The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (31 page)

The news reached the Baltic Fleet at Madagascar as it was making its way around the world to relieve the siege. (The fleet had been obliged to go around the tip of Africa because the British would not allow it to pass through the Suez Canal.) The admiral in command decided to make a run for the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. On 27 May 1905, as the fleet went into the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, the Japanese fleet was waiting for it. The subsequent battle was one of the most stunning naval victories in history. The Russian Baltic Fleet was annihilated and over 4,000 men drowned and even more captured. Japanese losses amounted to 116 men and a few torpedo boats.

Russia was forced to accept President Theodore Roosevelt’s offer to mediate and the Japanese, who were reaching the limit of their resources, were prepared to talk as well. That August Russian and Japanese representatives met in a navy yard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Roosevelt’s motives were mixed: he genuinely felt that the United States had a moral obligation as one of the world’s civilised nations to
foster peace but he also loved the opportunity for the United States, and himself, to be in the centre of great events. As far as the belligerents were concerned, he disapproved, as did many Americans, of Russian autocracy and he had initially been sympathetic to Japan, a ‘desirable addition’ to the international order, even going so far as to admire the way the Japanese had started hostilities with a surprise attack on Russia without bothering with formality of declaring war. As Japan crushed Russia, though, he became concerned for the American position in Asia and worried that the Japanese might turn their attentions to China. Having brought the two sides together, Roosevelt did not himself take part in the discussions but watched at a distance from his estate on Long Island, trying to contain himself as both sides dragged out the negotiations. ‘What I really want to do’, he complained, ‘is give utterance to whoops of rage and jump up and knock their heads together.’
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In September Russia and Japan finally signed the Treaty of Portsmouth. Japan got half of the Russian island of Sakhalin and the Russian concessions at the southern tip of Manchuria. The following year Roosevelt won the newly instituted Nobel Peace Prize.

The war cost Russia more than territory: it had 400,000 casualties, a large part of its navy was destroyed, and it spent 2.5 million roubles it could ill afford. ‘A war with Japan would be extremely unpopular’, General Aleksei Kuropatkin, the Minister of War, had warned the tsar in November 1903 shortly before hostilities broke out, ‘and would increase the feeling of dissatisfaction with the ruling authorities.’ The governor-general of the Caucasus went even further. ‘War must not be allowed,’ he told Kuropatkin. ‘The question of a war could become “dynastic”.’
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Both men were right. There had been little enthusiasm among the public for the war, right from the start, and by 1904 there already existed considerable dissatisfaction with the government among the intellectuals, the growing middle classes, and the more enlightened landowners who were active in the new local governments.

Periods of extraordinarily rapid development such as Russia had been experiencing especially since the 1890s are not easy to accommodate. Russia’s boom brought promise of a better future but it had also unsettled an already divided society. The magnates in Moscow and St Petersburg lived in magnificent mansions and assembled great collections of art and furniture while their workers lived in squalor and
laboured long hours in appalling conditions. While in the poorer villages, peasants rarely ate meat and lived close to starvation, especially in the long winter months, the great landowners lived in the same style as their counterparts in richer European countries. Even the extravagant Prince Yusupov (later to be the assassin of Rasputin) could not run through his fortune which included well over half a million acres of land as well as mines and factories, not to mention the silver vases which he liked to fill with uncut gems and pearls. In 1914 Countess Kleinmichel, one of the leaders of society in St Petersburg, gave what she thought of as a small fancy-dress ball for her nieces: ‘I sent over three hundred invitations, for my house could not hold a greater number, and as the Russian custom is to give a supper at little tables, it was also as much as my kitchen could undertake.’
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In spite of censorship and repression, demands for an end to autocracy and for representative government and civil liberties were coming from all sides. Balts, Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, among Russia’s many subject peoples, were also pushing for greater autonomy. A small but fanatical minority had long since given up hope of reform and were instead committed to overthrowing the old order violently through acts of terrorism or armed insurrection. Between 1905 and 1909 nearly 1,500 provincial governors and officials were assassinated. Industrial workers, their numbers growing too as Russia’s industrialisation charged ahead, showed an increasing militancy. In 1894, the year that Nicholas II became tsar, there were sixty-eight strikes; ten years later there were over five hundred.
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Although the radical socialist parties on the left were still banned and their leaders in exile, they were beginning to assume leadership in the emerging workers’ organisations. By 1914 the best-organised party, the Bolsheviks, dominated most of the unions and held the majority of the seats for workers in the Duma, the new Russian parliament.

