The project focuses on the international roots of the Zionist activism of Iosif Trumpeldor by triangulating his social and cultural experience in the POW camp Hamadera during the Russo-Japanese War with the contemporaneous heiminism movement organized around Kōtoku Shūsui and the revolutionary propaganda efforts in the Japanese POW camps by the Populist revolutionary Nikolai Russel. Reconstructing the indirect dialogue between Russel and Trumpeldor via Japan shows Sino-Japanese anarchism’s impact on the Russian and Jewish democratic thought-practices, recovering the place of Asian revolutionaries in creation of the global democratic paradigm. By focusing on the study of the writings, biographies, and publishing and pedagogical activity of three historical figures, the goal is to create an »effective« history of the »Hamadera moment« as a moment of dialogue among Japanese-Russian-Jewish cultures and political aspirations that went into the formation of early Zionism. This can be best understood against the background of Dmitri Shumsky’s recent historical revision of early Zionist thought »beyond the nation-state.«

Olga V. Solovieva studied Russian, German and Comparative Literature at the Moscow State University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Yale. She taught at Yale College, Smith College, Georgia Tech, and University of Chicago. Currently, she is Researcher in Comparative and Slavonic Literatures at the Center of Excellence—Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. She is the author of Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (2018) and The Russian Kurosawa, or the Art of Speaking Differently (2023), co-editor of Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (2021) and editor of Belarus—Faces of Resistance (2025).