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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
This will be our last setup episode before we get going with an eight-episode long toboggan ride through the revolution of 1905 that will round out part one of the Russian Revolution open parentheses s close parentheses series. This week, we pick up the narrative thread from the end of Episode 10.26: The Far East, which was the episode that required us to go all the way to Manchuria and Korea to somehow understand why there will be revolutionary uprisings in St. Petersburg and Moscow. History works in such ways. And today, we will start to understand why.
Now where we left off in the far east was that Russian imperial ambitions had carried them into Manchuria, and then further down the Liaodong Peninsula, where they established a naval base at Port Arthur, giving the Russians that permanent warm water Pacific port they so coveted. Russia’s settlement on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula was infuriating to the rising empire of Japan, because remember, they had claimed that very same spot during the first Sino-Japanese War and had then been forced to relinquish it by the Russians, who then turned right around and occupied it themselves. This was both diplomatically insulting and militarily provocative.
Then in 1903, we see two further Russian provocations that set off alarm bells inside the Japanese government. During the Boxer Rebellion, which had seen both Russia and Japan as members of the same eight-nation alliance, Russia had flooded Manchuria with an additional hundred thousand soldiers. According to agreements the Russian signed after the rebellion was suppressed, they were supposed to withdraw most of these troops from Manchuria by a specified date in April 1903, but the deadline came and went without the Russians moving anyone anywhere. And they clearly did not feel any pressure at all to actually leave. Who was going to make them?
So that was alarm bell number one. The second alarm bell was the arrival of a private Russian corporation called the Yalu Timber Company. The Yalu Timber Company was a private enterprise run by a brash and charismatic former Russian cavalry officer who had visions of leading the Russian Empire beyond Manchuria and into Korea. The Korean government had granted this Yalu Timber Company the right to harvest trees in the Yalu River Valley, which stood as the border between Manchuria and Korea. This put Russian interests inside the Kingdom of Korea, and back in St. Petersburg, this adventurous former cavalry officer used his contacts in the ministry to propose a plan whereby Russian soldiers would be dressed up as, and do the work of, regular loggers, allowing the Russians to insert a sizeable force into Korea that could advance the dream of annexing the Korean peninsula. The Russian ministry thought this was all a grand idea. If it worked, it worked, and Russia would get Korea. If it didn’t work, if it blew up in their faces, the government could assert it was all a misguided private project and they would publicly disavow it. Tsar Nicholas was himself carried away by enthusiasm for the project and gave his approval.
The only one of the tsar’s ministers who objected was Sergei Witte, who had, remember, been the point man for Russian diplomacy in the far east, and he said, this is crackpot, it’s going to ruin everything and probably start a war. But by now, the luster of Witte’s standing as the only minister who knows what he he’s doing had worn off. He and the other ministers around the tsar had very different worldviews. His advice always seemed to run counter to what everyone else instinctively wanted to do, and he had been kept around mostly because the tsar’s dying father had all but commanded it from his deathbed. So the disagreement about what to do in the far east was one of the issues that isolated Witte from everyone else, led to a loss of favor with the tsar, and his removal as finance minister in August of 1903. So at this critical juncture, the guy who knew the most about international politics in east Asia was removed from the loop.
Meanwhile, the Japanese had to address the clear advance of Russian ambitions into territory the Japanese now viewed as vital to their own national interest. There was disagreement inside the Japanese government about whether Japan could, right now, do anything militarily to expel the Russians. Some said, we can take them, others said, no, we can’t. But they had at least ensured that they would likely only face the Russians if, and when, a shooting war began. They had ensured this by signing a treaty with the British in 1902 that said each party would remain neutral if the other party got into a war with a single other belligerent, but would join the conflict if another belligerent joined on the opposite side. In practical terms, what this meant is that if France or Germany decided to join Russia against Japan, that the British would enter the war on Japan’s side, which meant that in Paris and Berlin calculating support for Russia in the far east now necessarily carried the risk of war with the British, which is not what anyone wanted. France had already announced that their defensive pact with Russia covered Europe only. So the Japanese calculated, correctly, that if Russia fought a war with Japan, that they would be fighting alone.
