World War Two victory is inseparable from the heroic struggle of the Soviet and Chinese peoples. Speech at the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism in the European theatre of World War II organised by the Workers Party of Britain. 10 May 2025.
Today’s meeting is a timely initiative – 80 years on, the struggle against fascism, against imperialist war and genocide, for the rights of nations, and for a people’s peace and a better life for working people have lost none of their poignancy or urgency.
It is right that we remember this anniversary. And that we remember it from the standpoint of the working class rather than just that of the ruling circles. The war touched the lives of every family in this country just as it did those of every family in all the countries that were swept into its maelstrom. And the victory was the result of the broadest possible unity of democratic forces worldwide.
But whilst the people of every country, including the progressive and democratic forces in the axis powers themselves, played their part, above all, this victory was inseparable from the heroic exploits, struggle and sacrifice of the great Soviet people of all nationalities and the great Chinese people.
Today, we celebrate the victorious end of the war in Europe, but the war in East Asia and the Pacific still had more than three months to run and whilst it was clear that Japanese militarism would be defeated, nobody could be sure how long that would take and how many lives it would still claim. That was the sobering reality to which people awoke after the greatly deserved revelry of the first VE Day.
So, in being asked to speak about the war in the east on this occasion, I’ll try to draw out the essential relationship between what were the two key fronts of a single united struggle. Fronts that were mutually reinforcing and inseparable. And at the heart of this single struggle was the combat alliance, the friendship forged in blood, between the peoples of China, Russia and the other constituent republics of the USSR.
The anti-fascist war in China started earliest and lasted the longest. Japanese imperialism, which had first embarked on the road of aggression against China in the nineteenth century, occupied China’s three northeastern provinces in 1931, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo. In 1937, Japan began an all-out war of aggression against China. In the course of 14 years, China suffered over 35 million casualties. As Xi Jinping put it in his speech marking the 70th anniversary of victory:
“The victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression is the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times. This great triumph crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonise and enslave China and put an end to China’s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times.”
He added: “During the war, with huge national sacrifice, the Chinese people held their ground in the main theatre in the East of the World Anti-Fascist War, thus making a major contribution to its victory.”
And as then Chinese leader Hu Jintao put it 10 years previously:
“The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression constitutes a glorious page in the history of the World Anti-Fascist War, for it broke out much earlier and lasted the longest. For a long time, we Chinese contained and pinned down the main forces of Japanese militarism in the China theatre and annihilated more than 1.5 million Japanese troops. This played a decisive role in the total defeat of the Japanese aggressors. The war of resistance lent a strategic support to battles of China’s allies, assisted the strategic operations in the Europe and Pacific theatres, and restrained and disrupted the attempt of Japanese, German and Italian fascists to coordinate their strategic operations… The victory of the war in China sets a shining example of the weak vanquishing the strong for the people all over the world and boosted the confidence and morale of the oppressed and victimised nations to carry on their liberation wars.”
In a word, by their heroic struggle the Chinese people not only rose up to save their nation and civilisation. By pinning down huge numbers of aggressor troops, they prevented Japan from attacking the Soviet Union, thereby ensuring that the Red Army never had to fight on two fronts simultaneously, something that was absolutely crucial to expediting both a victorious conclusion to the war in Europe but also to an overall and decisive victory over the axis powers as a whole.
In 1931, Soviet leader JV Stalin uttered these prophetic words: ““We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We have to close that gap in 10 years. Either we do it or we will be wiped out.”
In putting matters in this way, Stalin was mindful of threats to both the USSR’s East and West.
Since the emergence of Japan as a capitalist nation after the bourgeois revolution of the late 1860s known as the Meiji Restoration, the ruling class of Japan, a country lacking in most raw materials, had cast covetous eyes at the Far East of Russia and at Siberia, with its vast area, small population, but almost limitless mineral and natural wealth.
In 1904, Japan launched a war against Russia, winning a stunning victory the next year. This served notice to the whole world of the emergence of Japan as a major imperialist power, whilst the shock of Russia’s defeat was a major contributory factor to the Russian Revolution of 1905.
Following the October Revolution, Japan joined all the imperialist powers in the war of intervention against the infant Soviet state. In 1918, Japan occupied Russia’s far eastern provinces, including the port of Vladivostok, and parts of Siberia. The Red Army forced their withdrawal in 1922.
The Soviet Union and Japan established diplomatic relations in 1925, but their relationship continued to be characterised by tension and suspicion. Such tensions and suspicions could only but increase after the Japanese aggression against China began in earnest in 1931.
In December 1931, the Soviet Union proposed to conclude a non-aggression pact with Japan. When the Japanese side rejected the Soviet proposal, the Soviet Union attempted to sell its last remaining significant economic asset in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the Chinese Eastern Railway. The negotiations on this were difficult and protracted and the purchase agreement was not signed until March 1935.
