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That again. harrys.com/revolutions.
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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Last time, we returned to the Romanov household and the elevation of Nicholas and Alexandra to emperor and empress of Russia. We also talked a little bit about the position of the Russian Empire in Europe, specifically with regards to the two rivals whose rivalry would define the next half century or so of European war and diplomacy: France and Germany.
Today, we are going to extend that conversation, but take it to the other side of the world to introduce the origins of a brand new element to our story. The element that will get to go down in history as being one of the principal triggers for the cascading crisis that would become known as the Revolution of 1905, and that’s the Russo-Japanese War.
The Russian Empire had first started pushing east across the Ural Mountains in the later 1500s, and they just kept pushing right across Siberia until they got to the Pacific coast, and once they got to the Pacific coast, they launched seafaring explorations towards the Americas in the early 1700s. Now, they made some stab at setting up colonies in what is today Alaska, but these would never be well-established or profitable, and as every fifth grader who ever did a report on the state of Alaska knows — hi, that’s me — Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. But while they pulled back from the Americas, they had no intention of pulling back from the Pacific. In 1858, and then again in 1860, Russia signed treaties with Qing dynasty China, establishing a new border between China and what was becoming called the Russian far east.
As soon as these treaties were signed, Russia immediately started building their first permanent Pacific port: Vladivostok. Now Vladivostok was fine for the moment, it was a nice toehold, but it was so far north that it was iced over much of the year, so the Russians wanted something more. They wanted a permanent warm water port on the Pacific. And as they watch the failing Qing dynasty buckle under the weight of its own decay, and the battering of European imperial encroachment, policymakers back in St. Petersburg prepared to take advantage of the situation.
The minister who would wind up taking the lead on Russia’s political, economic and diplomatic interest in the far east is conveniently somebody we already know very well: Sergei Witte. The far east was destined to play a major role in Witte’s vision for the future of Russia’s imperial economy. The abundant natural resources of Manchuria, the Chinese territory now bordering the Russian far east, would provide excellent stock for the rest of Witte’s industrialization project. Further Russian encroachment into Manchuria would also likely net them that good stable, warm water port on the Pacific that would in turn plug them into the Asia Pacific trade. The whole region could also then serve as a logical place of resettlement for the increasingly overcrowded parts of core Russia and encouraging migration and resettlement east, which would ease the burdens on the natural resources of central Russia burdens, which became so tragically apparent in the midst of the 1891 famine.
Now the centerpiece of this project, and really the centerpiece of almost everything Witte is up to here in the 1890s, was the Trans-Siberian railway. Construction on the railway began going in both directions in 1891, and remember, Nicholas was on hand to lay the foundation stone of the Terminus station in Vladivostok. Once the western and eastern ends of the empire were linked by this vital artery, the strength of the Russian Empire would increase exponentially. That was the plan.
Now the arrival of Russia in the region introduced them as a new player into what was already an increasingly volatile rivalry between declining China and another power that, much like Russia, was trying to rapidly modernize itself out of an archaic feudal world in the later 19th century: Japan. Now I can’t, like, start from scratch attempting to explain all of Japanese history, but just so you know, there was this thing called the Meiji Restoration, which overthrew the old shogun system in 1868, and then embarked on a radical remaking of Japanese society, its political system, military forces, social structures and its economy. The new leaders of Japan saw how rapidly things were changing in the world and how far behind they were when it came to dealing with western Europe and the United States, who were now forging empires with steel and steam.
So post-Meiji restoration Japan embarked on a program of aggressive modernization and industrialization. The idea was that if they did this hard enough and fast enough that they could join the great imperial games of the late 19th century instead of becoming one of its victims. So they wanted a modern political empire and the economic wealth and social clout that went with it. And they too eyed the declining behemoth of China as a ripe target.
But, first on the agenda: Korea.
Now, Korea at this point was technically an autonomous kingdom operating under the political hegemony of the Qing dynasty. Now the ruling faction at the Korean court was conservative; they were allied with China and trying to maintain their traditional isolationism, but much like the rest of east Asia, they were being pried open by western imperial crowbars. Opposing the traditional monarchy in the 1880s was a group of reformist who wanted to follow Japan’s example towards industrial modernization, and in fact, saw the future of Korea as Japan-facing rather than China-facing.