So Japan embarked on a two-pronged strategy to deal with the Russians. On the one side, they would approach Russia, diplomatically and attempt to come to a peaceful and mutually agreeable compact. But on the other side, the generals and admirals of the Japanese Army and Navy tirelessly planned war scenarios, campaigns, and strategies, which I can assure you, their counterparts in Russia were not doing.
So on the diplomatic front, in August 1903, Japan’s Emissary in St. Petersburg delivered the basis of an understanding. There were two issues here: Manchuria and Korea. The Russians already had Manchuria, but were clearly eyeing a move into Korea. So Japan said, what we can do, is both officially maintain the territorial integrity and independence sovereignty of Korea and China, while saying to each other, that you, Russia, have a special position in Manchuria, and that we, Japan, have a special position in Korea. That way, there won’t be any conflict between us. Much to Japanese chagrin, it took the Russians two full months to get around to replying to this proposal. But in October 1903, the Russians came back and said, first of all, Manchuria, isn’t even a question for us to resolve. It’s ours and you have no claim to it. You can’t even use it as a piece of some larger hegemonic swap. We don’t need your permission or understanding to do whatever the hell we want in Manchuria. And while we are willing to discuss your interest in Korea, we will stipulate certain conditions if we allow you to claim this special right to the peninsula, because we have interests there too.
And so negotiations began.
Now, Tsar Nicholas was not eager for war. He did not want a war. He found the idea terribly loathsome. His ministers were also mostly opposed to the idea of war, citing the problems that such a war would pose. I mean, financially, they were still relying on French loans to cover huge annual budget deficits; then there were supply and manpower issues with maintaining a frontline literally 6,000 miles away from home. And besides, the issues at stake here were, like, logging concessions, and theoretical advancement into Korea. Russia already had most of what it wanted it in the far east, specifically that warm water port on the Pacific. So the consensus among the tsar and his ministers was that war was not ideal, nor were the issues big enough to start a war. So let’s just talk our way through this at our leisure.
As a result of this understanding, the Russian negotiators gave ground on various points, and the Japanese believed, rightly, that they were getting the better end of it at the bargaining table. But they were deeply troubled by the manner in which the Russians negotiated. When the Russians sent the Japanese something to consider, the Japanese replied promptly. The Russians on the other hand would then sit on that reply for weeks and even months without responding at all. This was not just annoying, this was not just insulting, this was suspicious. And the Japanese came to believe that the stalling was part of a deliberate Russian strategy to buy time while they built up their military forces in east Asia.
But so far as I can tell, from everything I have read, this is not what the Russians were up to. Instead, they were just kind of being arrogantly blithe and flippant about the whole thing. A blithe arrogance that was coming from the very top. Remember, Tsar Nicholas believed that being an absolute autocrat meant involving himself in minute details of state, and that matters of high foreign policy were especially in need of his personal micromanaging. And Nicholas even fancied himself a special expert on the Japanese, because he visited Japan once, and emerged from that trip with a thoroughly racist disdain for them.
So, because everything was running across Nicholas’s desk, there were delays getting formal replies back to the Japanese, because though the tsar had his own proclivities and peaceful desires, he was also being relentlessly lobbied by trusted voices who wanted him to not give in to those peaceful desires. So he stalled and stalled, and decisions were put off. Besides, who cares? It’s only the Japanese we’re talking about.
Among those counseling firm resolution and not giving away Russian interests in the far east was the Empress Alexandra, who implored her husband to be strong and not back down. But more than anywhere else, Tsar Nicholas was hearing it from Kaiser Wilheim. All through 1903 and 1904, Willy was writing a steady stream of letters to Nikki saying, this isn’t just about timber concessions and access to markets, it’s about the fate of Christendom itself. That the half savage Japanese represent the great Yellow Peril that might rise up and sweep west like a new Mongol horde and destroy Western civilization itself, that Nikki’s destiny was to be the savior of the white race. So anytime Nicholas would confess as desire for peaceful compromise, Willie would come back: don’t back down, concede nothing, push back, take the fight to them for God’s sakes, be a man. It was all incredibly racist and incredibly manipulative. Because remember, the Kaiser’s real interest here is in making sure Russia gets tied down on the other side of the world so they pose less of a threat to German interests in Europe. And though he constantly promised that the Germans would have Russian backs in the event of a war, he just meant, watch your back in Europe, not actually join the war in the far East, which is never how Nicholas understood it. To the bitter end of the coming disaster that was the Russo-Japanese War, Nikki believed that Willy would come. But Willie was never going to come.
