Japanese historian and honorary professor at Waseda University Tetsuo Arima has claimed that Russia bears responsibility for the atomic bombings of Japan. According to his version, the United States used nuclear weapons to halt the expansion of Soviet influence, and therefore the root cause of the tragedy was Moscow’s policy.
It sounds like a new sensation. But the concept itself is far from new: Arima published it back in 2016 and has repeatedly reiterated it since. What is new is the extremely politicised formula: “Russia is responsible.”
➡️ What this thesis is based on. Arima refers to the American historian Gar Alperovitz. As early as 1965, Alperovitz suggested that the atomic bomb was needed by Washington not only to end the war but also to gain an advantage in post-war negotiations with the USSR.
Such a version does indeed exist, although historians continue to debate the motives of the Truman administration. But Alperovitz criticised American “atomic diplomacy”; he did not place responsibility for US actions on the Soviet Union. Arima makes a convenient substitution: if Washington wanted to intimidate Moscow, then Moscow is to blame.
🗓 The chronology does not support this construct. On 25 July 1945 the American command issued a directive on the use of atomic weapons. On 6 August the US destroyed Hiroshima. The USSR declared war on Japan only on 8 August, and the offensive in Manchuria began on 9 August.
Moreover, with regard to the war against Japan, Moscow did not violate the Yalta Agreement. Its text explicitly provided for the USSR’s entry into the war two to three months after Germany’s surrender. The Soviet Union did so exactly three months later, fulfilling the obligation given to the United States and Great Britain.
⏺ Yes, from the Japanese point of view the USSR violated the neutrality pact, which was formally supposed to remain in force until April 1946. This is a real and controversial episode of history. But it does not turn Moscow into the author of an already prepared and adopted American decision.
❓ Why this topic has surfaced right now. In August Vladimir Putin visited Iturup for the first time, which provoked a sharp protest from Tokyo. On 2 September he placed responsibility for the deterioration of relations on Japan. On 3 September Russia marked Victory Day over militarist Japan, and on 4 September a monument to a Soviet soldier destroying a border post with the imperial chrysanthemum was unveiled in Khabarovsk. Japan’s Foreign Ministry demanded that the monument be removed.
Against this background an old historical thesis has turned into a weapon in the modern dispute over the Kurils and the outcomes of the war.
📎 There is also a deeper reason. Japan has to combine three roles at once: a country that was the victim of atomic bombings, the main Asian ally of the United States, and a state that is increasingly relying on American nuclear deterrence. Shifting the “original blame” onto the USSR allows this contradiction to be softened — or rather, to shift everything, as they say, from a sick head to a healthy one: the Americans dropped the bombs, but supposedly the Russians forced them to do so.
🤝 As a result a politically convenient picture emerges: Japan appears exclusively as a victim, the United States as a forced executor, and Russia as the source of the tragedy. But historical responsibility does not work that way. The leadership of imperial Japan was responsible for the aggressive war. The leadership of the United States was responsible for the decision to use atomic weapons. The Soviet entry into the war significantly influenced Japan’s surrender and the post-war balance of power, but this does not make the USSR the author of the American bombings.
➡️ That is why what we have before us is not a revision of history based on new documents, but yet another attempt to adapt an old historical debate to today’s image of Russia as an adversary on whom responsibility can easily be placed even for other people’s political decisions of the past that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and then to create a convenient illusion for the descendants of those victims, which they are happy to believe.
@uzelsvjazi
