The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (16 page)

Not for the last time in the twentieth century, notions of innate racial superiority were to prove deceptive. The Russian naval expedition proceeded with astonishing slowness, not least because its Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Zinovy Petrovitch Rozhestvensky, was privately convinced that he was doomed to fail. Fearful of another surprise attack by the Japanese, the Russians mistakenly opened fire on British trawlers at the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, sinking one and inflicting damage on their own cruiser
Aurora
. They travelled with their holds full of coal and other supplies, as if expecting the Japanese fleet to be lying in wait off the next coaling station. The Japanese had in fact achieved naval dominance off the Manchurian coast by August. Meanwhile their army had occupied Seoul and landed troops at Inchon (February 1904), effectively taking over the Korean peninsula; Japanese troops proceeded to inflict heavy defeats on Russian forces at Yalu (April) and Fengcheng (May). Following the landing of the Japanese 2nd Army at Kwantung, the Russian garrison at Port Arthur found themselves under siege. There was heavy fighting throughout the second half of 1904, culminating in the Japanese capture of the crucial hill overlooking the harbour on December 5. Although they suffered heavy casualties, the Japanese finally secured Port Arthur’s surrender on January 2, 1905. Two months later, after wave upon wave of bloody frontal assaults by Japanese soldiers, Kuropatkin was
forced to surrender Mukden (Shenyang). By the time the Russian fleet reached the scene, then, the war was effectively over. In due course, Admiral Rozhestvensky’s premonitions of doom were amply fulfilled. At Tsushima on May 27–28, 1905, the Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō sent two-thirds of the Russian fleet – 147,000 tons of naval hardware and nearly 50,000 sailors – to the bottom of the Korea Strait.

Returning home in disgrace, Kuropatkin could only reflect bitterly on what seemed to him a turning point in world history:

The battle is only just beginning. What happened in Manchuria in 1904–5 was nothing more than a skirmish with the advance guard… Only with a common recognition that keeping Asia peaceful is a matter of importance to all of Europe… can we keep the ‘yellow peril’ at bay.

Yet in many ways the Japanese had won by being more European than the Russians; their ships were more modern, their troops better disciplined, their artillery more effective. To Leo Tolstoy, the titan of Russian letters, Japan’s victory looked like a straightforward triumph of Western materialism. By comparison, it was the Tsarist system that suddenly looked ‘Asiatic’ – and ripe for overthrow. Now, it seemed, the Japanese could concentrate on acquiring the other indispensable accessory of a great power: a colonial empire.

The Western empires most interested in the region were not at all sorry to see Russia humiliated. On the other hand, they were again eager to limit the spoils Japan might claim on the basis of her victory. In the negotiations that led to the signing of a Russo-Japanese peace treaty at Portsmouth naval base in Maine in September 1905, they therefore pressed the Japanese to be content with informal rather than formal power. Russia was to recognize Japan’s ‘paramount political, military, and economic interests’ in Korea, but Korea itself was to remain independent. The Japanese acquired the Liaodong peninsula as a leased territory, including Port Arthur, and – in lieu of a cash indemnity – Russian economic assets in southern Manchuria, notably the South Manchurian Railway Company; but politically Manchuria was to remain a Chinese possession. Not everyone in Japan was satisfied with these gains; radical nationalists formed an Anti-Peace Society and there were riots in Tokyo, Yokohama and Kōbe. The
essential point, however, was that the Western powers were now clearly obliged to treat Japan as an equal; there was no serious objection when the Japanese proceeded to annex Korea in 1910. At the same time, from the point of view of Japanese businessmen, equal treatment allowed them to exploit their natural advantages – both geographical and cultural – in developing the potentially enormous Chinese market.

