Curated playlist
Japan–Soviet Union relations
- Invasion of the Kuril IslandsThe decision to invade the Kuril Islands emerged from a sudden shift in Soviet military strategy during August 1945. Planners initially targeted Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island, as part of their broader Pacific campaign. That…
- Soviet invasion of South SakhalinThe Soviet invasion of South Sakhalin kept troops fighting for more than a week after Japan had already surrendered. It struck the southern half of Sakhalin Island, a Japanese territory called Karafuto Prefecture. Japan had taken the whole…
- Surrender of JapanAt 8:15 in the morning on the 6th of August 1945, a single aircraft released a single bomb over Hiroshima. Sixteen hours later, President Harry S. Truman went on the air to promise Japan "a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has…
- Soviet–Japanese Neutrality PactAfter Stalin signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, he did something almost no one had seen him do. He personally saw off Japan's Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, at a train station. Stalin rarely appeared before foreign diplomats…
- Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956The Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 ended a state of war that had lingered for more than a decade after the guns fell silent across Asia. On the 19th of October 1956, diplomats from Japan and the Soviet Union signed a document in…
- Anti-Comintern PactOn the 25th of November 1936, in the offices of a semi-official diplomatic bureau that operated outside Germany's formal foreign ministry, two ambassadors put their signatures to a document that would reshape the alignment of the world's…
- Soviet invasion of ManchuriaThe Soviet invasion of Manchuria began at one minute past midnight Trans-Baikal time on the 9th of August 1945, simultaneously on three fronts. Hours earlier, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had summoned Japanese ambassador…
- Soviet–Japanese WarThe Soviet-Japanese War began at one minute past midnight Trans-Baikal time on the 9th of August 1945, when three Red Army fronts crossed into Manchuria simultaneously from the east, west, and north. It lasted less than a month. Yet in…
- Hokushin-ronHokushin-ron gave Imperial Japan a compass: point the empire's expansion north, into Manchuria and Siberia, not south across the Pacific. Its backers were sometimes called the Strike North Group, convinced that no other direction offered…
- Japanese Instrument of SurrenderThe Japanese Instrument of Surrender was the printed agreement that ended World War II, signed on the deck of a warship anchored in Tokyo Bay just after nine o'clock in the morning on the 2nd of September 1945. Nine Allied nations put…
- KantokuenKantokuen called for seven Japanese armies to invade and occupy the Russian Far East. Most of the empire's naval and air forces backed them, making it the largest combined arms operation in Japanese history to that point. The name is short…
- Battles of Khalkhin GolThe Battles of Khalkhin Gol began on the 11th of May 1939, with a patrol of Mongolian cavalry, somewhere between 70 and 90 men, riding into disputed grassland to find grazing for their horses. Within days, what started as a skirmish over…
- Kuril Islands disputeThe Kuril Islands dispute is one of the longest-running territorial standoffs of the modern era. Four small islands at the southern tip of the Kuril chain have kept Japan and Russia from signing a formal peace treaty since the end of World…
- Treaty of San FranciscoOn the 8th of September 1951, inside the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, representatives of 49 nations gathered to sign a document that would formally close the most destructive war in human history. The Treaty of San Francisco…
- Richard SorgeRichard Sorge arrived in Yokohama on the 6th of September 1933, carrying press credentials from the most prestigious newspaper in Germany and a Nazi Party membership card fresh from Berlin. Joseph Goebbels had attended his farewell dinner.…