In 1884, a clique of these reformers, fully backed by the Japanese, attempted a coup, but the Korean royal family called in help from China. The Chinese sent 1500 soldiers, and pretty soon Japanese and Chinese troops were fighting openly in the streets of Seoul, but the Japanese did not yet want an all out war with China, so they withdrew. The end result of all this was a thing called the Convention of Tientsin that required both China and Japan to pull their forces out of Korea, and that in the future, neither could send military forces onto the peninsula without notifying the other. And this was a win for Japan, because Korea was no longer just the preserve of China, it was a co-protectorate with Japan, and this for the Japanese was a step in the right direction.
So fast forward 10 years — 10 years during which China got progressively weaker, and Japan got progressively stronger — and a peasant rebellion erupted in Korea against the corruption in inequality of the old Korean monarchy. The Korean Royal family again appealed to the Chinese, who dispatched about 3000 troops to help quell the revolt. But this was all done without notifying Japan, as per the convention everyone had just signed. Armed with this casus belli, the Japanese invaded in 1894, starting what we now call the first Sino-Japanese War. Japan’s goals for this war were to drive out the Chinese and the rebellion, dislodge the pro-Chinese royal family, and install a pro-Japanese puppet government. Japan stronger in every way on land and at sea made short work of their enemies, and in April, 1895, they forced China to signed the five article Treaty of Shimonoseki.
China renounced its claims to Korea, promised to pay a war indemnity to Japan, as well as make further trade concessions, but most importantly for our story, recognizing new territorial acquisitions that Japan had won during the war. And most importantly-most importantly, for our story, this meant Japan’s occupation of the Liaodong Peninsula, which is that peninsula that juts south into the Yellow Sea between mainland China to the west and the Korean Peninsula to the East.
It is this part of the treaty which brings us back to Russia. Now up until the first Sino-Japanese War, Russia and Japan had never really had any major beefs between them. Sergei Witte certainly had friendly relations with Japanese diplomats, and he looked forward to profitable trade with Japan in the future. But the Russians did not like the idea of Japan occupying the strategically valuable Liaodong Peninsula, because a.) it seemed to be upsetting the existing balance of power in the region, and b.) the Russians themselves were eyeing the Liaodong Peninsula as a place they might like to occupy to get that warm water port on the Pacific they so desired.
So as I said, up until now the Russians had maintained good relations with both China and Japan, but now they had to pick a side. Do we partner with the rising modernizing expansionist Japan, or do we recast ourselves as the protectors of Chinese sovereignty? Since failing China seemed like a better conduit for Russian ambition than rising Japan, Witte threw Russia’s lot in with the Chinese. So within a week of the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Russian diplomats stepped in and said, this treaty is no good, you need to rewrite it. And the change they demanded was straightforward: Japan needed to give the Liaodong Peninsula back to the Chinese. In exchange, China would pay a larger war indemnity than they had originally agreed to.
Now, if it had just been Russia making this demand, Japan might’ve held firm. But Russia was flanked by both France and Germany, which is why this little episode gets dubbed the Triple Intervention. Concluding they could not take all three European powers at once, the Japanese backed down and withdrew from the peninsula by the end of 1895.
So this raises an interesting question. France and Germany are both siding with Russia on this? What’s going on? How is that even possible? I thought the French and Germans were rivals in all things.
Well, from the French perspective, they felt obligated to play along with Russia’s demands in the far east, even if they weren’t thrilled about it. Russian moves around Manchuria had already induced a statement from the French Foreign Office to the effect that their military alliance only covered events in Europe. France was not going to fight a war on Russia’s behalf over Manchuria or Korea. I mean, the French had their own southeast Asian imperial interests in Vietnam to attend to, and didn’t want to get sucked into something that was of no benefit to French national interest.