The Russo-Japanese War had more profound geopolitical implications than these, however. First, the intensity of the fighting – especially at Mukden, which was a bigger military engagement than any in the preceding century – was an intimation that a new zone of conflict had come into existence, comparable in its potential instability to Central and Eastern Europe. Here was another great fault line, running through Manchuria and northern Korea, between the Amur and the Yalu, where the over-extended Russian Empire met the new and dynamic Japanese Empire. In the century that lay ahead, the tremors in this region would be comparable in their magnitude with those that shook Eurasia’s western conflict zone between the Elbe and the Dnieper. Secondly, the military earthquake at Mukden had been followed by a naval tsunami. If the West had still dominated the East at the dawn of the new century, then the Japanese victory at Tsushima signalled the waning of that dominance.

The revelation that there was, after all, no inherent advantage to being a European swept like an enormous wave not just over Russia, but over the whole of the Western world.

That January, as military disaster was unfolding in the Far East, dissatisfaction erupted into revolution in the Russian capital, St Petersburg, after troops fired on a peaceful demonstration by workers and their families. The leader of the demonstration, a priest named Father Georgi Gapon, was himself no revolutionary, though he was subsequently represented as one. But the wave of strikes, riots and mutinies that swept the country in the aftermath of ‘Bloody Sunday’ (January 22, 1905) presented Russia’s real revolutionaries,
most of whom lived in exile, with what seemed a golden opportunity. For a time in 1905 St Petersburg was effectively run by a new kind of institution – a council (
soviet
) of workers’ deputies, elected by local factory employees. Among its members was a flamboyant socialist journalist who went by the name of Leon Trotsky.

To Trotsky, the naval defeat at Tsushima was an indictment of all that was wrong with the Tsarist system. ‘The Russian fleet is no more,’ he declared. ‘[But] it is not the Japanese who destroyed her. Rather, it is the Tsarist government… It is not the people that need this war. Rather, it is the governing clique, which dreams of seizing new lands and wants to extinguish the flame of the people’s anger in blood.’ When, three days after peace had been concluded, the Tsar’s government reluctantly published a constitution creating the first representative parliament, the Duma, Trotsky publicly tore it up. The regime, he wrote, was ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’. Russia’s socialists wanted more than merely the constitutional monarchy that seemed to be on offer. Their vision was of a revolution led by the industrial working class, the proletariat, which would overturn not just the Tsarist regime but the entire system of Western imperialism.

Yet Trotsky’s rhetoric did not impress the majority of the Tsar’s subjects. The Left itself was deeply divided; as a former member of the Menshevik (minority) Social Democrats, Trotsky was viewed with intense suspicion by Bolshevik (majority) party leaders like Vladimir Ulyanov, who had renamed himself Lenin four years before.
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More importantly, whatever its appeal to the workers in the huge factories of St Petersburg, Marx’s doctrine of proletarian class struggle had little resonance with the overwhelming majority of Russians, who were peasants. The revolution of 1905 took many forms, few of them anticipated by Marx, who had always assumed that the proletariat would rise up amid the smokestacks and slums of Lancashire or the Ruhr, if not in the traditional revolutionary setting of central Paris. Aboard the battleship
Potemkin
, indignant sailors hoisted the red flag because of maggots in their meat. In Volokolamsk, meanwhile,
peasants formed their own ‘Markovo Republic’, proclaiming their independence from St Petersburg. Elsewhere, peasants looted and burned down their landlords’ residences, or cut down timber from landlords’ forests. As one of those who ransacked the Petrov estate in Bobrov county (Voronezh) explained: ‘It is necessary to rob and burn them. Then they will not return and the land will pass over to the peasants.’ The police chief in Pronsk county (Riazan) reported that peasants were saying: ‘Now we are all gentlemen and all are equal.’

There was another difficulty. Born Leib (Lev) Bronshtein, the son of a prosperous Ukrainian landowner, Trotsky, whose family originally hailed from a
shtetl
near Poltova, was a Jew. To many Russians that automatically made him a suspect figure. Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews’ aim, Nilus insisted, ‘to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan’. The Minister for the Interior, Vyacheslav Pleve, insisted: ‘There is no revolutionary movement in Russia; there are only the Jews who are the enemy of the government.’ The chairman of the Council of Ministers, Count Sergei Witte, took the same view, citing Jews as ‘one of the evil factors of our accursed revolution’.

