Russia Goes East
"THE Heartland of the World "—that is what the British geographer Mackinder called the vast source of land-power and man-power stretching from the Baltic to Mongolia, where Russia holds such a strategically privileged position. How powerfully placed she is for land-expansion is strikingly illustrated in the succession of failures to stop the Russian advance in the Far East, which is the subject of Dr. Dallin's latest book. The very name given to the first Russian outpost, Vladivostok, "Ruler of the East," was a sign of Russian ambition. That ambition became a com- mitment, to which Russia has adhered with ruthless tenacity through b9th the old and the new regimes, when the Tzar Alexander HI ordered the construction of the 3,500-miles Trans-Siberian railway.
There have been strategic and diplomatic withdrawals. There have been overwhelming military defeats, as in the Russo-Japanese war. There have been political catastrophes as when Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 broke with the Chinese Communists and with his Russian advisers. But if there is one thing which stands out in this highly interesting book. it is the deep-rooted tenacity of the Russian ex- pansionist policy in this Far Eastern zone. The latest Russiatt effort to control Korea is one more example. To achieve Russian aims, alliances were made indiscriminately with one Power after the other —with the United States, France, Germany, Japan, China, with both Kuomintang and Communists, though not until recently with Great Britain.
Russian policy throughout is seen as preferably one of shrewd and cautious manoeuvre, of indirect rather than direct aggression. On the rare occasions when caution was thrown to the winds, as when she intervened directly in Korea at the beginning of the last century, it led to the Russo-Japanese war, and the Russians paid, and heavily. A better policy, in Lenin's favourite phrase, was "to make use of" the differences between the capitalist Powers ; mean- while, as the second Congress of the Commuttist International neatly expressed it, "calling the masses to an active struggle for their national liberation and insisting on their orientation on Soviet Russia."
Dr. Daniel unfolds the history of Russian expansion into Mon- golia, Sinkiang, China, including Manchuria, and Korea down to 1931. On Korea his book is most opportune. Korea, always a bone of contention between China and Japan, though linked with China through cultural and religious ties, became of immediate concern to Russia the day Vladivostok was founded. In 18% Russia and Japan signed an agreement about this independent kingdom. In that year, for the first time in history, the 38th Parallel was used as the line dividing two protectorates. Then onwards the story has quite a contemporary air. A few Russian . and Japanese troops were introduced on either side. Then the Russians broke the agreement by introducing a large number of -Russian officers to reconstruct and train the Korean Army. When ,the Koreans objected, the " advisers " were replaced by Russian soldiers disguised as lumberjacks working on timber concessions, thought- fully bought beforehand. Eventually it led to war, and here and elsewhere Dr. Dallin's quotations from contemporary Russian documents make sinister reading. "it is desirable," wrote the Tzar to General Alexander in 1904, "that the Japanese, and not we, be the ones to start military operations . . . But if they should cross the 38th Parallel on the western coast of Korea, with or without a landing, you are hereby given instructions to attack them without waiting for the first shot from their side. I rely on you. God help you."
This is an invaluable book, scholarly, objective and never dull ; a fitting companion volume to Dr. Dallin's earlier work, Soviet Russia and the Far East, which dealt with the period from 1931. More might perhaps have been said about economic factors, such as the vital importance of Manchurian raw materials to the Chinese economy. But that is a minor, criticism. Graver is the inadequacy of the maps. None have any cales, essential to a proper under- standing of the strategic geography of this vast arena of power politics. Some, unintentionally no doubt, resemble nothing more than the disembowelled entrails of some Asiatic beast. Graver still is the standard of typography, more like that of a cheap reprint than of a first edition.; ' and at a cost-price to the public of eighteen shillings. This is a book which should be read by all who wish to understand the fundamentals of the Far Eastern situation today. It is strange that the publishers did not consider it worthy of better
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