Russo-Japanese agreement on the Far East

On 3 July 1916, or 20 June by the Julian calendar, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov and the Japanese ambassador in Petrograd, Ichirō Motono, signed a convention on cooperation in the Far East. Its public text was short. In the preamble the two empires announced that they were joining their efforts to maintain lasting peace in that part of the world. In the first article Russia and Japan undertook that neither of them would become party to any arrangement or political combination directed against the other. In the second they agreed that if the territorial rights or special interests of either party in the Far East, as recognised by the other, were threatened, the two would consult on how to support each other in defending those rights and interests. On the same day the same signatories signed a second document, which was to remain strictly secret.

From enemies to allies

Eleven years earlier the two states had ended a war in which Russia lost southern Manchuria and half of Sakhalin to Japan. They soon came to terms, however. In 1907, 1910 and 1912 they concluded a series of agreements, some of them secret, in which they divided Manchuria and Mongolia into spheres of influence: the north for Russia, the south for Japan. The convention of 1916 was the fourth link in this chain, and according to the United States ambassador in Tokyo, George Guthrie, its public part went little beyond the convention of 4 July 1910.

The novelty was the war. Russia and Japan were fighting on the same side, and since 1914 Japan had been selling the Russians rifles and ammunition, which the tsarist army desperately lacked. In Japan an alliance with Russia had been talked of since the beginning of the war. According to the Russian ambassador in Tokyo, Nikolai Malevsky-Malevich, there was hardly a newspaper or periodical that did not write about it. The chief advocate of the alliance was Field Marshal Aritomo Yamagata, a former prime minister and one of the most influential men in the country. In February 1915 he presented a memorandum to the government: he doubted an Entente victory, expected the war to end in a draw and foresaw tensions in Asia in which, in his view, the United States would become involved. For that reason Japan needed, alongside its alliance with Britain, an alliance with Russia.

The government of Prime Minister Shigenobu Ōkuma received these ideas coolly, and the foreign minister, Kikujirō Ishii, was likewise not eager for an alliance with the continental giant. Yamagata therefore turned to the diplomacy of courts. Tsar Nicholas II sent Grand Duke George Mikhailovich to Tokyo, officially to offer congratulations on the coronation of Emperor Yoshihito in November 1915. When the grand duke arrived in Tokyo in January 1916, the emperor went to the station in person to meet him. After such a reception open opposition to the rapprochement was no longer possible. On 18 February Motono handed Sazonov a note proposing the opening of official negotiations.

The secret alliance

The secret agreement, signed together with the convention, built on the secret arrangements of 1907–1912. In it both sides recognised that their vital interests required that China should not fall under the political domination of any third power hostile to Russia or Japan. If joint steps taken to this end led such a power to declare war on one of the parties, the other was to come to its aid at the first request, and neither could conclude a separate peace with it. The conditions and manner of armed assistance were to be settled jointly by the competent authorities of the two states. An important reservation was contained in the fourth article: neither party was obliged to give assistance until it had received assurances from its own allies that they would support it in a manner corresponding to the gravity of the conflict. The agreement was to remain in force until 14 July 1921 and to be extended if neither party denounced it.

The third power was not named. Germany, which might try to return to China after the war, came into question, but so did the United States. According to an article published by the Japanese portal Nippon.com on the agreement’s centenary, the only Russian minister who knew of the secret agreement was the prime minister, Boris Stürmer.

The railway and the Sungari

Behind the scenes concrete benefits were also being negotiated. The Japanese press wrote that Russia would sell Japan the section of the Chinese Eastern Railway from Changchun, where the Japanese South Manchuria Railway ended, to the second station on the Sungari, about 75 miles (120 km), and admit the Japanese to navigation on that river, until then reserved for Russians and Chinese. Payment was to take the form of deliveries of war material. Some newspapers added that Japan had wanted the whole line as far as Harbin and the northern half of Sakhalin, but that Russia had refused. On 16 July Guthrie cabled Washington that Foreign Minister Ishii had read these provisions to the British ambassador, including fishing rights off the coast of the Russian Far East. The announcement of these arrangements was postponed, because the railway section still had to be valued and China’s consent obtained for navigation on its river.

Reception and later fate

The Japanese foreign ministry released the text of the convention to the press on 7 July, and the next day it appeared in the official gazette. Russia published it in its collection of laws on 25 July. The semi-official Japanese press explained that Japan’s “special interests” included, among other things, the lease of Jiaozhou, China’s undertaking not to cede the province of Fujian to anyone, and the rights in South Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia won in the treaties of 1915. In Peking the agreement was read as a Russian concession to Japanese ambitions, unfavourable to China. Sazonov assured the American ambassador, David Francis, that the United States had no reason for concern and that the agreement would make it harder for Germany to return to the competition for Chinese trade. Francis reported, however, that many Russians criticised the agreement and that in Petrograd there was a feeling that Russia would have preferred to put it off until the end of the war, but that Japan had pressed for haste.

The alliance proved short-lived. Less than three weeks after the signing Sazonov lost his post, and the transfer of the railway section never took place. After the October Revolution the Bolsheviks repudiated the secret treaties of tsarist Russia and began to publish them. A translation of the text of the secret Russo-Japanese agreement was printed on 2 March 1918 by the New York Evening Post, which stated that it came from the archives of the Russian foreign ministry. The convention of 1916 was nevertheless the high point of the rapprochement between the two states, which a decade earlier had fought each other over Manchuria.