Because of this conflicting advice, Nicholas was… conflicted. And he did the perfectly human thing to do when you’re conflicted about making a decision: he avoided making a decision. And this was the main cause of the delays that the Japanese took to be nefarious, calculated strategy. And Nicholas didn’t even think there would be any great harm to delay, because he — along with all of other Russians — assumed Japan would never unilaterally declare war on Russia. That they had to know how inferior they were, they were just this tiny Island of half civilized savages, while Russia was a vast and mighty ancient empire. So, if a war did come, it was obviously going to be a cakewalk for Russia, and the Japanese surely had to know that it would be a big mistake to start a war with the Russians. So in Nicholas’s mind, this was all entirely his call about whether or not there would be a war, and he did not believe there would be a war, because and I’m quoting him now, “I do not wish it.”
But folks, I must tell you, this was not a decision that was in the tsar’s hands. And the Japanese were in fact making very different calculations, because they had kept up that second prong of their approach. They were meticulously planning for war. And when the Japanese diplomats concluded that negotiating delays were not caused by racist arrogance or diplomatic incompetence, but an intentional strategy of delay, the Japanese government voted in December 1903 to go to war. As Nikki sat around believing that there couldn’t be a war because he didn’t wish it, the Japanese had already decided there was going to be a war, whether the tsar wished it or not.
On January the 26th of 1904, according to the old style Russian calendar, the tsar was returning home from the theater when he received an urgent telegram. Not only have the Japanese done the unthinkable and unilaterally declared war on Russia, before that declaration was even received, they had attacked Port Arthur in the middle of the night, severely damaging two capital vessels. By dawn, the Japanese navy was flooding into the Yellow Sea. The tsar was shocked, not just that the Japanese had declared war, but that they had launched this war with a surprise attack that was against recently signed international conventions of war that said you couldn’t do that. The tsar was incredulous and offended, but it was done now. Punishing the Japanese for breaking international law would have to wait until after Russia stomped them in to the ground. Though he had not wished it, the Russo-Japanese War had begun.
The shocking news of war swept Russia over the next few days. The story, of course, was that the dishonorable Japanese had launched a sneak attack on our brave troops, and patriotic fervor swelled. On January the 30th, something like 75,000 people congregated at the Winter Palace to show their support, cheer the tsar, and sing hymns. Nicholas came out to the balcony and waved to the happy, massive crowd. Indeed, commencement of the Russo-Japanese War was quite a boon to the flagging popularity of the tsar. The still vaguely defined but increasingly important thing called public opinion rallied to support the war effort. The intelligentsia was almost uniformly supportive of war as a matter of national honor, and many of them embraced the yellow peril theory that Russia had a special destiny to defend Western civilization from the savage eastern hordes. Propaganda started being plastered everywhere portraying the Japanese as inferior little monkeys being captured or smashed by a big white fist. Even commentators as far out on the political spectrum as Pyotr Struve and the Legal Marxists supported the national war effort even as they tried to keep that national effort separate from the tsarist regime they still wanted to criticize. So all over Russia in the story was, we are the victims, we must now go fight a war, but we will easily when the war. That was the message. And so everyone is simultaneously embracing two contradictory thoughts: one, the Yellow Peril poses an existential threat to western civilization that must be defeated, or it literally means the end of western civilization; but also two, that the Japanese are a weak and pathetic enemy that can be stomped like so many ants. So in other words: we are vastly superior to you, yet also believe you pose an apocalyptic threat. This is the classic one-two punch of racist paranoia.
So had the Russians gone out and easily won the Russo-Japanese War, as everyone seemed to suspect was going to happen, it might’ve been just the shot of confidence and popularity that the stagnating and unpopular tsarist regime needed to pick up its spirits and remind everyone that they were not in fact incompetent, backwards, out of touch, inefficient, corrupt, stupid, and on the brink of collapse. Instead, the Russo-Japanese War proved all of those things were truer even than the harshest critics have the tsar dared to think. Because as it turns out, Russians everywhere had badly underestimated the Japanese and overestimated themselves.
