The rush to modernize came with a very great price in human lives. The Kulaks were, understandably, opposed to agrarian collectivization, and there were estimated to be between 5 million and 7 million of them. As officers of the Red Army who came from peasant stock might not be prepared to enforce collectivization with sufficient rigour, the secret police (the OGPU) were reinforced by party militias and bully boys from the cities and the factories. Those who persisted in opposing government policy were either shot, exiled to the Russian Far East or forced to labour in physically demanding and unpleasant industries, such as mining, where the concept of workers’ health and safety did not exist. It is thought that up to 5 million people perished from a combination of compulsory grain seizures, punishment for being anti-Stalin or worked to death in labour camps in the winter of 1932–33 alone.7 But Stalin’s paranoid suspicion and distrust of anyone or any institution that might oppose him would soon be extended from recalcitrant farmers to the organs of the Soviet state. The armed forces would not escape, and thousands of officers of the Red Army would be removed.
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According to national legend, the first emperor of Japan was the great-great-great-grandson of the Sun Goddess. The Sun Goddess created Japan – and, presumably, the rest of the world too, although this is not mentioned by the chroniclers. The Japanese imperial family traces its line back to 11 February 660 bc, which puts the creation of the world at around 810 bc, so the planet is even younger than Bishop Ussher’s calculations made it.* While the Japanese claim that their emperor is the only reigning monarch whose descent is unbroken from the Sun Goddess, and that his subjects are descendants of the goddess’s brother, may not be entirely accurate, Japanese emperors, unlike their Chinese counterparts, were not overthrown or deposed, largely because they had no power other than that exercised by advisers in the imperial name. That is not to say that emperors did not die mysteriously, nor abdicate early, but the emperor himself was seen as being ‘above the clouds’ or remote from the day-to-day governance of what was actually a loose collection of quasi-independent baronial estates, and, being above mere politics, he was a focus for loyalty and respect (but not yet actual worship) by all classes.
By around 1600 the constant feuding between rival magnates had made the country even more difficult to govern than it already had been, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, a member of a hereditary military clan, achieved supreme temporal power by a mixture of alliances and slaughter, frequently of his own allies. That Ieyasu at one stage during his early career killed his first wife and ordered his son to commit suicide in order to prove his loyalty to a superior is a fair indication of the sort of society Japan had become, and taking the traditional military title of shogun, Ieyasu established a form of government which, against all the odds, lasted for 250 years. The emperor was still the emperor, of course, but, instead of decisions being taken by the emperor’s advisers, they were now taken by the shogun and, latterly, by the shogun’s advisers.
Japanese society was rigidly hierarchical, bolstered by the Shinto religion, which was part ancestor worship and part a reinforcement of a caste system decreeing that one was born into a station in life out of which one could not escape. As Hinduism, which shares Shinto’s belief in caste, has also demonstrated, such a system is a most effective tool for social control, and during the period of the shogunate the stratified layers of precedence – and bloody repression where that failed – enabled the shogun and his successors to hold together the often mutually antipathetic principalities. Loyalty and obedience were everything: to one’s elder siblings and parents, to the village, to the local lord, to the ruler of the province, to the shogunate and ultimately to the emperor. The national religion had no moral code, other than loyalty and obedience, and there was no concept of looking after those less fortunate than oneself. Lords might take action to improve the lot of their workers, but only did so because, if they did not, the work would not get done; the idea that one should look after one’s subordinates because that is the decent thing to do was quite alien. Confucian and Buddhist influences did moderate behaviour somewhat, but the shoguns were so concerned about Christianity that they banned it and banished its missionaries.
Japan had always been suspicious of outsiders, and under the shoguns she became more so. Japanese merchants did trade with China but the only Europeans allowed to maintain a permanent trading post were the Dutch, and they were confined to an island off Nagasaki. In the first half of the nineteenth century Japan was still feudal when the rest of the world had moved on, but even in its rigidly stratified society things were changing. The relative influence of the four classes into which Japanese were divided – warriors, peasants, artisans and merchants – was not as it was. The shogunate had brought relative peace, and the hereditary warriors – the samurai, who made up 10 per cent of the population and insisted on maintaining their traditional dress, carrying two swords and demanding obeisance from all those below them in the pecking order – were becoming redundant. All samurai were supposed to follow a lord, to whom they owed total and unthinking loyalty, but the shoguns had kept the lords in check by taxing them and too many of them were in hock to the merchants and money lenders and could not afford to keep great bands of retainers with nothing to do. Rather like the Junker of Prussia or the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the magnates and the samurai had aristocratic tastes and pretensions, but increasingly lacked the wherewithal to indulge them. Not only did the samurai consider that working for a living was beneath them, but they were also barred by law and custom from all trades and professions, other than their own, save that of intellectual or bureaucrat. As the number of samurai who could become, say, poets or civil servants was limited, by 1850 it was estimated that there were 400,000 ronin, or samurai without a liege lord, who wandered the country at best hoping to find a lord, and at worst indulging in brigandage.8
It is generally assumed that it was Commodore Perry and his Black Ships that forced Japan out of the medieval and into the modern. Perry, under orders from the American president, Millard Fillmore, sailed into Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) on 8 July 1853 and demanded that Japan open its ports to American trade. Two of Perry’s ships were powered by steam and all of them mounted modern cannon; they were met by dummy shore batteries and warriors armed with smoothbore muskets and swords. The Japanese did not have a navy and, after procrastinating and delaying as long as they could, were forced to recognize Perry’s presence. Perry delivered his president’s demands, and, after announcing that he would return in a year with a fleet, sailed away. While Perry himself made much of the claim that it was he who forced Japan to open itself to the outside world, in fact the system was rotten and falling apart before Perry came on the scene. The merchant class had the money, they wanted trade with the West, and the British and the Russians were pressing for Japanese ports to be opened to them. Japanese of the governing and merchant classes knew very well that the British had trounced China militarily in the 1840s, and drew the obvious conclusion that the Japanese system of government, imported from China, might not last for ever. Japanese suspicion of the outside world had always been mixed with curiosity. There was much about Western technology that was attractive to the Japanese, and it had not escaped their notice that a small island nation such as Britain, which depended on trade, could manage very well if it had colonies and a powerful navy – a point which was reinforced in 1862 when the Royal Navy flattened the capital of a particular clan of samurai as punishment for an attack on a lone Englishman travelling across Japan overland.
