The resolution of any territorial and border conflicts between States is a rather complicated process in international diplomatic practice and depends on the willingness and readiness of the parties to seek compromises and the willingness to make certain concessions. Often, the process of resolving territorial conflicts can take quite a long period of time and be accompanied by periodic attempts to resolve the problem not on the basis of diplomatic and legal solutions, but by force. Such protracted conflicts include, first of all, the Palestinian-Israeli and Indo-Pakistani conflicts, the problems of belonging to Taiwan and the Falkland Islands, etc.
80 years have passed since the victory of the united coalition of allied forces – the USSR, the USA and Great Britain – over Japan, respectively, the end of World War II. However, since the mid–1950s, Japan began to raise the issue of the “illegal occupation“ of the Southern Kuril Islands (the so–called “northern territories“) by the Soviet Union in 1945 Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the small island groups of Habomai and demand their return, and since 1981, February 7– proclaimed the day of the “northern territories“, has been used by local nationalist circles to organize and conduct anti-Russian demonstrations and actions.
According to Russian archival documents, at the beginning of the 18th century, Kamchatka Cossacks penetrated from the north to the Kuril Islands, and in 1718 Peter the Great sent an expedition to Kamchatka to explore the previously discovered islands. Under Catherine II, in 1778, the Kuril Islands were incorporated into the Irkutsk Province of Russia. During the development of the Kuril Islands, Russian explorers and industrialists practically did not meet the Japanese, and had business and trade relations only with representatives of the local Ainu tribes. Thus, the Russians became the first explorers who began to explore the Kuril Islands and claimed their rights to these territories.
It was only in 1778-1788 that the Japanese began to over-population from Hokkaido Island to the Southern Kuril Islands, as a result of which they ousted Russian merchants and fishermen from their settlements on the Southern Kuril Islands, destroyed their churches and cemeteries, and moved north, including Sakhalin.
The first delimitation of territories between Russia and Japan was recorded in the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, according to which Japanese jurisdiction extended to the Southern Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin was transferred to the joint administration of the two countries. However, in 1878, under the Treaty of St. Petersburg, Russia returned Sakhalin to its jurisdiction in exchange for the transfer of all the Kuril Islands to Japan.
As a result of the severe defeat in the Russian–Japanese War (1904-1905), the tsarist government was forced to sign the unfavorable Portsmouth Peace Treaty, according to which Russia ceded the southern part of Sakhalin to Japan.
The history of the Russian discoveries of the Kuril Islands and all the above-mentioned bilateral treaties certainly have their historical and legal significance, but they do not determine the status of the modern Russian–Japanese border in the area of the Southern Kuril Islands. The key to this issue are the political and legal decisions and agreements made during the Second World War and the post-war years, adopted by the participants of the Allied coalition in the war against Japan.
According to the decisions of the Yalta Conference of February 1945 and the Potsdam Conference of August 1945, as a condition of the USSR joining the war against Japan on the side of the allies, the United States and the United Kingdom guaranteed that after the victory over Tokyo, the Soviet Union’s right to regain its historical rights to the territory of Southern Sakhalin, as well as to the Kuril Islands lost by it in the 19th century, would be realized.
During the successful offensive of Soviet troops against the Japanese army in the Far East, which began on August 9, 1945, on August 25, South Sakhalin was liberated, and on September 1, after the Soviet amphibious operation, the garrisons of Japanese troops in all Kuril Islands laid down their arms.
Thus, on September 2, 1945, aboard the American battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Japanese High Military Command (Chief of the General Staff) and the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs signed the Act of Unconditional Surrender to the Allied Powers of all Japanese Armed Forces, which, as a legal document, marked the end of World War II. This document, which was based on the articles of the Potsdam Declaration, stated in particular that “Japan’s sovereignty should be limited to four islands: Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands, the fate of which will be determined later.” From the content of this article, it becomes unclear whether Japan can include other islands besides the four main islands after the occupation. In particular, this legal ambiguity was clarified in January 1946 in Memorandum No. 677 of the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces, General D. MacArthur’s letter to the Japanese government stated, in particular, that “all Kuril Islands located north of Hokkaido, including the Tishima Islands, the Habomai Island group, and Shikotan Island are excluded from the jurisdiction of the state and administrative authorities of Japan.”
