In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labour camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives, memoirs and survivor interviews, to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and, for those who survived, life in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front.

Specially discounted copies of the book will be on sale for £25 at the event (RRP £36.95).

Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan by Sherzod Muminov is published by Harvard University Press (2022). It is available for purchase via this link.

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About the contributors:

Dr Sherzod Muminov is a multilingual historian and Lecturer in Japanese History at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches courses on the histories of Japan, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and POW and internment camps. Sherzod’s research dwells at the intersections of eras, empires, and ideologies, and draws from archives in Japanese, Russian, and English. He has co-edited (with Barak Kushner) two volumes on the dismantling of Japan’s imperial edifice in Asia, and his articles have been published in journals such as Cold War History and Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context.