Andrey G. Fesyun

Basing on the documents from the investigation file, the paper displays the life of the famous actress of the Japanese Theatre and Cinema - Okada Yoshiko. Together with her beloved man - Sugimoto Ryokichi (who was the member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Japan), she crossed the Soviet-Japanese border in Sakhalin Island in 1938, hoping to start a new happy life in the Socialist country. Instead, they were immediately arrested and forced to “admit” that they came to the USSR with the spying purposes. After about a year Sugimoto war judges and shot, and Okada was sentenced for 10 years in the concentration camps. Nevertheless, she was not broken down, she managed to survive, come to Moscow and start working on the State Radio and for some Moscow theatres.

The article continues the study of the political biography of Nosaka Sanzo, one of the most prominent leaders of the Japanese Communist Party in the twentieth century. Drawing on documents from Soviet party and foreign-policy archives, materials of the US occupation authorities, CIA reports and publications of the Japanese party press, it examines Nosaka’s return to Japan after the war, his contacts with American and Soviet representatives, his role in shaping the line of “peaceful revolution”, the subsequent subordination of the JCP to Soviet and Chinese directives, and the circumstances of Nosaka’s late party condemnation in 1992. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between Nosaka’s personal political strategy, intra-party conflicts, external influence from Moscow and Beijing, and the logic of the Cold War. The author argues that Nosaka’s figure cannot be reduced either to the image of the “face of the party” or to the later party version of “betrayal”. He appears simultaneously as a communist theorist, a mediator between the JCP and external centers of the communist movement, a cautious politician inclined to compromise, and a participant in a system dependent on foreign support. The case of Nosaka illustrates how party organizations construct and revise their own past, and how the political assessment of the same action may change radically depending on the historical context.

Drawing on documents from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the article examines the fate of one of the most prominent figures of the Japanese Communist Party, Nosaka Sanzo: his rise to power, his contacts and cooperation with leaders of the communist movement in the Soviet Union, China, and Korea, his relations with the United States occupation forces in Japan, and his tragic final years.