In 1951, Washington and London took the initiative to sign a Peace Treaty with Japan, which would draw a line under the war. But a lot has changed since the end of the war and the defeat of Japan. The cold war was going on between the former allies, in which the United States no longer viewed Tokyo as an enemy, but as an important ally in the Far East. In this regard, the resolution of the US Senate, adopted during the preliminary discussion of the draft San Francisco Peace Treaty, eloquently reflects Washington’s true attitude towards the Soviet post-war acquisitions in the Far East. It contains a significant addition: “it stipulates that the terms of the Treaty will not mean recognition for the USSR of any rights or claims in the territories belonging to Japan on December 7, 1941, which would prejudice the rights and legal grounds of Japan in these territories, nor will any provisions be recognized. in favor of the Soviet Union in relation to Japan, contained in the Yalta Agreement of 1945.”
During the San Francisco peace conference in September 1951, its participants were offered (or rather forced) to sign a draft treaty developed earlier by the American State Department and the British, which provided for ending the war between the Allied coalition and Japan. So, in the draft peace treaty, in particular, there is a clause directly infringing on the legitimate interests of the USSR, that “Japan renounces all rights, legal grounds and claims to the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin, sovereignty over which it acquired under the 1905 Portsmouth Treaty. At the same time, Japan does not recognize Soviet sovereignty over the territories, and then completely refuses to consider the islands of the Southern Kurils as the territory mentioned in the treaty.“
The Soviet delegation, led by the first Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, A.A. Gromyko, tried to amend the final document, which were ignored and were not even discussed by the American organizers of the conference. Due to the fact that the said Treaty does not contain Japan’s indisputable obligation to recognize the sovereignty of the USSR over Southern Sakhalin and all the Kuril Islands that came under Soviet jurisdiction in accordance with the decisions of the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, the Soviet delegation decided (in agreement with Moscow) not to sign this treaty infringing on the legitimate interests of the USSR. Otherwise, the signing of the Treaty by the Soviet side would mean that the USSR accepts, among other things, the aforementioned resolution of the US Senate on the non-recognition of the Soviet Union “no rights and claims to any pre-war territories.” In addition, Moscow could suffer serious image losses and lose the support of many of its supporters on the world stage, such as China, Mongolia, North Korea and Vietnam. The refusal of the Soviet leadership to sign a peace treaty is sometimes interpreted in our country as a serious diplomatic mistake. Stalin, which indicates a lack of understanding by the authors of these judgments of the specifics of the international situation of the Cold War at that time. For Stalin at that time, relations with his military ally China were more important than relations with Japan, which had passed under the American “umbrella.” Therefore, the Soviet delegation left Portsmouth ahead of schedule in protest against the discriminatory decision of the US authorities to invite the delegation of the Kuomintang Taiwan and to refuse the Chinese delegation to participate in the conference.
Moreover, as subsequent events showed, the USSR‘s signature under the text of the peace treaty proposed by the Americans did not guarantee Japan‘s unconditional recognition of the Soviet Union‘s sovereignty over the Kuril Islands.
It is symbolic that on the day of the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, a separate Japanese–American agreement on security guarantees was concluded, which secured for the future the possibility of the presence of American troops and military bases on Japanese territory, which was confirmed in the 1960 US–Japanese Cooperation and Security Treaty, which allows the United States to deploy its bases on the entire territory of Japan.