In the years before 1914 Russia was a giant organism moving in several directions at once and it was not clear what its final shape might be. Parts especially out in the remoter countryside looked much as they had done for centuries while the big cities with their electric lights, trams, and modern shops, looked like Paris or Berlin or London. Yet the impression of an eternal unchanging rural Russia – as the tsar and many conservatives as well as later observers thought – was highly misleading.
The end of serfdom in 1861, the spread of communications, the growth of literacy, the movement of peasants into the cities to work (and their return to see their families), were shaking village life and undermining its institutions. Elders, priests, traditions, and the once all-powerful village commune no longer had the power over village life that they once had.

Modernity was challenging the old certainties in both the urban and rural areas. The religious still venerated icons and believed in miracles and ghosts; the new industrialists were busy buying up the work of Matisse, Picasso or Braque to build some of the world’s great collections of modern art. Russian traditional folk art coexisted with experimental writers and artists: Stanislavsky and Diaghilev were revolutionising theatre and dance. Daring writers were challenging accepted morality while at the same time there was a spiritual revival and a search for deeper meaning in life. Reactionaries wanted to go back to the time before Peter the Great opened up Russia to European influences; extreme revolutionaries, many of them in exile such as Lenin or Trotsky, wanted to smash Russian society.

Economic and social changes that had taken a century or more in western Europe were compressed into a generation in Russia. And Russia did not have strongly developed and deeply rooted institutions that might have helped to absorb and manage the changes. The most stable country in Europe, Britain, had had centuries to build its parliament, local councils, laws, and law courts (and had weathered crises including a civil war along the way). More, British society had grown incrementally and slowly, taking generations to develop attitudes and institutions, from universities to chambers of commerce, clubs and associations, a free press, the whole complex web of civil society which sustains a workable political system. Closer to home, Russia’s neighbour Germany may have been a new country but it possessed old institutions in its cities and states and had a confident and large middle class capable of sustaining a strong society. Austria-Hungary was more fragile and was also struggling with burgeoning nationalisms but it too had a society whose institutions were more fully realised than Russia’s.

There are two contemporary parallels for what Russia faced in the decade or two before 1914. One is the Gulf States which have gone in a single lifetime from a modest and manageable way of life where change
came slowly, to an international world where their sudden wealth made them players, from one-storey mud-brick buildings to the glitter of Las Vegas and skyscrapers going higher and faster. But the Gulf States have the great advantage of being small both geographically and in terms of population, and are therefore, for better or worse, capable of being manipulated by strong forces or individuals, whether from outside or within. Their rulers were, with some external support, skilful enough to manage the rapid changes, or, if they were not, briskly replaced. For the tsar the challenge was infinitely greater: to somehow keep control of a Russia, so huge and so diverse, where everything, whether population or the distance from its European borders to the Pacific, was so vast.

