BiblioVault - Books about Geopolitics

Eleven Winters of Discontent

The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan

Sherzod Muminov

Harvard University Press, 2022

The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan.

In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home.

The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state.

Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives—including memoirs and survivor interviews—to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.

[more]

The Endless Periphery

Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto's Italy

Stephen J. Campbell

University of Chicago Press, 2019

While the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are usually associated with Italy’s historical seats of power, some of the era’s most characteristic works are to be found in places other than Florence, Rome, and Venice. They are the product of the diversity of regions and cultures that makes up the country. In Endless Periphery, Stephen J. Campbell examines a range of iconic works in order to unlock a rich series of local references in Renaissance art that include regional rulers, patron saints, and miracles, demonstrating, for example, that the works of Titian spoke to beholders differently in Naples, Brescia, or Milan than in his native Venice. More than a series of regional microhistories, Endless Periphery tracks the geographic mobility of Italian Renaissance art and artists, revealing a series of exchanges between artists and their patrons, as well as the power dynamics that fueled these exchanges. A counter history of one of the greatest epochs of art production, this richly illustrated book will bring new insight to our understanding of classic works of Italian art.

[more]

European Coasts of Bohemia

Negotiating the Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal in a Troubled Twentieth Century

Jirí Janác

Amsterdam University Press, 2012

The Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal promised to create an integrated waterway system across Europe, linking Black Sea ports to Atlantic markets and giving landlocked Czech nation its own connections to the ocean. The fascinating history of this never-completed project, European Coasts of Bohemia tells the story of the experts who confronted and contributed to different and often conflicting geopolitical visions of Europe. Jíra Janác shows how the canal-backers adapted themselves to various political developments, such as the break-up of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire and the integration into the Soviet Bloc, while still managing to keep the canal project alive.

[more]

Extending Russia

Competing from Advantageous Ground

James Dobbins

RAND Corporation, 2019

As the U.S. National Defense Strategy recognizes, the United States is currently locked in a great-power competition with Russia. This report seeks to define areas where the United States can compete to its own advantage. It examines Russian vulnerabilities and anxieties; analyzes potential policy options to exploit them; and assesses the associated benefits, costs, and risks, as well as the likelihood of successful implementation.

[more]