While Perry may not have precipitated the period of anarchy, civil war, assassination and chaos that lasted until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, he was certainly one of its catalysts. It was a restoration because the constitution drawn up by those who emerged victorious from the bloody struggles of the previous decade supposedly ‘restored’ power to the emperor, but in no sense was this a liberal or enlightened revolution in the manner of those that had broken out all over Europe (and in the main failed)
in 1848. Rather, it was, as one historian has put it, as if the fox-hunting squirearchy of England had risen up and seized power as the champions of liberalism.* The architects of the restoration concluded that Japan was powerless to resist the unequal treaties that she had signed to permit contact with the West, and that the only way to stand up to the Europeans was to learn their ways and be better at them than they were. Hence a written constitution, top hats and morning dress, political parties, elected assemblies and a monarch who supposedly acted in accordance with the advice of his ministers – but was now officially divine. With all this went massive and rapid modernization, industrialization and expansion; the British built railways and spinning mills and trained a Japanese navy, the Dutch built arsenals, the French built ironworks, Germans drafted the laws, trained the army and introduced the polka; the Italians, the Swiss and the Americans all were involved in one of the most rapid industrializations of a backward agricultural economy; and all the while, looking over their shoulders, were bright young Japanese learning how it was all being done. Long before Stalin, the Japanese squeezed the peasantry to provide capital for industrialization, a side effect being a population drift to the towns and cities that duly provided the workforce for the factories.
While the restoration’s slogan of ‘Respect the emperor, expel the barbarians’ might not have been applicable just yet, that of ‘Rich country, strong army’ certainly was, and by 1895 the Japanese had an army of 240,000 men armed with modern weapons, mainly peasant conscripts led by Samurai officers and NCOs, and a small but efficient navy of twenty-eight steam-powered warships.† 9 That same year Japan, in her first foreign war of modern times, took Korea and Formosa from a decaying Chinese empire, and in 1904–5 defeated the Russians. Even though the latter were already tottering and their armies and navy were operating a long way from home, it was none the less a decisive victory.
But underneath the top hats and Western façade, Japan had not changed all that much. Class divisions may have been legally abolished but power still rested with the aristocracy, the samurai and the merchants; the emperor may have been transformed into a constitutional monarch but he was now to be worshipped as divine; political parties may have been tolerated for a time but they had no power, and all the time were stressed the ‘virtues’ of obedience, loyalty, respect for the emperor, while any show of individualism was discouraged. Huge commercial enterprises grew up, with the power and influence that money brought, but they were expected to work in the interests of the state rather than in those of shareholders, and it was an unwritten alliance between the industrialists and the military, motivated not only by a need to safeguard their own narrow interests but also by a conviction that Japan should be – must be – a powerful and respected country with an empire like the British, the French, the Russians and the Americans that was to send Japan along the road of expansion, conquest and repression. Much the same motivation inspired the newly unified Germany, and it is no surprise that it was to the German, rather than to the British or American, model of government that the shapers of Japanese institutions looked.
The Japanese admiration for all things German was not reciprocated, however, and so the Japanese, in 1902, allied themselves with the British, and English newspapers lauded‘the plucky little Japs’ when they went on to smash the Russian colossus. The First World War came as a welcome opportunity. Japan joined the Allies and her economy boomed. Factories proliferated and heavy industry grew, particularly steel mills, which in turn boosted shipbuilding. Japan supplied the Western powers with textiles and was able to penetrate markets that the British and French could no longer service. While she did no fighting, the presence of her navy in the Far East allowed the British to transfer ships to home waters and in 1915 she took possession of the German concession of Shantung in China. Japanese participation in the war persuaded the British to ignore her penetration of Manchuria, but her seizure of the German Pacific island territories of the Marianas, Palau, the Marshalls and the Carolines increased existing American suspicions of Japanese long-term aims.