And just to note a few things in a non-exhaustive list:
- First, while it was true that Japan had only begun modernizing in the 1860s, they had actually done a really good job at it, and they were ready to wage a modern industrial war.
- Second, they had imported European instructors to train their officer corps, who emerged from this training creative, talented, and ready to deploy the latest advances in military theory and practice.
- Third, their supply lines were compact, and reinforcements readily at hand. So while Russia had a three million man army compared to Japan’s 600,000, only about 130,000 Russian soldiers were actually in the far east. The rest were going to have to be transported across the Trans-Siberian Railway, which though nearly finished, still had a critical hundred-mile gap at Lake Baikal, which required transferring everyone and everything to slow moving ferries in the summer, and literal horse-drawn sleigh in the winter.
- Fourth, though their navies were of roughly equal size, the Japanese boats carried heavy long range guns while the Russians were more equipped for traditional close quarters broadsides.
- And then finally: the Japanese had probably spent two years planning their campaigns, while the Russians had assumed the Japanese would never attack, but that even if they did, we’ll just, you know, fight back and win.
Now at first, there didn’t seem to be that much to worry about on the Russian side. Nothing to seriously challenge the triumphant expectations back home. The sneak attack on Port Arthur had damaged some ships, but further attacks had been repelled, and after the first furious skirmishes at the end of January and beginning of February of 1904, both sides settled into a stalemate. The Russian navy would not leave its harbor, nor would the Japanese navy venture into range of Russian shore batteries. And this went on right up through the spring of 1904.
But with all this attention on Port Arthur, the Japanese landed an expeditionary force at Incheon and in short order had enveloped and occupied the entire Korean Peninsula. They now sat on the Yalu River right across from Russian held Manchuria. Then the Japanese started ferrying forces over to the northeast coast of the Liaodong Peninsula, and pushing those forces down to Port Arthur to begin a siege on the land side, aimed at dislodging the Russians from the critical hilltops that commanded the harbor. Now surrounded, Russian Vice Admiral Makarov, by far the most talented Russian officer at Port Arthur, led an attempted breakout of the navy through the Japanese blockade in mid-April, but these ships ran into mines, and not only were they badly damaged, but Makarov was killed, which was probably the bigger blow to Russian fortunes. While the Russians were reeling from these blows at Port Arthur, the Japanese advanced across the Yalu River and successfully pushed the Russian army backward, paving the way for a more thorough envelopment of the Liaodong Peninsula, as well as further advances into Manchuria while the Russians just fell back. Meanwhile, Russian supplies and reinforcements were still months away from showing up. This was not going to be a quick war and it was not going to be an easy war. Somebody had made a big mistake, and it wasn’t the Japanese.
Reports of these frustrations, setbacks, and retreats filtered back to the homefront, and a dreadful picture emerged. The slow witted and incompetent military high command had been caught flat-footed and they were losing the war. These reports were especially explosive because of all that racist double-thinking that had been going on. The Japanese are supposed to be pushovers, but if they win, it’s the end of civilization as we know it, and now they’re winning. People literally couldn’t believe it. And just as suddenly as the patriotic fervor had led everyone to support the tsar, it now led them to criticize the tsar relentlessly and passionately. The fate of Russia was in the tsar’s hand and he was blowing it. So the crescendo of support for the regime in January, February, March, and April now gave way to disillusioned anger. Far from proving they were strong, hard, and capable stewards of the national interest, the tsar, his ministers, and the military high command revealed themselves to be incompetent, slow, backwards, and irresponsible. Old generals and admirals who had their jobs thanks to favors and connections rather than intelligence or skill were leading Russia to catastrophic defeat. And with all this bad news coming in, the dormant liberal opposition started to revive in a major way, because it’s safe to say that there’s nothing liberal nationalists hate more than a badly run war. It offends both their sense of national honor and their belief in the superiority of meritocracy. Business leaders were expressing concern that the regime was ruining the economy, respectable members of the intelligentsia were concluding that the only way forward was for the regime to reform itself and fast. Almost overnight, talk of national assemblies, and political participation in civil rights, and constitutions was suddenly everywhere. All the senseless dreams came rushing back. And that is what next week’s episode is going to be all about.
