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Ideas


WHAT A 1904 WAR CAN TEACH VLADIMIR PUTIN

The Russo-Japanese War led not just to an immediate revolution, but to deeper
and longer-lasting change years later.

By David Gioe

A Russian column trying to make progress along a muddy road during the
Russo-Japanese War (Art Media / Print Collector / Getty)
June 23, 2022
Share

About the author: David Gioe is a British Academy Global Professor at King’s
College London, and an associate professor of history at the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, where he is also the history fellow for the Army Cyber
Institute.

When, in an expansionist mood, Russia embarked on an ill-judged war of
territorial conquest against its neighbor, it did so with a grandiose sense of
its conquering power. Russia’s leader, who ruled nearly as an absolute monarch
and held his counterpart next door in contempt, believed that his country’s
interests were threatened, that Russia deserved more influence and respect. He
had envisioned a scenario in which his enemy would yield quickly in the face of
overwhelming odds and accede to Russian territorial demands.

Contrary to the expectations of the sovereign and his military planners, the
initial campaign went badly for Russia. This was partly because of snarled
supply lines and logistics, but the biggest factor in Russia’s early defeats was
its profound misjudgment of its foe. No pushover, Russia’s opponent surprised
the world with its determination and ability to resist Russian might, aided by
timely support from European allies.



Although the circumstances may sound familiar to anyone who has followed
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the above narrative actually describes the
beginning of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. The conflict set in motion or
accelerated changes that impacted two world wars, the Cold War, and the present
day, and offers profound lessons for contemporary leaders in Moscow and beyond.
Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s military quagmire in Ukraine today is fraught with
domestic dangers that, when they bubbled up during Czar Nicholas II’s reign, led
to not just an immediate revolution but even bigger and longer-lasting changes
years later.

Putin would recognize the unenviable predicament facing Czar Nicholas II in
1904, if he could bear to consider it. The czar had overestimated his nation’s
military might, and the initial domestic support for Russia’s war with Japan
began to falter as battlefield realities slowly started to seep in. Thanks to
recent advances in telecommunications technology, there was no hiding that
Russia’s armies were underperforming. Then, as now, Britain provided weapons and
intelligence to Russia’s enemy, while the Poles seized the opportunity to
collaborate militarily with Japan, which they viewed as the latest victim of
Russian aggression. But the czar, isolated in his splendid palace, doubled down,
a reckless gamble perhaps best epitomized by sending his Baltic naval fleet on
an epic journey around the world to confront the Japanese navy in the Pacific.
It did not return home.

Nicholas was nevertheless confident that Russia would ultimately emerge
victorious; a reshuffling of strategy and greater commitment from the people
would, he believed, tip the scales in Russia’s favor. The conflict raged for
another year, but in the Battle of Mukden, in February 1905, the Japanese army
broke the back of the Russian army, and shortly thereafter, the Japanese navy
destroyed most of the remaining Russian Baltic fleet in the lopsided Battle of
Tsushima.

An illustration depicts the sinking of a Russian battleship during the Battle of
Tsushima. (Credit: Edward Matania / De Agostini / Getty)

Russia’s overconfident intransigence meant it missed an early window of
opportunity whereby diplomacy—backed by a huge army and a respectable navy—could
perhaps have secured some territorial concessions. Instead, it embarked upon a
bloody contest, accompanied by credible reports of looting, civilian atrocities,
and sexual violence. Russian troops proved themselves to be as brutal as feared
in the territories they occupied. Russian generals were dismayed by the
desultory performance of their troops, many of which lacked discipline and were
unmotivated, as evidenced by widespread instances of soldiers disobeying orders.
Russian efforts were also hampered by subpar technology, disagreement among
commanders, a lack of combined arms coordination, and an inability to replace
manpower and equipment losses in battle. Russia eventually pivoted to fighting
to save face.



The unpopular and unnecessary war with Japan caused great turmoil within Russia.
The economy was in disarray, food shortages were commonplace, and Russia was
embarrassed internationally. For his failed war, among other poor decisions, the
czar had lost the confidence of his people, sparking protests over economic woes
and awful labor conditions (which were exacerbated by the conflict) that peaked
on Bloody Sunday, a January 1905 episode in which the Russian Imperial Guard
fired on unarmed protesters outside Nicholas’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg,
killing perhaps hundreds of demonstrators; they arrested thousands more. Facing
military defeats coupled with domestic pressures, Nicholas finally sued for
peace later in 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt presided over the Treaty of
Portsmouth, which brought an end to hostilities. But peace with Japan did not
bring domestic harmony: The 1905 Russian Revolution, which saw widespread unrest
across the Russian empire, sowed the seeds for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
that overthrew the czar and led to the murder of the Romanov dynasty.


