U.S. and Japanese Intervention in the Russian Civil War: Violence and "Barbarism" in the Far East

This dissertation examines the U.S. and Japanese intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922. It assesses the civil war’s impact on U.S.-Soviet-Japanese relations by integrating local, regional, and international perspectives of the conflict. Rather than emphasizing the intervention as the origins of the Cold War, the dissertation argues for analyzing this event in the context of its own time and place. It finds that the significance of U.S. and Japanese interference in the Russian Civil War lies in its effect on U.S.-Soviet-Japanese relations during the conflict and into the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, it demonstrates that strategies and perceptions of violence had a major impact on the civil war and the U.S-Soviet-Japanese triangular relationship. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first four chapters cover U.S.-Russian-Japanese relations to 1918. In addition to describing the international context in which the Russian Revolution and Civil War erupted, this part of the dissertation contributes to the historiographical debate over U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to intervene. It argues that his overarching goal was to prevent the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. Although Wilson preferred a non-Bolshevik alternative, he also failed to provide sustained support for either the Japanese or the anti-Bolshevik alternatives to Lenin’s regime. Paradoxically, the commitment by Wilson (sustained by his successor, Warren G. Harding), eventually facilitated the Bolsheviks’ reconstitution of the Russian Empire. The dissertation’s second section focuses on the period of U.S. military intervention from the summer of 1918 to the spring of 1920. It argues that the violence of the Russian Civil War had a major impact on American perceptions of Russians and Japanese and that this affected U.S. policy toward Soviet Russia and Japan. In the end, U.S. officials fell back on explanations that fit into their suspicions that Russians (whether Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik) and Japanese were uncivilized, prone to committing atrocities, and unworthy of American assistance and cooperation. In the Russian case, this meant reviving a long-term view of Russia as backward and prone to tyranny. This stereotype helped sustain the policy of nonrecognition of the Soviets throughout the 1920s. There were competing American stereotypes of Japanese prior to World War I. On the one hand, U.S. citizens in places with high levels of Japanese immigration continued to lump Japanese into the “yellow peril” and were strong advocates of exclusion. On the other hand, however, some American elites saw the Japanese as “honorary whites,” the most civilized of all Asian peoples. The experience of the Siberian intervention demolished this latter, somewhat more positive stereotype. In its place, a more malevolent view of Japanese appeared—as a people prone to barbaric violence and duplicity. This perception helped pave the way for the 1924 immigration exclusion act that ended Japanese immigration to the United States. It also laid the groundwork for a dehumanized view of Japanese that fueled the brutality of the Pacific War from 1941-45. The dissertation’s final part explores the period of Japanese occupation from 1920-22. It highlights the ways in which Japan’s policy in Russia was connected to its concern about defending and expanding its empire. This section also demonstrates that strategies of violence are integral to understanding why the Bolsheviks won and the anti-Bolsheviks lost. It argues that, whereas the Bolsheviks focused on attacking state infrastructure, their opponents deployed a people-centric strategy aimed at rooting out ideological enemies. In doing so, the anti-Bolsheviks blurred the lines of ethnicity, criminality, and ideology, and were unable to secure territory under their command, instead fueling insurgency. In addition, the last section explains why the Soviet “buffer state” strategy successfully defeated Japan’s own attempts to create a puppet in the Russian Far East. Finally, it demonstrates how the United States played an integral diplomatic role in securing Japanese evacuation from the region by convening the Washington Conference in 1921-22.