Kaneko Seizan Boris and Japanese prisoners of war secret agreement

Lieutenant Mamiya’s role in arranging a secret pact between Boris Gromov and the Japanese prisoners of war is a turning point in the camp’s politics. The prisoners see cooperation as a possible route to limited self-government, but the agreement helps Boris consolidate power while the camp’s inmates remain subject to exploitation and death.

Background and Stakes

Mamiya’s mediation takes place in a Siberian coal mine where prisoners die from hunger, overwork, accidents, disease, exposure, and violence. The mine is managed as a strategic facility, and its political overseer prizes rising production over the lives of the laborers. Prisoners who die are disposed of in abandoned mine shafts; new arrivals replenish the workforce as it dwindles. In this setting, any offer of relief carries the risk of becoming another instrument of control.

Boris approaches the Japanese prisoners with an offer of cooperation. He says he wants their help in removing the current political overseer and presents the arrangement as mutually beneficial. He also warns that some prisoners inform on their compatriots, so the proposal must be kept from them. Mamiya understands that Boris is dangerous and deceptive, but the camp’s Japanese leader sees little to lose by considering the offer: the existing conditions are already intolerable.

Mamiya Arranges the Pact

Mamiya first discusses Boris’s proposal privately with a former lieutenant colonel who has become the unofficial leader of the Japanese prisoners. The colonel had commanded a unit that refused to surrender at a Khingan Mountain fortress even after Japan’s defeat. Mamiya tells him that Boris had held high rank in the secret police and emphasizes his capacity for deceit. The colonel agrees that the current overseer is also a threat and that the Japanese prisoners have little to lose by trying the deal.

A few days later, Mamiya arranges a private meeting between the colonel and Boris in a place away from prying eyes. He serves as interpreter while the two men speak for half an hour and conclude a secret pact with a handshake. Mamiya does not know the precise terms beyond the offer he had conveyed. Afterward, the two principals avoid direct contact and apparently exchange coded messages by secret means. Mamiya’s part as intermediary ends, and he hopes to have no further involvement with Boris.

Immediate Consequences

About a month later, Party Central removes the Georgian political overseer and sends a replacement. Two days after the replacement arrives, three Japanese prisoners are found dead, apparently killed by fellow prisoners and staged to look like suicides. Boris had warned that informers were among the Japanese; the men who died are believed to have been those informers. No investigation follows.

The sequence reveals the pact’s danger: a change in the camp’s political leadership coincides with internal violence, and Boris’s influence expands rather than diminishing. Mamiya later recognizes that the agreement has not improved the prisoners’ position. His retrospective account marks his earlier belief that they had nothing to lose as a grave misjudgment: the pact has helped Boris bring the camp nearly under his control.

Significance in Mamiya’s Account

The episode turns on a choice made under coercive conditions rather than on an equal negotiation. The Japanese prisoners seek a measure of autonomy by cooperating with Boris against the existing overseer, but Boris’s promise does not protect them from the camp’s machinery of violence. The removal of one official and the deaths of the suspected informers instead mark a transfer of power toward Boris.

The pact also foreshadows Mamiya’s deeper entanglement with Boris. Although he wants his role as intermediary to be over, he later becomes indispensable to Boris’s operations, and ultimately forms a plan to kill him. The brief meeting thus becomes more than a tactical arrangement: it is the first step in a relationship whose consequences Mamiya cannot escape.