Vodka Politics (35 page)

Even when recruits were corralled into the trains the drinking did not stop. From the luxury of the officers’ car Veresayev reported that in the cramped, musty cars of the common soldiers, drinking went on day and night. “Nobody knew how or where the soldiers got the vodka. But they had all they wanted.” Not surprisingly, easy access to alcohol and weapons was a recipe for tragedy.

“‘Have you heard this story?’” Veresayev’s traveling companion asked. “‘Officers just told me at the station that soldiers yesterday killed Colonel Lukashóv. They were drunk and started shooting from the cars at a herd that was passing by. He tried to stop them, and so they killed him.’

“‘I heard it differently,’” Veresayev calmly replied. “‘He treated the soldiers very brutally and they promised before departing that they would kill him on the way.’”
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In either case, the long trip across the vast Siberian landmass was marred with drunken misfortune—and more would be waiting on Far Eastern battlefields.

Even more than in the Crimea, coverage by embedded journalists was unflattering for the Russian side. On his first visit to Port Arthur, Associated Press war correspondent Frederick McCormick first noted the grandeur of the Russian ships in the small, crowded port; and second, the “pile of perhaps ten thousand cases of vodka” by the train station. Journalists found alcohol in the barracks, in the officers’ quarters, and on the battlefield. In the ensuing battle of Port Arthur, Russian troops stumbled into battle drunk. Correspondents described the entire Manchurian campaign between Russia and Japan as a “scuffle between a drunken guardsman and a sober policeman.”
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The chief engineer of the Pacific fleet at Port Arthur, Evgeny Politovsky, would not survive the Russian war in the Far East, but his diaries did. On October 7, 1904, he wrote of how many were more willing to follow vodka than follow their commanders.

The crews of the ships at Port Arthur asked leave to go to the advanced positions, and returned under the influence of liquor. No one could understand how they became drunk. In the town liquors were not sold,
and yet men went to the advanced positions and returned intoxicated. At last it was discovered, and how do you suppose? It appears that the sailors went to the front in order to kill one of the enemy and take away his brandy-flask. Just imagine such a thing. They risked their lives to get drunk! They did all this without thinking anything of it, and contrived to conceal it from the authorities.
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As in Crimea, it was not just the common foot soldier who got tipsy, but their commanders as well. As a guest of the Russian military command, McCormick described his encounter with a drunken Cossack colonel who threatened to shoot him for refusing to drink vodka and wine.
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As an outsider, McCormick was appalled—both at the unimaginable quantity of alcohol the commanders consumed and their complete nonchalance about Russia’s staggering battlefield losses.

Up to this time, although the troops had been continually beaten, the army seemed outwardly, at least to the casual observer, as care-free as possible. In the back court in the International Hotel captains, colonels and generals could be found any day, and occasionally from late morning breakfast to late at night, repeatedly greeting each other with kisses through their heavy beards and making merry over liquor, champagne and beer. It reminded one of Port Arthur just before the opening of the war. Every night had its orgy, and out of these grew many troubles for the commander-in-chief. It seemed to be a natural characteristic to begin breakfast with champagne. A young officer… would begin in the morning on a bottle of liquor, and at night was always certain of being carried out to his room by the Chinese waiters. It took a fortnight by military process to transfer him from the army base to the rear. A staff officer and three companions, who mixed their champagne with beer and vodka, and among them could not raise fifty rubles with which to pay their bill, would monopolize the hotel.
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Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Port Arthur was a repeat of the disaster at Sevastopol—both in terms of the drunkenness and corruption. “The Russian appears to devote himself to champagne as to the very elixir of life,” McCormick reported. “The thirst for this liquor was the cause of the very gravest charges of corruption against the Red Cross department and the quartermaster’s department, both of which handled quantities of it. Such a demand was created for this drink that the price advanced to nearly ten times the normal, and the opportunities for profit were irresistible to those officials who had control of the champagne supplies.”
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Some drunken havoc was to be expected, McCormick surmised, from a system of universal conscription that had could not weed out those unfit for
service.
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As in the Crimea, this inebriated, incompetent, and corrupt military force was dealt one embarrassing blow after another. By mid-1904, the Japanese had blockaded the Russian fleet, and besieged the port, while scoring land victories at the Yalu River.

Something dramatic had to be done. And odds were, it wouldn’t be good.

What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor?

The young Tsar Nicholas II and his top brass grew frustrated. Reinforcements were slow in coming. In addition to the mobilization fiasco, supplying the war effort had clogged Russia’s frail infrastructure—including the still-incomplete, single-rail Trans-Siberian Railway—bringing commerce to a standstill.
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If the front could not be reinforced by land, perhaps it could by sea! Nicholas turned to his uncle, Grand Duke Alexei Aleksandrovich—who commanded the entire navy despite spending “less time on the fleet than he did on drinking bouts and various love affairs.”
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In 1904, Nicholas and Alexei authorized the most harebrained military scheme ever: sending forty-five ships from the Baltic Fleet to the Pacific to take on the Japanese. To get there, these ships had to circumnavigate the entire Eastern Hemisphere—from their home ports in the Baltic Sea, around the Iberian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, through the Dutch East Indies, and up the Chinese coast. This epic eighteen thousand mile journey was the longest voyage of a coal-powered battleship fleet in history.

