New Books In Military History

At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender. Those eleven years are the subject of Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Sherzod Muminov. The book tells the story of the Japanese prisoners: how they were captured, their time in the camps, and how they tried to acclimatize to Japan after their release. Sherzod Muminov is a Lecturer in Japanese History at the University of East Anglia and winner of the inaugural Murayama Tsuneo Memorial Prize. He is a historian of transnational and international processes in East Asia and Eurasia, whose primary research deals with Japan’s makings as a modern nation from th