But there was more to consider, which brings us back to what we talked about a bit last week, and that Germany is now working aggressively to turn the tsar away from the French and towards the Germans. So while the French were reluctant partners in this triple intervention, the Germans were enthusiastic partners: heck yeah, we’ll help. We’d love to help you advance your hegemony in the East, there’s nothing we’d like better. And with Germany showing so much enthusiasm, the French concluded they could either back their new ally Russia, or lose influence to Germany. So, it became the Triple Intervention. And really this is just a love triangle over Russia between her two suitors, France and Germany.
But in reality, German enthusiasm for supporting Russian interests in the far east was not all that it appeared to be. Both Bismarck and the kaiser hoped that getting Russia embroiled in the far east would advanced German interest in Europe. The Russians would wind up committing their resources to the other side of the world, leaving them less able to commit resources in Europe. This meant both on Germany’s eastern flank, as well as in the Balkans, which would make Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary happy. It would also put stress on the new Franco-Russian alliance because the French were very dubious about all of this, and would prefer the Russians stay focused on European affairs, not go gallivanting around Manchuria. And plus, as a final bonus, it would probably bring the Russians into direct conflict with the British. So for Germany, helping Russia get embroiled in the far East was just win, win, win, win, win, win, win.
Now another thing we need to expand on here is something else I mentioned last week, which is the kaiser’s direct written correspondence with dearest Nikki, which constantly urged and encouraged Russian ambitions in the far east. And all of this urging and encouraging was couched in extremely racist terms about the quote unquote yellow peril that was allegedly facing Europe. The kaiser painted a picture — and at times literally sent allegorical paintings to picking this by the way — of Nicholas and the Russians as the great savior of the white race, that they stood between the heathen yellow hordes of Asia and stalwart Christian civilization. The kaiser wondered at the horrors that would come if modernizing Japan were able to see seize control of China, forge a huge conscript army and invade Europe like some new Mongol horde.
Now, this is all delusional and racist, and it’s also a hell of a thing to be pitching this scenario of a Yellow Peril at the precise moment when the western European powers are systematically invading and enveloping most of Asia. But Nicholas himself was just racist and delusional enough to believe it. Remember, we talked about that tour he took through the far East and how he had emerged from it with nothing but dismissive contempt for the people he had met. Both the tsar and kaiser thought that the yellow monkeys of the east — qthat’s how they talked about them — were an inferior race to be controlled and ruled by their white superiors. The kaiser then further embellished these racist fantasies by telling Nicholas that it was Russia’s divine destiny to rule over Manchuria and Korea and most of northern China. In fact, if they did this in full partnership with the German Empire, then together, their united, divinely ordained empires would rule all of Eurasia, and thus become the defacto rulers of the whole world.
Now on slightly firmer, and I suppose more rational, footing, Sergei Witte had made his decision to side Russia with China against Japan. And the first thing Witte did was create a new institution to facilitate loans to China, to help them pay the indemnity that had just been forced on them by a victorious Japan, and raised by the Russians. This is the Russo-Chinese Bank. This bank would float Chinese government bonds to raise money to make the indemnity payments. But let’s recall here that Russia is itself a major international debtor. So Witte turned to the French bankers, who eagerly capitalized this project, seeing easy profits to be made financing China’s war indemnity to Japan.
Then, during the festivities surrounding the tzar’s coronation in May of 1896, Witte and Chinese diplomat Lee Hong Jang worked out terms of a further secret treaty. Witte took full advantage of Chinese weakness to forge what became known as the Li–Lobanov Treaty, so-called because foreign minister Alexey Lobanov-Rostovsky was the official signatory for the Russians. And though the ostensible purpose of the agreement was to enlist Russia in the defense of Chinese sovereignty, the actual result of it was the de facto annexation of Manchuria by the Russians. The terms of this treaty would remain a secret to the rest of the world.
The defacto Russian annexation of Manchuria was carried out in stages and organized around what else? A new railroad. The big thing China agreed to was to give Russia permission to build a Russian railroad directly through Manchuria to Vladivostok. Now up until now, departing Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian railway meant not heading west, but due north about 500 miles before making a sharp left turn to stay inside of Russian territory. With the Chinese now granting a concession to build a railway through Manchuria, the Russians would have a straight shot that cut about a thousand miles off the journey.