In the mid–1950s, Japanese ruling circles came to the conclusion that the lack of normal relations with such an influential and major power as the USSR did not meet Tokyo‘s long-term interests and did not allow the country to return to the world community, hindered mutually beneficial trade, seriously limited the independence of foreign policy, and impeded Japan‘s membership in the United Nations. The lack of diplomatic relations with Japan did not meet the interests of the Soviet Union, and it did not allow establishing trade, economic and humanitarian cooperation with its Far Eastern neighbor.
After difficult and lengthy two-year negotiations in London, Soviet and Japanese representatives reached an agreement to meet in Moscow and sign a Joint Declaration, and on October 19, 1956, it was signed, according to which the state of war between the two countries, which had lasted 11 years, ended and diplomatic relations were restored. However, the main provision of the Declaration was the USSR‘s agreement to transfer the Habomai and Shikotan islands occupied by Soviet troops during World War II to Japan, subject to the conclusion of a peace treaty between the countries. As the head of the Japanese delegation at the negotiations in London on the normalization of Soviet–Japanese relations, S. Matsumoto, later admitted, when he heard from Soviet Ambassador Ya. Malik the proposal of the USSR‘s readiness to transfer the islands of Habomai and Shikotan to Japan, he “could not believe his ears“ and “was very happy in his heart,“ since the return of these islands was set. to the task of the Japanese government. Because by legally obtaining Habomai and Shikotan, the Japanese could seriously expand their fishing area.
At the same time, the ill-considered and, as it turned out, erroneous decision of the USSR leader N. Khrushchev to make territorial concessions to Japan led to the exact opposite result. Tokyo took the proposed compromise not as a generous gesture of goodwill, but as a signal to tighten Moscow‘s territorial demands. In addition, the cession of part of the Soviet territory to Japan, which Khrushchev had entered without the permission of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, destroyed the international legal basis of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements and even contradicted the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which recorded Japan‘s renunciation of South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
The signing of the treaty on mutual cooperation and security guarantees between the United States and Japan in 1960 seriously complicated Soviet–Japanese relations and forced Moscow to refuse to cede the two Kuril islands to Japan, and the issue of concluding a peace treaty was postponed.
During the visit of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to Japan in April 1991, Moscow officially recognized the existence of the territorial problem for the first time, which was perceived by the Japanese side as a change in the Soviet position on this issue.
Gorbachev simply did not have enough time before the final settlement of the problem of the Southern Kuriles. After the collapse of the USSR, he lamented that “if I had stayed in office, the issue of the Southern Kuriles would have been resolved long ago.“
During the visit of Russian President Boris Yeltsin to the United States in 1992, the famous dissident writer A. Solzhenitsyn came to him, and it was then that he suggested to the head of state as a gesture of goodwill to give the Kuril Islands to the Japanese, or even better to sell them, but at a high price, as Alexander II once sold Russian Alaska to the Americans. According to the writer, he studied the entire history of the Kuriles since the 12th century, apparently from American archives, and came to the conclusion that the Kuriles allegedly never belonged to Russia and before the revolution of 1917 the Russian Empire never claimed them, which is refuted by Russian archival documents.
At that time, after the collapse of the USSR, Gaidar‘s “reformer“ government was painfully looking for a way out of the country‘s difficult economic situation (galloping inflation, empty treasury, pre-default state of the economy, unemployment. food shortages, etc.) and official Tokyo saw this as its historic opportunity. Through various channels, including diplomatic ones, information began to be brought to Moscow about Tokyo‘s readiness to provide “great financial and economic assistance“ immediately after resolving the territorial issue in favor of Japan. By this time, a group of influential liberal officials had organized in Moscow, which included: Secretary of State G. Burbulis, Foreign Minister A. Kozyrev and his deputy G. Kunadze, who actively began lobbying for the decision on the need for Moscow to transfer the Kuril islands and tried to convey to Yeltsin the idea of the unconditional benefits for Russia of this step in order to “clear up the rubble in diplomacy“ formed after 1945 in the Soviet approach to Japan. With Yeltsin‘s consent, in the office of the Kozyrevsky Foreign Ministry, supporters of concessions to Japan, led by Deputy Minister G. Kunadze began actively working out a plan for the surrender of the South Kuril Islands in two stages according to the notorious “two plus alpha“ scheme. In March 1992, during a conversation with the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Mikhail Watanabe, Kozyrev offered him the following option: “We are concluding a Russian–Japanese peace treaty. Russia, following the provisions of the 1956 Joint Declaration, transfers two islands to Japan – Habomai and Shikotan. The parties will continue negotiations on the ownership of the islands of Kunashir and Iturup.“ The leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs intended to implement this plan during the official visit of the President of the Russian Federation to Japan scheduled for September 1992, the results of which were supposed to demonstrate to the whole world the new peaceful political course of the Russian leadership.