Japan ended the war as an industrialized nation with the wherewithal to manufacture but without the necessary raw materials – coal, rubber, iron, oil – which had to be imported, and with a society deeply divided socially and economically, but united by emperor worship and dislike of foreigners. At the top were the army, the navy and the powerful industrialists, and at the bottom were the increasingly exploited toilers – factory workers and peasants. There was virtually no middle class, and, as the administration clamped down mightily on any mutterings from the left, politics revolved around conflicting interpretations of nationalism and loyalty to the emperor. Japan had sent 70,000 troops to Russia, supposedly to assist the anti-Bolshevik forces but in reality to protect her own interests – unsure though she was what those interests were – and she did not withdraw them until 1925,thus earning the permanent hostility of the new Soviet state. Japan increasingly saw herself as becoming isolated internationally – mainly, she thought, owing to the machinations of the British and the Americans, who were both anxious to protect their own interest in Asia – and so the feelings of insecurity and aggressiveness grew. The articles of the Washington Naval Treaty, which gave Japan a ratio in naval tonnage of only three to Britain’s and America’s five each, and the British refusal to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which ended in 1923, seemed only to confirm the developed world’s hostility towards Japan. All the country’s most powerful interests now accepted that expansion was needed; the only argument was whether that expansion should be by peaceful persuasion or by military might, and whether it should be north into Soviet controlled territory or south-west into China.
Japan suffered an economic wobble in 1927, when there were a series of bank failures that also brought down a number of small businesses – many of which were then gobbled up by the zaibatsu or big industrialists. This experience did make Japan better prepared for the Wall Street Crash than some other economies but, when the silk trade in the United States collapsed, Japanese exports plummeted. The solution, it seemed to many Japanese, was to expel the colonialists and create an Asian economic trading area in which Japan would provide the manufactured goods from raw materials supplied from within the bloc. The last vestige of influence held by the lobby in favour of peaceful penetration evaporated and increasingly the military, and their allies the zaibatsu, would shape Japanese foreign and defence policy.
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It was not long after the first war that the cry ‘We wuz robbed’, or its Italian equivalent, was raised. Italy had been a unified country only since 1861, and, despite attempts by her founding fathers to link her with the glories of the Roman Empire, the truth was that 1,500 years of invasion, fragmentation and immigration had left precious few of the once rulers of the known world and had replaced them with a distillation of a variety of Balkan tribes. In modern parlance, Italy was desperate to punch above her weight, but, by the time that her king and government realized that a good way to divert attention from domestic problems was to embark on adventures abroad, there was precious little left to colonize. Italy joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria in 1882, but always made it clear that she regarded it as a defensive pact and in any event would not go to war against Britain. As the Mediterranean was a British lake, this was a very sensible reservation.
Italy had interests in Eritrea and attempts to expand there led to war with Abyssinia and a disastrous defeat at Adowa in 1896. She sent a 2,000-strong contingent as part of the relief force to China during the Boxer Rebellion, and in 1911 she embarked on a campaign to seize Libya from a tottering Ottoman Empire. In a conflict marked more by Italian ingenuity in committing atrocities than by any great military skill,* Libya was eventually brought under nominal Italian control in 1912, when Turkey was distracted by the First Balkan War.
The Triple Alliance was unpopular with many Italians, who saw it as an obstacle to the incorporation of areas on her borders belonging to Austria but conta
ining large numbers of ethnic Italians, or at least Italian-speakers. Austrian residents of Trieste were bemused by the apparent attachment of so many of their fellow citizens to opera, to the extent that the most common graffiti on the city walls was ‘Viva Verdi’, but they were not to know that this was shorthand for Viva Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia. When war broke out in 1914, Italy declined to join Germany and Austria, pointing out that, as the alliance was a defensive pact and Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, Italy was not obliged to join in. Both sides courted the Italians. To the Germans, Italian entry on the side of the Central Powers, or at least a guarantee of neutrality, would release Austrian troops for the Western Front, open another front against France and make life difficult for the British navy in the Mediterranean. From the Allied point of view, Italian belligerence would tie down large numbers of Austrians and keep them away from Russia. There was little that Germany could or Austria would offer Italy, but the Allies could hold out the promise of satisfying Italian irredentism at Austria’s expense. The Pact of London, signed in April 1915, duly granted Austrian territory to Italy in return for her entering the war on the Allied side no later than 26 May 1915.
Bismarck said that Italy had a large appetite for territorial gains but very poor teeth.10 Anyone who has served with NATO regards the modern Italian Army as something of a joke, one that lends weight to the old adage, ‘If you can’t fight, wear a big hat’, and assumes that this has always been so, but this is not entirely fair. Italy’s performance in the first war was noted for the dogged stoicism of her soldiers, who were let down by her leaders and the lack of a military-industrial base. Estimates of Italian military deaths vary between 460,000 and 650,000 – losses comparable to those of Britain (700,000) and suffered by a smaller population in a shorter war. Italy made few advances and was only saved from complete collapse by the despatch of French and British divisions in late 1917. Even what is celebrated as the glorious victory of Vittorio Veneto was spearheaded by British troops, a fact that is notably absent from Italian history books.*
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