The Pittsburgh Press (February 8, 1946)
Background of news –
The Kurile Islands
By Bertram Benedict
The United States government is reported to have asked the British and Russian governments for permission to make public the agreement reached at the Yalta Conference on giving the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union.
The Kuriles are a ribbon of 30-odd islands stretching about 750 miles from Hokkaido, northernmost island of Japan proper, to the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. The southernmost Kurile is only seven miles from Japan and the northernmost Kurile is the same distance from Kamchatka. The weather is almost as bad in the Kuriles as in the Aleutians.
The islands, sparsely inhabited, are mountainous and volcanic. In fact, the word Kurile comes from the Russian kurit, to smoke. The Japanese name for the islands is Chishima. The Kuriles have rich sulphur deposits, are heavily wooded, and are valuable also for their fisheries.
But it is primarily their geographical location which makes the Kuriles important. They form the outer barrier of the vast Sea of Okhotsk. While Japan held the Kuriles and Korea, Japan controlled the sea approaches to Siberia (and thus to the long island of Sakhalin and to Vladivostok) except for Kamchatka and the desolate region north of Kamchatka.
Now that the Soviet Union holds the Kuriles and Korea is no longer part of Japan, all of Eastern Siberia can be approached through waters controlled by Russia or by Korea or by China (Manchuria).
No threat to the U.S.
So the Russians maintain that they need the Kuriles for defense as much as the United States needs the former Japanese islands which the United States will claim either under outright annexation or under a UNO trusteeship.
The Kuriles in Russian hands can hardly present any military threat to the United States. Russia will have the great naval base which Japan had maintained at Paramushiro, but Russia already has a great naval base on Kamchatka, at Petropavlovsk, which is 200 miles nearer to the Aleutians. Even nearer to the Aleutians than Petropavlovsk, are the Russian-held Komandorksi islands.
When it was disclosed at the time of the San Francisco conference that Messrs. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed at Yalta to support separate membership in the UNO, for the White Russian and Ukrainian Soviet republics, Secretary of State Stettinius said that the only other secret political agreements at Yalta concerned initial membership in the UNO and territorial trusteeships.
A ‘military’ agreement
The Washington explanation is that the Kuriles agreement was not political, but military. It was one of the concessions whereby Russia was to enter the war against Japan; it was not disclosed at the time lest Japan attack Russia while Russia was still fighting Germany.
Even so, it cannot be said that the Kuriles cession comes under the Cairo Declaration of December 1, 1943. Messrs. Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-Shek agreed at Cairo that Japan was to be stripped of the territories “stolen” from China, of the Pacific islands occupied since 1914, of Korea, and of “other territories which she has taken by violence and greed.”
Japan got undisputed possession of the Kuriles by an agreement with Russia in 1875 which was voluntary on both sides. The Southern Kuriles had been settled chiefly by Japanese, the Northern Kuriles chiefly by Russians working south from Kamchatka.