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E-book Revolution Goes East : Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism
The Russian Revolution of 1917 raised a profound question: was socialism a means to promote national unity and wealth, or was its goal to achieve global human liberation from both capitalism and imperialism? In imperial Japan, as elsewhere in the non-Western world, the answer was neither obvious nor uni-form. This question, however, was even more complicated in Japan because the Russian Revolution happened at a time when Japan approached the fiftieth anni-versary of its own great revolution, the Meiji Revolution of 1868, and when the Japanese public began to contemplate the historical foundations and future of their own modernized imperial state. As such, the Russian Revolution provoked fierce debates among supporters and opponents alike about the relationships among the state, society, individuals, and the national community; and finally, the objectives of the Japanese imperial project. This book explores Japan’s dispa-rate responses to the Russian Revolution during the 1920s and demonstrates how the debate about Soviet Russia and its communist ideology became a debate over what constituted modern Japan.After their successful takeover of power in October1917, Russian Bolsheviks declared a war not only on capitalism, but no less significantly a war on impe-rialism.1 Russian Bolsheviks, however, envisioned their revolution as the first in a series of world proletarian revolutions. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin specifically insisted that without the success of proletarian revolutions in Europe, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime would not be able to survive. However, by 1920, as communist revolutions failed to materialize in Europe, and as the Red Army was gaining control over Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the center of gravity of the Russian Revolution shifted to East Asia. It was in East Asia, as well as in the Middle East, where the Russian Revolution merged with and acquired the character of an anti-imperialist struggle. And it was the anti-imperialist message that Russian Bolsheviks skillfully employed in East Asia to win over Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Mongol national liberation movements.2 Consequently, the anti-imperialist struggle became the cornerstone of the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Mongol communist parties, established between 1921 and 1922 with the help of Russian Bolsheviks.
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