By this time, the most acute and direct tensions between the Soviet Union and Japan were starting to focus on the Mongolian People’s Republic, which at that time was the Soviet Union’s only true ally.
From January 1935, there were frequent clashes, numbering in the hundreds, on the border between Mongolia and the so-called Manchukuo.
In November 1936, having spurned Soviet offers of a non-aggression treaty, Japan and Nazi Germany, later joined by Italy, signed the so-called “Anti-Comintern Pact”, which, in reality, could only be directed against the Soviet Union. In the same year, a mutual assistance pact was concluded between the Soviet Union and Mongolia.
As tensions mounted, it clearly became a matter of when not if a major confrontation would take place between Soviet and Japanese forces in or adjacent to Mongolia. The stakes would be high. A decisive Soviet defeat would likely prompt a full-scale Japanese invasion of the Soviet Union, with the equal likelihood that this would prompt a further attack on the Soviet Union from the West, whereas a decisive Soviet victory would contain the Japanese threat for a considerable period and allow the Soviet Union relative freedom to devote its attentions to preparation to meet an attack from the West.
That major confrontation was to take place from May to September 1939.
A minor dispute over border demarcation became the pretext for a Japanese attack that triggered a fierce, if undeclared war over several months between Japan and the Soviet Union on the territory of Mongolia before war had even been declared in Europe. Known as the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, after the river of the same name, this little-known conflict actually deserves to be known as a key battle that shaped the entire subsequent course of the Second World War. Its 85th anniversary was solemnly and grandly marked last year during President Putin’s state visit to Mongolia.
Just one day after the Red Army forces, commanded by Marshal Zhukov, won a decisive victory in Mongolia, Hitler invaded Poland.
For their part, in the midst of the fighting, the Japanese leadership had been shocked to learn of the conclusion of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August. Japanese feelings were bitterly summarised by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun as follows:
“The spirit of the Anti-Comintern Pact has been reduced to a scrap of paper and Germany has betrayed an ally.”
Air clashes between the two sides continued in September, but, smarting from the betrayal of their German ally and the resolute blows of the Red Army, the Japanese signed a ceasefire agreement with the Soviets on 16 September.
One western military historian has described the significance of the Battle of Khalkhin Gol as follows:
“Although this engagement is little-known in the West, it had profound implications on the conduct of World War II. It may be said to be the first decisive battle of World War II, because it determined that the two principal Axis powers, Germany and Japan, would never geographically link up their areas of control through Russia. The defeat convinced the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo that the policy of the North Strike group, favoured by the army, which wanted to seize Siberia as far as Lake Baikal for its resources, was untenable. Instead, the South Strike group, favoured by the navy, which wanted to seize the resources of southeast Asia… gained the ascendancy, leading directly to the attack on Pearl Harbour two and a half years later in December 1941. The Japanese would never make an offensive movement towards Russia again.”
However, even as he summoned 1,000 tanks and 1,200 warplanes from Soviet Far Eastern forces to join the desperate battles against the German invaders, Stalin ensured that 19 reserve divisions, 1,200 tanks and some 1,000 aircraft remained in Mongolia to confront the Japanese.
For their part, having felt betrayed by their German ally, in April 1941, two months before the planned German attack on the Soviet Union, Japan returned the favour by concluding its own neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, when Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka chose to go home via Moscow following a visit to Germany!
Writing about this many years later in his memoirs, ‘With the Century’, the Korean revolutionary leader Kim Il Sung observed:
“Seeing … that Japan was taking the initiative in proposing to maintain peaceful relations and respect each other’s territorial integrity, the Soviet Union, that had been guarding against a possible pincer attack from the east and west by Japan and Germany, felt that this was a lucky chance. In those days the Soviet Union was faced with an unprecedented threat of invasion by Nazi Germany. The large German forces massed on its western frontier might attack at any time. Japan’s professed neutrality in this situation, in spite of her covetous eye on Siberia, gave the Soviet Union the respite of a possible delay in having to fight a two-front war.
“When Matsuoka was leaving Moscow, Stalin was said to have seen him off at the railway station. This fact eloquently spoke of the mental state of the Soviet leadership on the eve of the Soviet-German war.
“So how ignorant it was to think that the Soviet Union had become a friend of Japan by signing the neutrality pact! The more tense the situation is, the more sober must be the estimate and judgement of it.”
The Soviet-Japanese pact was to remain in force until nine months before its expiry date of April 1946.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan ninety days after the defeat of Germany. Stalin fulfilled his agreement to the letter, with the launch of Operation August Storm on 8 August 1945.