The second contemporary parallel to the Russia before the Great War is therefore China. It too had faced the challenges of change with a regime that was sadly unprepared and it too lacked the robust institutions that might have eased the transition from one form of society to another. It took China nearly half a century and appalling human costs, from the collapse of the old dynastic system to the emergence of Communist rule, to get a stable government – and it could be argued that China is still struggling to build the lasting institutions it needs if it is not to regress to an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. It is not surprising that Russian society, caught as it was in a transition from the old to the new, creaked and started to buckle under the strains. Things might have worked out if there had been time and if Russia had managed to avoid costly wars. Instead it fought two, the second even more disastrous than the first, within a decade. Many of Russia’s leaders, including by 1914 the tsar himself, knew well the dangers of war but for some of them there was also the seductive temptation of rallying society around a noble cause and healing its divisions. In 1904 the Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve, is reported to have said that Russia needed ‘a small victorious war’ which would take the minds of the Russian masses off ‘political questions’.
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The Russo-Japanese War showed the folly of that idea. In its early months Plehve himself was blown apart by a bomb; towards its end the newly formed Bolsheviks tried to seize Moscow. The war served to deepen and bring into sharp focus the existing unhappiness of many Russians with their own society and its rulers. As the many deficiencies, from command to supplies, of the Russian war effort became apparent,
criticism grew, both of the government and, since the regime was a highly personalised one, of the tsar himself. In St Petersburg a cartoon showed the tsar with his breeches down being beaten while he says, ‘Leave me alone. I am the autocrat!’
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Like the French Revolution, with which it had many similarities, the Russian Revolution of 1905 broke old taboos, including the reverence surrounding the country’s ruler. It seemed to officials in St Petersburg a bad omen that the empress had hung a portrait of Marie Antoinette, a gift from the French government, in her rooms.
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On 22 January 1905, a giant procession of workers and their families, dressed in their best clothes and singing hymns, wended its way towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar demanding sweeping political and economic reforms. Many of them still regarded the tsar as their ‘Little Father’ and believed that he only needed to know what was wrong in order to make changes. The authorities, already jumpy, called out the army which cracked down brutally, firing point blank into the crowd. By the end of the day some hundreds were dead or wounded. Bloody Sunday helped to set off what was a dress rehearsal for the revolution of 1917 and which very nearly became the real thing. Throughout 1905 – ‘the year of nightmares’, the dowager empress called it – and into the summer of 1906 – Russia was hit by strikes and protests. Some of the many nationalities within the Russian Empire saw a chance for freedom and there were mass popular demonstrations against Russian rule from the Baltic provinces and Poland down to the Caucasus. Peasants refused to pay rent to their landlords and in some parts of the countryside seized the land and animals and plundered the big houses. Some 15 per cent of Russia’s manor houses were burned in this period.
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Ominously, in the summer of 1905 sailors in the Black Sea Fleet on board the battleship
Potemkin
mutinied.

By the autumn the tsar was isolated in his country estate at Tsarskoye Selo outside St Petersburg as the railways and telegraphs stopped working. Shops ran out of supplies, electricity went off, and people were afraid to go out. For six weeks in the city itself a Soviet of Workers Deputies was an alternative authority to the government. A young radical, Leon Trotsky, was one of its leading members as he was to be again with another Soviet in the 1917 revolution. In Moscow the new revolutionary Bolshevik Party was planning its armed uprising. Under
huge pressure from his own supporters, the tsar reluctantly issued a manifesto in October promising a responsible legislature, the Duma, as well as civil rights.

As so often happens in revolutionary moments, the concessions only encouraged the opponents of the regime. It appeared to be close to collapsing with its officials confused and ineffective in the face of such widespread disorder. That winter a battalion from Nicholas’s own regiment, the Preobrazhensky Guards, which had been founded by Peter the Great, mutinied. A member of the tsar’s court wrote in his diary: ‘This is it.’
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Fortunately for the regime, its most determined enemies were disunited and not yet ready to take power while moderate reformers were prepared to support it in the light of the tsar’s promises. Using the army and police freely, the government managed to restore order. By the summer of 1906 the worst was over – for the time being. The regime still faced the dilemma, though, of how far it could let reforms go without fatally undermining its authority. It was a dilemma faced by the French government in 1789 or the Shah’s government in Iran in 1979. Refusing demands for reform and relying on repression creates enemies; giving way encourages them and brings more demands.