Battle of Lake Khasan - Background

Background

For most of the first half of the twentieth century there was considerable tension between Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing along their common borders in what is now North East China. The Chinese Eastern Railway or (CER) was a railway in northeastern China (Manchuria). It connected China and the Russian Far East. The southern branch of the CER, known in the West as the South Manchuria Railway, became the locus and partial casus belli for the Russo-Japanese War and subsequent incidents leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War, and a series of Soviet-Japanese Border Wars. Larger incidents included the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929 and the Mukden Incident between Japan and China in 1931. The battle of Lake Khasan was fought between two powers which had long distrusted each other.

The confrontation was triggered when the Soviet Far East Army and Soviet State Security (NKVD) Border Guard reinforced its Khasan border with Manchuria. This was prompted in part by the famous defection one month before of Soviet General G.S. Lyushkov, in charge of all NKVD forces in the Soviet Far East at Hunchun, located in the heart of the Tumen River Area. He provided the Japanese with critical intelligence on the poor state of Soviet Far Eastern forces and the wholesale purge of army officers