Japan at Genoa and Vladivostok

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

The Japanese Government is represented at Genoa. At Genoa it is going to construct peace and prosperity in Europe and throughout the world. At the same time it is represented at Vladivostok. It maintains its troops on the land of Russia’s workers and peasants on the pretext that order and civilisation are insufficiently safeguarded there. In the name of order and civilisation’ the Japanese Government is supporting in the Far East corrupt bandits, atamans, hired leaders of black gangs, it is setting them on the Russian working population, arming and feeding them, and protecting them from the armed rebuff of the workers and peasants. This regime of dishonour and baseness has already gone on for years. Artificially maintaining a state of bloody anarchy in the Far East, the Japanese Government thereby creates motives for the continued maintenance of its troops on the land of Russia’s workers and peasants’ and then, by means of these troops, supports and increases the bloody anarchy that prevails. To this it must be added that the Far Eastern Republic is governed by the methods of formal democracy, while Japan is a bureaucratic absolutism based on a regime of castes. There is a worthwhile theme for meditation both by the diplomats at Genoa and by the diplomats of the Second and the Two-and-a-half Internationals.

The forces of the Far Eastern Republic have again beaten the Whites – as so many times already – and are irresistibly advancing, sweeping away the remnants of the White-Guard bands sent by Japan on to Russian territory. But now Japanese troops have appeared from behind the scenes. Despite the fact that they had been warned by the Far Eastern Republic (1) of the forthcoming advance by the revolutionary army and (2) that this army had absolutely no intention of engaging in hostilities against the Japanese forces, the latter opened fire in a frenzied way, from rifles, machine-guns and artillery. The revolutionary forces withdrew without firing a shot, having suffered 30 casualties killed and wounded.

In the name of the maintenance of order, democracy and civilisation, the troops of Japan, that is, of a caste monarchy, have again killed thirty [sic] Russian peasants and workers on Russian soil, on the soil of a little democratic republic. We shall put this down to their account, and that account we shall present, sooner or later, at Genoa or elsewhere.

April 11, 1922