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Although the parallels between the Russo-Japanese War and the current invasion
of Ukraine are striking, there are also key differences, and fully appreciating
these distinctions is necessary to avoid facile conclusions. In 1904, Japan was
an empire on the rise and embarking on its own expansionist period, leading to
its confrontation with Russia’s hegemonic ambitions in East Asia. The two powers
had been engaged in years of negotiations over territory in what is now
northeast China and, in a notable similarity to their opening gambit at Pearl
Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese in 1904 actually attacked first with a
surprise strike on Russia’s naval fleet at anchor in Port Arthur on Manchuria’s
Liaodong Peninsula before formally declaring war. And, like at Pearl Harbor,
Japan badly damaged the fleet, thereby seizing the military initiative. Unlike
the present-day Ukrainians, the Japanese did have a formidable naval fleet to
bolster their expansionist agenda, and a loss for Japan would not have been
existential for the country.

It is useful to illuminate the present and to confront the future by consulting
the past. In this case, an analysis of the consequences of the Russo-Japanese
War ought to concern Putin. There are many battlefield parallels between Russian
military performance in these two wars, largely based on faulty assessments of
the quality of their enemy. Putin’s far larger problem, however, is that
throughout Russian history, humiliating military defeats have presaged major
social and political upheaval. The Russo-Japanese War is but one example of this
phenomenon. Russian failures against Germany in World War I helped usher in the
Bolshevik Revolution, and the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan gravely
weakened the political coherence and credibility of the Soviet Union. To be
sure, these wars did not cause all of the social unrest in Russia. In each case,
internal dynamics unrelated to the wars were at play, but they interacted with
the conflicts in crucial ways. In each case, the military failures exacerbated
structural problems and had an accelerating effect on Russian political
developments.



After the 1905 revolution, the czar cracked down on dissent while also making
nominal concessions, most notably allowing some popular political representation
by creating a duma, though this was not a serious power-sharing arrangement.
Likewise, there are Potemkin trappings of democratic governance in modern
Russia, but no serious checks on Putin’s power. One risk with a personalized
autocracy, like the Romanov monarch, is that the state is seen as synonymous
with its leader. In the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian military’s rotten
performance suggested, by extension, something of how rotten the state had
become under the czar. Given how much Putin has personalized his rule in Russia,
he now risks the shambles of the war in Ukraine becoming a proxy for his own
mismanagement of Russia.

A colorized photo of three Japanese soldiers sitting near the wreckage of a
Russian warship in Port Arthur. (Credit: Burton Holmes / Archive Farms / Getty)

History suggests that what domestic dissent Putin may have been able to manage
before the invasion of Ukraine will be harder to grapple with in the future. The
czar twice enjoyed a brief period of patriotic war fervor before his people
turned on him after military defeats. This may inform Putin’s recent crackdowns
on dissent, but it misses the benefit of history’s long view. Throughout Russian
and Soviet history, social movements for change have often been met with
repression and mass arrests, which, in time, have the opposite effect of what
autocrats have intended.



The cracks of domestic discontent are already visible in Russia, thanks to
Putin’s frequently contradictory lies to his own people. When the Ukrainians
sank the Russian naval flagship Moskva, Russian state media falsely claimed that
there had been a fire onboard, that the crew of more than 400 sailors had been
rescued, and that the ship went down in rough seas under tow. The reality was
that 100 Russian sailors, perhaps more, went down with the ship thanks to two
strikes from Ukrainian missiles. Many of these sailors were conscripts who Putin
claimed would not be fighting in Ukraine in the first place. Their families have
now bravely spoken out about their sons’ deaths, demanding information and
accountability from a regime that, heretofore, they suffered quietly.

Putin has written often about his views of history. If he were to consider the
lessons of the Russo-Japanese War, he would do well to remember the war theorist
Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war does not take place outside the context of
the society that wages it. Indeed, domestic unrest as much as any battlefield
setbacks against Japan finally convinced Czar Nicholas II to abandon his
military campaign. The present-day families of the estimated many thousands of
dead Russian soldiers are unlikely to keep their peace about this senseless
slaughter, and perhaps a great many other complaints besides.

Modern-day Ukraine isn’t Japan of the early 20th century, but the similarities
between the dire circumstances of each for Russia can illuminate the social and
political drivers that history suggests may happen now on an accelerated
timeline. In fact, much as the Russo-Japanese War shaped the contours of the
20th-century world, so, too, may Putin’s calamitous invasion of Ukraine drive
the forces that define the 21st.

The disaster of the Russo-Japanese War scrubbed the veneer off Imperial Russia,
and it confirmed the decay across the empire. That war ended with an emerging
country boldly announcing itself on the world’s stage, a loss of prestige and
influence for Russia, and eventually the end of the ruler himself.

The defeat also served as an incubator for those seeking revolutionary political
change. “The European bourgeoisie has its reasons to be frightened, and the
proletariat has its reasons to rejoice,” exclaimed Vladimir Lenin after the fall
of Port Arthur. Today, identifying any clear challengers to Putin’s power is
difficult. Opposition leaders such as Boris Nemtsov have been murdered or, like
Alexey Navalny, poisoned and jailed. Even if a focal point of resistance has not
yet emerged, however, Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine may be the spark for
unknown actors in Russia—or in exile—to organize. He should recall that in
Russia, after disastrous foreign wars, domestic discontent is never far behind.





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