Max Hastings, in his book Nemesis about the war in the Pacific Theatre 1944-45, use several first-hand accounts in which the Japanese were referred to as samurai by Soviet soldiers. Another example is Viktor Leonov's Blood on the Shores which is an English translation and compilation of several texts he has written about his time as a Soviet Navy special recon marine in operations in Norway and Korea during WWII. In the last section, which covers his operations in Korea, he and his comrades constantly refer to their enemy as samurai.

If someone asks us to picture a samurai today, we can clearly imagine the archetypal samurai that we have seen depicted so many times in popular culture, but was knowledge about the samurai widespread in the Soviet Union before WWII? Where would the average Soviet soldier on the Pacific front have gotten the idea to call his new enemy for 'samurai'? Did Soviet propaganda paint the Japanese as samurai or was this nickname spread by the more educated among the Soviet soldiers?