Under the command of Adm. Zinovy Rozhestvensky, the voyage was a microcosm of the hubris and misfortune of Nicholas’ entire reign (see
chapter 12
): beginning with drunken tragedy and ending in epic disaster. Upon setting sail from Libau in October 1904, Rozhestvensky’s newly commissioned flagship the
Knyaz Suvorov
, with its largely inexperienced crew, immediately ran aground, while one of its escorts lost its anchor. After the anchor was retrieved and the flagship re-floated, a destroyer rammed the battleship
Oslyaba
, which had to return for repairs.
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Incredibly, things got even worse in open water. Rumors circulated that the Baltic and North seas were teeming with Japanese torpedo boats that, despite all evidence or logic (torpedo boat squadrons have an extremely limited range), had allegedly completed the improbable eighteen-thousand-mile voyage from the Far East, around Siam, Ceylon, India, and Africa to mine the waters of Northern Europe.

Upon approaching the coast of Denmark, a local fishing vessel was dispatched to relay consular communications from Tsar Nicholas II. Mistaking the vessel for a Japanese fighter, the fleet opened fire, though due to the appalling standards of Russian gunnery, the two fishermen made it through unharmed to deliver the
imperial communique: Admiral Rozhestvensky—Congratulations! Your exemplary performance has earned you a well-deserved promotion.

Before continuing on from Denmark, the heavily inebriated captain of the repair ship
Kamchatka
hysterically claimed to have been attacked “from all directions” by up to eight Japanese torpedo boats that no one on the other ships ever saw.
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Yet the fleet saved its greatest embarrassment for the Dogger Banks—a rich fishing area between Denmark and England. On the evening of October 21, the captain of the
Kamchatka
—again drunk by all accounts—mistook a nearby Swedish ship for a Japanese torpedo boat and radioed that his ship was under attack. Nearby were a number of British fishing trawlers, which through the fog of alcohol were mistook for Japanese warships, which (again) somehow made the unfathomable eighteen-thousand-mile journey to engage the Russians in the North Sea. These unfortunate and unarmed vessels were met by the full fury of the fleet’s thunderous guns. As Russian spotlights panned across the British trawlers, the fishermen hurriedly splayed their catch across their bows to show they were no threat. Despite the all-out barrage, only one British ship was sunk and three fishermen killed.
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In the confusion, several Russian ships signaled that they had been hit by Japanese torpedos while sailors on others scurried about hysterically, claiming they were being boarded by Japanese raiders.

Belatedly realizing their mistake, the fleet’s battleships then trained their heavy-calibre fire on the
real
enemy—an approaching formation of actual warships. Unfortunately, it turned out that these were in fact Russian cruisers from their own formation including the
Dmitry Donskoi
and the
Aurora
.

As an aside: the
Aurora
later gained fame for her catalyzing role in the October Revolution of 1917. Her sailors defied orders to put to sea, and a blank shot from its forecastle gun signaled the assault on the Winter Palace. Some
Aurora
sailors joined in the storming of the Winter Palace, while most stormed a nearby tavern.
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Today, the
Aurora
is moored in the Neva River in St. Petersburg as a museum ship—but on that October night in the Dogger Banks she saw her first military action… against her own drunken fleet.

Both the
Aurora
and the
Dmitry Donskoi
sustained modest damage in the attack. Further damage was saved only by the incompetence and incapacitation of the artillerymen themselves: the battleship
Orel
, for one, fired more than five hundred artillery shells in the incident without ever landing a single hit.
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The British were understandably livid. Relations were already strained by Russians seizing neutral British commercial steamers in the Pacific theater. This was the the last straw: an unprovoked attack against unarmed civilians was an act of war. Admiral Rozhestvensky’s reaction did not help: rather than assess injuries or assist the victims, Rozhestvensky simply sailed on, acknowledging the
incident only days later while off the coast of Spain. As news of the event spread, so did international outrage. According to one reporter, “In the United States, in France, and even in Germany, unsparing reprobation of a deed so unjustifiable was freely uttered, and the belief was confidently expressed that the only possible explanation was to be found in the undiscipline and probable drunken frenzy of the Russian naval officers.”
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It was vodka that pushed Russia to the brink of war. Amid the public outcry, the government of Arthur Balfour delivered an ultimatum and prepared the British Mediterranean fleet to sink the Russian squadron en route to the Pacific. Russia was already stretched thin both on land and at sea; a war against the mighty British navy would have been disastrous. Ultimately, the British were satisfied only after repeated public apologies by the Russian government, the payment of indemnities to the fishermen, and the promise of an official inquiry.
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Having narrowly averted war with the Brits, Russia still had the Japanese to contend with. But unfortunately, more embarrassments would follow.

R
UNNING
A
MUCK
. November 16, 1904, cover of the satirical magazine
Puck
depicting Russia—clutching a jug of vodka—stumbling into war against a Japanese hornet. Note the injured John Bull character in the background. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Massacre At Mukden, Tragedy In Tsushima

While the fleet was re-coaling in Madagascar, news reached the Russians that Port Arthur had surrendered to the Japanese on January 2, 1905. But that was not the end of the war. On land, the Japanese continued to beat Russian forces back north along the Russian Manchurian Railway, some two hundred and fifty miles inland to the city of Mukden—destined to be the site of the decisive battle of the war and one of the largest military conflicts in world history to that point.
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