Then came a really important turning point. Remember, last week that the SR Combat Organization had succeeded in killing the minister of the interior in early 1902. Well, to replace him, the tsar had appointed the archest of arch hardline conservatives, a guy named Vyacheslav von Plehve. Plehve had made his bones back in the early 1880s, running the gendarme operations that crushed People’s Will, and he got a lot of credit for destroying their organization after the assassination of the tsar. Well, after becoming minister of the interior in 1902, he not only cracked down hard on revolutionaries like the Social Democrats and the SRs, but also on liberal reform types. He tightened censorship and absolutely stifled any attempt by the zemstvos to revive their hope of greater political participation. He also earned international enmity by doing nothing to stop a wave of attack on Jews in 1903, all but giving official approval to a destructive pogrom that left 50 dead.
So naturally the SRs targeted Plehve for assassination, and after missing a few times, they finally got him in July 1904 when a member of the SR Combat Organization tossed a bomb into his carriage and blew him to bits. It is noted particularly that Plehve’s violent death was met with an incredibly muted response. He was hardly mourned or lamented even inside the government. And in fact, many breathed a sigh of relief that his provocative reactionary tactics had now come to an end. But most of all, it spoke to how little support there was for the tsar continuing his hard line conservative tactics. A different approach was needed.
Then the summer of 1904 brought even more bad news from the far east. In August, the Russians and Japanese squared off in a battle that might pave the way for the Russian relief of Port Arthur, but instead of the Russians were again forced into retreat. This was yet another humiliating defeat that meant Port Arthur would not be relieved until the reinforcements from the west arrived, and those reinforcements had still not arrived. In response to this, the navy at Port Arthur attempted another breakout, this one featuring nearly the whole squadron, but they were blasted back into their harbor by the superior range and targeting of the Japanese navy, who were just able to sit back and lob artillery well out of range of most of the Russian guns. Meanwhile, heavy fighting in the hills above the port made it ominously possible that the Russian position in Port Arthur was hopeless.
It was in the midst of all this bad news that the tsar was deciding who to appoint to be his new new minister of the interior. He was inclined to appoint another hard line conservative, those were Nicholas’s instincts, but he was now facing public opinion that was enraged by the disappointed expectations in the Russo-Japanese War. So his inner circle concluded that whatever his mandate from God might be, that this new fangled and very troublesome thing called public opinion was going to have to be sated.
So at the end of August 1904, the tsar tapped a 47-year-old career bureaucrat named Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky to be his new minister of the interior. Mirsky was an enlightened liberal-ish reformer who had the same support and confidence of the zemstvo constitutionalist types. And he believed he was there to negotiate an understanding between angry reformers and liberals and educated observers in the nobility, and the intelligentsia and the conservative tsarist regime. The hope was to form an anti-revolutionary bulwark in defense of the existing order, to strengthen the monarchy was some liberal reforms. But as we will see next week, Mirsky found himself in an impossible position. The dashed expectations of an easy military triumph had now been replaced by expectations of political reform. Meanwhile, the tsar was adamantly opposed to any such reform, and was only indulging in such talk to buy himself some time until he won the war. But there was no denying that at the moment the war was going very badly, and he did need to buy himself some time.
So in October 1904, the tsar took dramatic action. The Russian Baltic fleet was ordered to embark on a 20,000 mile long voyage from the Baltic Sea, around Europe, down the African coast, around the Cape of Good Horn, through the Indian Ocean, and then up into the Yellow Sea, where they would finally relief Port Arthur and pound the Japanese in to the ground once and for all. It might take them nine months to get there, but when the Baltic fleet did arrive, all this trouble at home and abroad would be resolved once and for all the promise of victory may have been delayed, but it was not broken.
But as the world watched and waited as the Russian Baltic fleet embarked on its famous voyage, angry Russian liberals continued to take advantage of the tsar’s failures and demand reform. They wanted a national assembly of some kind, they wanted freedom of the press, less arbitrary government, more respect for civil rights. Power-sharing with the people and by the people, they meant, themselves. It was all coming out now. The liberals smelled blood in the water. And wouldn’t you know, it, as they pressed for these reforms, they used a method that was explicitly copied from the French liberal opposition in 1847 and 1848, because they were caught in the same legal predicament of wanting to openly talk about politics without being able to hold overtly rallies.
So next week, we will open the Russian Revolution of 1905 as we opened the French Revolution of 1848: with the Banquet Campaign.