Japanese presence in the Far East of Russia on the eve and at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War

The work is devoted to the history of Soviet-Japanese relations before and at the beginning of the Second World War. The article explores the problems of the Japanese presence in the far East of Russia. Having reached its peak during the Civil War and foreign intervention in Russia, the Japanese presence has been steadily declining since 1922. The documents revealed in the Far Eastern archives confirm the theses about the departure of the Japanese from the USSR in the 1920s-1930s voiced by Russian historians, the curtailment of their economic activities and the closure of Japanese consular offices (Novosibirsk, Odessa, etc.). The interwar period is characterized by the gradual growth of the Soviet-Japanese contradictions, which largely determined the entry of the two states into the opposing military-political blocs. And the repressions of the late 1930s and the Soviet-Japanese military conflicts resulted in the almost complete disappearance of Japanese migrants in the USSR. In Russian historiography, researchers point to the gradual disappearance of Japanese migrants in the USSR from the mid-1920s to 1937. However, the Japanese were still present in the territory of the USSR on the eve and at the beginning of the Second World War. In the early 1940s, in the Far East of the USSR, there were consular offices of Japan and Manchukuo, the Japanese worked in coal, oil, and fishing concessions, some Japanese lived in Vladivostok and other Soviet cities or, being convicted, were in prison. Some Japanese engineers and teachers were officially invited to work in the USSR in the 1920s. Still, the issues of Japanese presence in the Far East of Russia at the beginning of the Second World War have not been covered in Russian historiography. Discovered documents allowed to restore the historical picture of the release of the Japanese sailors arrested at the beginning of the Second World War in Soviet waters. The study will restore the forgotten pages of the history of the Japanese in Russia.