However, even whilst professing neutrality with Japan, and despite the huge burden of the war with Germany, it would be quite wrong to assume that the Soviet Union was indifferent to the struggle against Japanese militarism in the intervening years. In fact, the Soviet Union was deeply involved in military struggle against Japanese imperialism the whole time.
As Hu Jintao said in his 2005 speech: “The victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese aggression was inseparable from the sympathy and support of all the peace- and justice-loving countries and peoples, international organisations and various anti-fascist forces. The Soviet Union was the first to provide invaluable aid to the Chinese people in the war.”
This week, in his article for the Russian media, published just prior to his state visit to attend the Moscow celebrations, Xi Jinping noted: “In the darkest hours of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Soviet Volunteer Group, which was part of the Soviet Air Force, came to Nanjing, Wuhan and Chongqing to fight alongside the Chinese people, bravely engaging Japanese invaders in aerial combat—many sacrificing their precious lives.”
Moreover, in the summer of 1942, the Soviet Union took the initiative to form the International Allied Forces together with Chinese and Korean communists and other patriots. Kim Il Sung wrote in his Memoirs:
“With the organisation of the IAF, a great change took place in our armed struggle. It can be said that, with the formation of the allied forces as a turning point, we switched from the stage of our joint struggle with the Chinese people to the stage of extensive joint struggle, which meant an alliance of the armed forces of Korea, China and the Soviet Union, the stage of a new common front joining the mainstream of the worldwide anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle.
“Even when the Soviet Union badly needed the strength of another single regiment or a single battalion because of the extremely difficult situation at the front, it never touched the allied forces but helped them so that they could make full preparations for the showdown against the Japanese imperialists.”
Of course, the solidarity and support in this epic conflict was never one-way. It was always mutual. Many thousands of Chinese and Koreans fought in the ranks of the Red Army. One of them was Mao Anying, Chairman Mao’s oldest son, who was to later give his life in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. Anying, who had been living in the Soviet Union, petitioned Stalin to be allowed to enlist. He took part in the fighting to liberate Poland and Czechoslovakia, and in the final battle for Berlin.
When the Soviet Union formally entered the war against Japan, he was decorated for his role in the liberation of Northeast China.
In his article for the Russian Gazette this week, Xi Jinping referred to Yan Baohang as a legendary intelligence agent of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Yan Baohang was an intelligence agent of the CPC and the Communist International, personally entrusted by later Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Based behind enemy lines in Chongqing, in May 1941 the one-time student at Edinburgh University was able to discover the exact date – June 22 – of the planned German attack on the Soviet Union, thanks to his close connections with then Chinese ruler Chiang Kai-shek and particularly with his wife Soong Mei-ling. At that time, the Nazis were trying hard to convince Chiang to throw in his lot with the axis powers. Yan managed to get the information to the communist base area in Yan’an by June 6, where Mao Zedong ordered it to be conveyed to Moscow and where it then reached Stalin, enabling important preparations to be made in time. On June 30, eight days after the German invasion, Stalin telegraphed Yan’an, to thank Yan “for his accurate information that prompted us to prepare for what’s to come.”
Naturally, as in Europe, many other forces participated in the anti-fascist war in the Asia Pacific region, not least the communist-led guerrilla forces in Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Malaya, the Philippines and elsewhere, as well, of course, as the United States of America and other powers.
The defeat of Japanese militarism created in large measure the conditions for the successive founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948 and the People’s Republic of China in 1949, as well as expediting the collapse of the European colonial powers in Asia.
It therefore vindicates the overall assessment of the war made by JV Stalin in his February 1946 speech to Moscow electors:
“Thus, as a result of the first crisis of the capitalist system of world economy, the First World War broke out; and as a result of the second crisis, the Second World War broke out.
“This does not mean, of course, that the Second World War was a copy of the first. On the contrary, the Second World War differed substantially in character from the first. It must be borne in mind that before attacking the Allied countries the major fascist states — Germany, Japan and Italy — destroyed the last remnants of bourgeois-democratic liberties at home and established there a cruel terrorist regime, trampled upon the principle of the sovereignty and free development of small countries, proclaimed as their own the policy of seizing foreign territory, and shouted from the rooftops that they were aiming at world domination and the spreading of the fascist regime all over the world; and by seizing Czechoslovakia and the central regions of China, the axis powers showed that they were ready to carry out their threat to enslave all the freedom-loving peoples. In view of this, the Second World War against the axis powers, unlike the First World War, assumed from the very outset the character of an anti-fascist war, a war of liberation, one of the tasks of which was to restore democratic liberties. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against the axis powers could only augment — and really did augment — the anti-fascist and liberating character of the Second World War….
“That is how it stands with the question of the origin and character of the Second World War.”