the next week. The Soviet H-bomb followed four years later.
But this was in the future, and the thought that the Americans had a monopoly of the atom bomb had a deeply depressing effect on Russian opinion. The Russian press
continued to be silent about it, and the issue of the English weekly Britansky Soyuznik which was the first paper inside Russia to give any details on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sold in the black market for sixty roubles, instead of the official two roubles, or the usual
"black-market" price of twenty roubles.
The feeling of resentment against those who had dropped the atom bomb was so acute
that any feeling of animosity against Japan was conspicuously absent. I remember that evening of August 8 only too well. There was feverish activity amongst the many
Japanese living at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. They were packing their bags in order to take them to the Japanese Embassy before midnight. They looked morose but
dignified, and—partly perhaps because they always tipped well—the hotel staff were
very helpful. Nobody else showed any malice either. Shortly before midnight, as they were piling their last trunks on lorries, something of a crowd gathered around, but no hostility was shown and many people even lent a hand with the trunks. It was like a
subtle little demonstration of sympathy.
The papers the next day did little more than paraphrase the Note declaring war on Japan, and recall all the evil that Japan had done to Russia and the Soviet Union in the past—
starting with the Russo-Japanese war, and going on to Japanese Intervention in 1919, to Lake Hassan and Halkin Gol, and to all the help Japan had given to Hitler. If, in the past, Marxist writers had said that Japan had stopped the spread of Russian imperialism in the Far East in 1904-5, the papers now spoke of her "perfidious attack on the Russian Navy at Port Arthur", and the "blot of shame" from which Russia had suffered for forty years.
In the next few days, the press reported mass meetings in many factories loudly
approving the declaration of war on the "Japanese militarists and imperialists." In reality, the Russians who felt passionately about Germany, had no feelings about Japan at all, and the new war against Japan was distinctly unpopular, except possibly among Russians in the Far East.
The only thing in its favour was that it did not last long. It was clear from the start that the three Russian army groups—the Baikal Front under Marshal Malinovsky, the First
Far-Eastern Front under Marshal Meretskov and the Second Far-Eastern Front under
General Purkayev, all of them under the general command of Marshal Vassilevsky—had
overwhelming superiority over the much-vaunted Kwantung Army. Within a few days
they had penetrated deep into Manchuria. The heavy and often fanatical Japanese
counter-attacks made little difference; the Russians had more men and incomparably
more guns, tanks and planes than the Japanese. On August 16 General Antonov, the
Soviet Chief-of-Staff, announced that the declaration of August 14 by the Emperor was
"only a general statement on Japan's capitulation", and that no cease-fire order had been given to the Japanese troops fighting the Russians. There had been no actual capitulation by the Japanese armed forces; therefore "the Soviet offensive in the Far East must continue." On August 17 Marshal Vassilevsky sent an ultimatum to the commander of the Kwantung Army, demanding surrender by noon, August 20. The surrender of this
Army was, indeed, announced by Stalin in an Order of the Day on August 22. The
Russians had used airborne troops extensively in Manchuria, particularly to occupy the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur where they feared an American landing. They also
hastened to penetrate into Northern Korea. The Russian Pacific Navy played an important part in the combined operations that resulted in the occupation of Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands; here, in particular, the Russians met with stiff Japanese resistance—
even long after the official capitulation.
In Manchuria, too, even after the official capitulation of the Kwantung Army, numerous Japanese units continued to fight and it was not till September 12 that the final results of the war against Japan were published in a special Sovinformbureau statement. This said that, between August 9 and September 9 the Japanese losses were: 925 planes, 369 tanks, 1,226 guns, 4,836 machine-guns, 300,000 rifles. In relation to the number of prisoners, these figures suggested that the mighty Kwantung Army had been very poorly equipped.
594,000 Japanese prisoners had been taken, including 20,000 wounded. Among the
prisoners were 148 generals. The Japanese dead were put at 80,000. The Russian
casualties were stated to be extremely low in comparison: 8,000 dead and 22,000
wounded.
[The present-day History (IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 581) gives the same figures for the Japanese prisoners, but puts the equipment figures rather higher; it says that the Baikal and 1st Far-Eastern Front alone captured 1,565 guns, 2,169 mortars, 600 tanks, 861
planes, and 13,000 machine-guns. The History gives no figures for Russian casualties, which suggests that they were higher than the official 1945 figure.]
On September 2 the final capitulation of Japan was signed on board the US battleship Missouri. The Soviet signatory was a General Derevyanko, totally unknown to the general public in Russia.
Stalin's broadcast that day left people with a strangely unsatisfactory impression. He dwelt, to an extraordinary degree, on the victory over Japan being Russia's revenge for her defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. He recalled that, taking advantage of the weakness of the Tsarist Government, Japan had perfidiously attacked the Russian Navy at Port Arthur, in almost exactly the same way as she was to attack the US Navy at Pearl Harbour thirty-seven years later.
Russia was defeated in that war. As a result, Japan grabbed Southern Sakhalin and firmly established herself in the Kuriles, thus padlocking our exits to the Pacific...
This defeat of the Russian troops in 1904 left a bitter memory in the minds of our people. Our people waited and believed that this blot would some day be erased.
We, people of the older generation, waited for this day for forty years. Now this day has come.
In conclusion he said that peace had come at last, that the Soviet Union was no longer threatened by either Germany or Japan, and he paid a tribute to the armed forces of the Soviet Union, the United States, China and Great Britain who had won this victory over Japan.
There were fireworks that night to celebrate Victory over Japan; but in and around Red Square there was barely one-tenth of the crowd that had turned out to celebrate the defeat of Germany on May 9.
It was a hollow victory, and everybody was conscious of it. For many years afterwards the official Soviet line was (and still is, though rather less emphatically) that Japan capitulated because of the Soviet Union's entry into the war: if the mighty Kwantung Army had not been defeated, Japan's resistance to America and Britain would have
continued for years, and cost them a million lives or more. It was, in fact, precisely the same argument as that Truman, Churchill and others applied to the atom bombs which,
they said, had precipitated Japan's unconditional surrender and had so saved untold
American and British lives. In reality the best evidence shows that Japan was on the point of surrendering at the time of the Potsdam Ultimatum, and merely wanted assurances