Rebuilding the Soviet Far East: the politics of industry and infrastructure after WWII

Abstract

Scholars who write about the Soviet Far East after WWII, often focus on high-end politics, such as Soviet-Japanese relations or the dawning the Cold War. Also, the immediate postwar period is usually squeezed between the Soviet victory over Japan and Stalin’s death in 1953. Thus, both time and space in locations as the Maritime Region (Primorskii Krai) are frozen. This presentation enquires into various efforts carried out by the local government to develop the region after 1945. It will highlight the politics of creating industrial, mining and infrastructural projects, and how they had broader effects on regional and Soviet politics. This presentation also deals with a historic aspect of the region that has yet to receive a thorough academic inquiry: the role of Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) as an economic force in rebuilding the Soviet state. A preliminary analysis of Russian published sources reveals that these POWs were not “mere afterthoughts of the war”, and that the Soviet government dealt with a wide number issues, such as securing their survival and its dependence on these POWs as a powerful workforce. In a larger framework, this presentation will contribute to our understanding of Soviet central-local tensions and Soviet-Japanese relations from a local perspective.