and international law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 255.
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Polunina, V. (2016). From Tokyo to Khabarovsk: Soviet War Crimes Trials in Asia as Cold War Battlefields. In: von Lingen, K. (eds) War Crimes Trials in the Wake of Decolonization and Cold War in Asia, 1945-1956. World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42987-8_11
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