As we have seen, no other European country had a larger Jewish population than the Russian Empire. Ashkenazi Jews had moved eastwards from Germany into Poland in the medieval period, in response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule, though (as we have seen) there were also substantial Jewish populations in Galicia, which had been acquired by Austria, and in Posen, which had been acquired by Prussia. Russia’s three million Jews were emphatically second-class
subjects of the Tsar. A Pale of Settlement, outside which Jews were not supposed to reside, had been established by Catherine II in 1791, though it was not precisely delineated until 1835. It consisted of Russian-controlled Poland and fifteen
gubernia
(provinces): Kovno, Vilna, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev, Volhynia, Podolia, Bessarabia (after its acquisition in 1881), Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev (except for the city of Kiev itself), Kherson (except the town of Nikolaiev), Ekaterinoslav and Tavrida (apart from Yalta and Sevastopol). Jews were not permitted to enter, much less reside in, the Russian interior. In today’s terms, then, the Pale extended in a broad strip from Latvia and Lithuania, through eastern Poland and Belarus, down to western Ukraine and Moldova. There were in fact exceptions to this residence restriction. In 1859 Jewish merchants who were members of the first guild, the highest social rank to which a Russian businessman could aspire, were permitted to reside and trade all over Russia, as were Jewish university graduates and (after 1865) artisans. There were thus communities of Jewish merchants in all the principal Russian cities: St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. Some other Jews chose to live illegally outside the Pale, but they were subject to periodic roundups by the authorities (a characteristic feature of Jewish life in Kiev).

The restriction on their place of abode was only one among many imposed on Jews by the Tsarist regime. From the 1820s until the 1860s, Jews, like all Russians, became subject to military conscription for a period of twenty-five years, a system that weighed disproportionately heavily on the younger sons of poor families. This was part of a sustained campaign to convert Jews to Christianity; once removed from their homes, young conscripts could be subjected to all kinds of pressures to renounce their faith. Bounties were also offered to Jewish adults who converted, including incentives designed to encourage Jewish men to divorce their wives. If they resisted these pressures, as most did, they had to pay a special tax on meat killed by kosher butchers. They were forbidden to employ Christians as domestic servants. Although permitted to attend high schools (
gymnasia
) and universities, they were subject to quotas; even in the Pale they could not account for more than 10 per cent of students. Nor could they become local councillors, even in towns where they were a majority of the population.

Popular hostility to the Jews had spread eastwards across Europe for centuries; it arrived in Russia relatively late. For example, the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it had reached German-speaking Central Europe; by the sixteenth, Poland, and by the eighteenth century it was firmly established all over Eastern Europe, from Lithuania to Romania. In 1840 there was an international outcry over a ‘blood libel’ case in Damascus. But such allegations did not manifest themselves in Russia until the later nineteenth century. Nor was outright violence against Jewish communities a Russian tradition. What became known in Russia as ‘pogroms’ – literally ‘after thunder’ – had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards. The Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt was ransacked in 1819; there was even a pogrom-like outbreak when striking miners ransacked Jewish shops in Tredegar, South Wales, in 1911. The earliest recorded pogroms in Russian territory – in Odessa in 1821, 1849, 1859 and 1871 – were in fact the work of the city’s Greek community.

Pogroms occur in all kinds of different settings and can be directed at all kinds of different ‘pariah’ minorities. There were, nevertheless, four distinctive features of life in the Pale of Settlement
circa
1900 that help to explain why anti-Jewish violence flared up there, even as it appeared to be dying away elsewhere. The first was the very rapid growth of the Jewish urban population. In Elizavetgrad, for example, their numbers had increased during the nineteenth century from 574 to 23,967 – 39 per cent of the population. In the industrial town of Ekaterinoslav, Jews went from being 10 per cent of the city’s population in 1825 to being 35 per cent in 1897. The population of Kiev nearly doubled in the decade between 1864 and 1874, but its Jewish population grew five-fold in the same period. These cases were not untypical. Jews accounted for high proportions of the urban population in many (though not all) of the locations of pogrom activity (see
Table 2.1
).