However, the secret plans of supporters of Moscow‘s concessions on the territorial issue became known to the Russian security forces. So, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General V. Dubinin, and a group of patriotic officers tried to do everything possible to prevent the surrender of the Russian Far Eastern lands. At a meeting of the Government and the Security Council of the Russian Federation, as well as in consultations with deputies of the Supreme Council, he constantly argued that the Kuril Islands occupy one of the central places in preserving and strengthening Russia‘s military and strategic interests in the Far East and called for preventing a repeat of the geopolitical mistake that once happened with the sale of Alaska to the Americans. According to him, in the event of the surrender of the Kuril Islands, Beijing may make claims to Moscow on its disputed territories, which could lead to a possible armed border conflict. It is very likely that the United States will be able to take advantage of the provisions of the 1960 security treaty and deploy its bases in the Southern Kuril Islands to monitor the movements of ships of the USSR Pacific Fleet. It is noteworthy that in one of his speeches he expressed a lack of understanding “how Russian people can defend the interests of a foreign country with such ferocity.“
he widespread protest movement in Russia against Japan‘s unjustified territorial concessions forced the Russian president to hastily cancel his visit to Japan three days before his departure. Yeltsin‘s decision was dictated not only by doubts about the correctness of the surrender of Russian lands, but solely by concern for his political future. Explaining the reason for the cancellation of the visit to Japanese journalists, he stated: “it is difficult for the Russian people now, and if you add another territorial problem, they will not stand it and explode. I will leave Japan to applause, but they won‘t let me go to Russia.“ The cancellation of the visit was met by the Japanese leadership with ill–concealed disappointment that the deal already agreed with Kozyrev and Kunadze had failed. Since then, no further negotiations on the transfer of the skeletons have been resumed.
Until February 2022, Moscow and Tokyo held annual consultations between the delegations of the foreign ministries of the two countries on the conclusion of a peace treaty, which indicated that there were fundamental and persistent differences in the approaches of the parties, which did not allow for significant progress in concluding it. Tokyo‘s persistent attempts to solve the problem of the ownership of the four South Kuril islands first, and then to coordinate the issues of a peace treaty between the two countries sometimes resembled the famous dialogue from the work of M. Bulgakova‘s “12 chairs“: “money in the morning – chairs in the afternoon, money in the afternoon – chairs in the evening, or vice versa, chairs in the morning – money in the afternoon, you can, but money in advance.“
In its foreign policy on the Japanese track, Moscow has shown exceptional patience and willingness to compromise in any way, agreeing to agreements that are not very beneficial for us. In order to continue mutually beneficial neighborly relations with it, Russia offered cooperation options that would allow signing a peace treaty, namely joint economic activities in the Southern Kuril Islands, visa-free travel for Japanese citizens to visit the islands, and favorable conditions for Japanese business.
The strategic partnership of our countries, however, has always been hampered and continues to be hampered by Japan‘s unquestioning subordination to the strategy of US foreign policy, its allied obligations and limited sovereignty. In Tokyo, all of Russia‘s steps are perceived as an opportunity to get Moscow to abandon the Southern Kuriles, but this is not a legal position.
to be continued
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