As diplomatic cover for all this, Witte established the nominally independent Chinese Eastern Railway, financed by the Russo-Chinese bank. Now on paper, the Chinese joined this new corporation as a full partner, but in reality, they put in no money, made no decisions, and had no control. But it did keep up the fiction that the concessions to build this railroad were not being made directly to the Russian government, but instead to a corporation that China itself appeared to be a part owner of. Work on the project began in July 1897 with Russian administrators and engineers and workers streaming into Manchuria. The official headquarters of the Chinese Eastern Railway were established in the Manchurian center of Harbin, staffed entirely by Russian managers. And of course, it goes without saying that along with all these Russian managers and engineers and workers came Russian soldiers, to protect the work sites and Russian property. the chinese Eastern railway would take six years to complete, and in that time, Manchuria would go from enticing opportunity for colonial advancement to Russian province in all but name.
Meanwhile, the Russians still dreamed of a warm water port on the Pacific, and with the Chinese proving so willing to give the Russians whatever the Russians wanted, the Russians now asked to occupy the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula. This was the very spot the Russians had forced the Japanese to surrender just two years earlier. There they would build up both a commercial port and a naval base — the naval base in particular was known at the time in the west as Port Arthur. Now they were only going to be leasing this territory, this was not an annexation, but the scope of the building project and the nature of the materials the Russians would use to build up fortifications and infrastructure and facilities indicated that they were planning on sticking around for good.
All of this was then formalized in the Russia-Qing Convention of 1898, which confirmed and extended the lease on Port Arthur by the Chinese to the Russians. The Russians were also given permission to build a spur line off the Chinese Eastern Railway that would run due south through the peninsula. When completed, this would create a railroad network that would connect Port Arthur all the way back to Russia via the Trans-Siberian railway. Work began on this spur line later in the year and the pace of construction on the Chinese Eastern Railway accelerated. Now, going along with all this, the Russian Navy requested a nearly four-fold increase in their budget for 1898 to help them rapidly build up a new Pacific fleet.
The Japanese, meanwhile were furious about all this. The port was of enormous strategic value; they had won it fair and square as a spoil of war in 1895, and had been forced to give it up after listening to lectures from Russian diplomats about the need to respect Chinese sovereignty, and here the Russians were now occupying that very spot. Russian duplicity was transparent. The Japanese felt robbed, they felt threatened, and if the Russians weren’t careful, all of this was going to lead to war.
But of more immediate concern to everyone was the Boxer Rebellion, which erupted in November of 1899. Now the Boxer Rebellion is another watershed moment in the development of modern China, it was a popular uprising against the vast array of foreigners carving up their country. In response to this uprising, we get an unprecedented eight nation alliance, which forged an international expeditionary army to go quote unquote, liberate Beijing from the rebels or more specifically, rescue everyone’s respective embassies, which were besieged in the diplomatic district of the Chinese capital. This eight nation alliance was composed of eight nations who never were on the same side of anything: it was the United Kingdom, the German Empire, the French Third Republic, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Kingdom of Italy, the United States, the Empire of Japan, and the Russian Empire. Now most of the time, these nations were rivals with each other, occasionally they were active belligerents with each other, and in short order, they would all be engaged in gigantic world wars with each other. But, at this moment in time, they were united in imperial alliance against any attempt to resurrect the corpse of China that they all hoped to feed off of for the next century. So, they got together, they won, and the rebellion was suppressed by 1901.
Now to stay focused on the Russian angle though, the Russian envelopment of Manchuria was one of the causes of the Boxer Rebellion, and during the fighting, the Chinese Eastern Railway was a prime target. To protect the railroad, and Russia’s clear colonial interest in Manchuria, they flooded 175,000 troops into the region. When the rebellion was over, various terms and conditions and conventions were agreed to, including the withdrawal of all these Russian troops from Manchuria, but then the Russians just kind of didn’t withdraw. They liked Manchuria. They wanted to keep it. So they left about a hundred thousand troops behind, despite signing documents stating that this occupation had only been temporary and would soon be over. Now, back in St. Petersburg, Sergei Witte argued strenuously against this idea; he thought it was unnecessarily provocative, that nobody was really challenging their influence in Manchuria. They had access to the raw materials and natural resources they wanted, they had the shortcut to Vladivostok they wanted. They had this new port, Port Arthur that they wanted. So why stir up a potential international crisis by leaving so many troops behind? But he was overruled. He was standing in the way of Russia’s destiny.
Now the Japanese looked at all of this with more furious frustration, but they were divided about what to do. Some believed that they should launch an attack right now to push the Russians back, while others argued that there was no good military path to preventing the Russians from annexng and occupying Manchuria and that they just needed to focus on Korea. So after the Boxer Rebellion, Japanese diplomats took a two-pronged approach to the Russia question. One prong was work out in accommodation with the Russians to avoid a war. Japan offered to recognize Russian claims in Manchuria if Russia in turn recognized Japanese claims to Korea. Now this accommodation was hoped for enough that the great Japanese statesman Hirobumi Itō made a trip to St. Petersburg in 1901 to talk personally to the tsar. But the tsar and all his ministers thought the Japanese were, like, subhuman, and they were incredibly dismissive and rude, and after keeping Itō waiting under a variety of pretexts, they then refuse to even grant the audience with the tsar. So Itō went home, and the possibility of peaceful accommodation seemed to be ruled out.
The other prong was to ensure that they were never again isolated diplomatically in Europe. And they identified the British in particular as being very nervous about Russian advancement into Manchuria. So the Japanese started working very closely with British diplomats and they did a clever thing where they highlighted the Witte system’s policy of closed national economic integration with its high protective tariff barriers. The Japanese played up the fact that if Russia was allowed to continue its envelopment unchecked, that the markets and resources of the region would be locked up, and the available riches would not be shared with the rest of the world. This too was very troubling for the British.
So with the new century dawning, and the diplomatic landscape, changing all over the world, the British decided to start emerging from the splendid isolation phase of their foreign policy, where they avoided all permanent treaties of alliance, and in 1902, they signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which promised neutrality in the event of either side going to war with just a single other belligerent, but full support if that war expanded to include more than one belligerent. Japan now had a strong European partner.
So to wrap all this up since we’ve now advanced to 1902: where we’re going to leave things is that Russia is pretty much enveloping Manchuria and building up a Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. If they were going to take the next imperial step, it was going to be a step towards Korea. Now there’s still much debate over how committed the Russians were to advancing into Korea. Whether they were gunning for it a hundred percent, whether it would be nice if it happened but not if it costs too much, or whether they were happy to consolidate Manchuria and just call that good. And part of the difficulty in getting to the bottom of this question is that different factions inside the Russian government each took each of the three positions. And in the end, as with all things, the final decision was going to be left to the tsar and he was offering very little in the way of decisive leadership. Sometimes he seemed amenable to a compromise with the Japanese, sometimes he okayed very provocative policies. Now I don’t think the tsar was actively seeking a war with Japan, but Nicholas himself was just racist enough that he figured if and when Russia did get into a shooting war with the Japanese that such a war would be quick and splendid, so they really didn’t have to think too much about what the Japanese thought about anything. So Russian policy in the far east at this point is not some Machiavellian game of 12 dimensional chess. It was absentminded, and lacking clear focus or direction… like pretty much everything else in Tsar Nicholas’s Russian Empire.
Next week, though, we will return to the revolutionary front, as we approach another critical moment in the build-up to the Revolution of 1905. The Witte System had created what some historians refer to as the Witte Boom, with especially railroad construction and especially the Trans-Siberian railway creating huge demand in other major industries: coal, iron, tools, machinery, textiles, everything that went into building and running railroads. That in turn created a huge demand for industrial labor. But after the turn of the century, a lot of the initial buildup was coming to an end. The Trans-Siberian railway was itself essentially finished by 1902. And when it was finished, it’s going to lead to a sharp economic downturn, that was going to hit industrial workers and rural peasants alike…. workers and peasants who had just spent the last few years getting increasingly angry, educated, and organized.