Season 13, Episode 15: A Tsar is Born
Russia is particularly unique among European nations in that its land spans both Europe and Asia. As a result of this geographic reality, the question of whether Russia is (quote) “Western” or (quote) “Eastern” has continually plagued its government administration since time immemorial. Whether they would attempt to emulate western nations or retreat into traditional slavic methods of governance depended on the particular Tsar, as well as the relative power dynamic of his ministers.
The Crimean War was a critical event for the Russian Empire. Through a series of miscalculations, diplomatic blunders, and battlefield mistakes, an alliance featuring Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia triumphed over Russian armed forces in a bloody two-year war whose complexities are far beyond the scope of this humble podcast. The Crimean War was concurrent with the early Bakumatsu period which witnessed the end of Japan’s isolation.
In 1855, in the middle of this terrible conflict, Tsar Nicholas the first passed away and Tsar Alexander II took charge. While Nicholas the first was a staunch “eastern” conservative, Alexander II was much more amicable to so-called “western-style” reforms. He is especially famous for officially putting an end to private serfdom throughout the Russian Empire in 1861 and then to all serfdom nationwide in 1866, for which the people referred to him as “The Tsar Liberator.” However, this newfound freedom was not exactly free. The aristocrats who had previously owned these land-locked peasants enjoyed some debt forgiveness and government bonds to compensate them for the value of their former property, and the state implemented loans for the newly-freed serfs which amounted to an extra tax which they were expected to pay off by farming. Naturally, this provoked something of a negative reaction among the serfs, who were initially very happy to be liberated but grew fairly dissatisfied with suddenly being indebted sharecroppers.
There are a remarkable number of similarities between Japan and Russia during the mid-1800s. Both had isolationist tendencies and a conservative political class that favored old-fashioned solutions which were often incompatible with emerging trends and problems. Obviously Russia had less of a choice in its isolation, given that it shares borders with many foreign nations, but the tendency to retreat and adhere to tradition definitely sounds familiar.
Given that Russia did not have Japan’s geographical advantage, ideas from outside the empire frequently percolated into the vast nation’s interior and even spread among the peasantry. The most well-known so-called foreign political philosophy which influenced Russia in the mid-1800s was Marxism. To briefly summarize, Marxism is a philosophy of history, politics, and economics which seeks not only to understand and define the power shift that arose when mercantile interests usurped traditional European aristocracy, but posited that a future power shift, from the bourgeois merchant class to the common workers, was inevitable. This would be accomplished, according to founding thinkers Marx and Engels, by a revolution of the working class.
Many of these groups organized assassination attempts against Tsar Alexander II and the first of these attempts in 1866 resulted in the Tsar adopting a more conservative, authoritarian style to governance. In 1879 and 1880, subsequent attempts were made against the Tsar as revolutionary groups gradually adopted anti-Tsarism as a default political stance.
For better or worse, Marxism and other revolutionary philosophies were making real headway in the Russian Empire throughout the latter 1800s, and many of the revolutionary groups that formed came to the conclusion that the Russian government was their enemy and needed to be violently overthrown. A group which would soon stand out above their peers was the Narodnaya Volya - the People’s Will.
In 1881, the Narodnaya Volya would succeed where their predecessors had failed. On March 13, 1881, the Tsar was returning to his palace after observing some military drills. A bomb was thrown under his carriage and detonated, but this particular carriage was heavily armored and the Tsar was unharmed. While standing outside of his carriage and remarking that he was, thank God, uninjured, a second assassin threw a bomb at his feet, which detonated with terrible efficiency.
The Tsar and his assassin were both gravely injured by the ensuing explosion. Alexander II was rushed from the scene and given the best medical treatment available but it was clear that the Tsar was not going to survive. Members of his family, the Romanov Dynasty, gathered around his bed as he was given last rites and communion. He died at 3:30 that afternoon, writhing in pain as his abdomen was torn open and his face badly mutilated by the explosive.
After the death of Alexander II, Alexander III was placed on the throne. Mindful of the Russian government’s vulnerability in the wake of his own father’s assassination, Tsar Alexander III largely hewed toward conservative policies, sponsoring the repression of the Narodnaya Volya and many of their peer radical groups. He reorganized national security into a secret police organization known as the Okhrana, which acted with broad, nearly unchecked authority. He was also a rabid antisemite and passed laws prohibiting certain activities among his Jewish subjects as well as turning a blind eye to over a dozen anti-Jewish pogroms which took place under his tenure.
Alexander III is widely blamed for the Borki train disaster of 1888, in which a train carrying the Russian Imperial Family was traveling at an unsafe speed, at the Tsar’s insistence, and derailed, killing twenty-one of its passengers. The Romanov family members on board the train were generally unharmed, though somewhat shaken by the crash. Among them was the future Nicholas II.
Famously known as the last Tsar of the Romanov Dynasty, Nicholas II had an interesting history which, in part, involved Japan. In 1890, he embarked on a grand world tour and the following year he found himself in Japan. While visiting the land of the rising sun, the young Crown Prince, like so many twenty-somethings before and after, opted to get a dragon tattoo on his right forearm, just like his cousin King George V had done some years earlier. Unfortunately for the young Tsarevich, the tattoo needle was not the only Japanese implement that would pierce his skin during this visit. While traveling from Lake Biwa to nearby Kyoto, one of Nicholas II’s Japanese police escorts suddenly drew a saber and attacked him.
The first blow struck young Nicky in the head and left a wound on his forehead which would later form into a nine-centimeter scar -- that’s almost four inches. Nicky’s cousin, George I of Greece and Denmark, parried a second blow and the police officer then attempted to flee. He was forcibly detained by two rickshaw drivers who had been accompanying the Tsar. The name of the police officer was Tsuda Sanzo and, like many political assassins before and since, his actual motivations made little sense. He claimed that Nicholas was a Russian spy and that he was acting in Japan’s national interest but this claim is fairly nonsensical on its face. Nicholas was the crown prince of Russia; killing him would only create a just cause for the Russians to make war against the Japanese, something which the Meiji government was desperate to avoid in 1891.
Luckily for the Empire of Japan, Tsarevich Nicholas recovered from his wounds and returned home safely. Any potential for an outbreak of war between Japan and Russia was, for the moment, averted. However, the Russian crown prince would never forget the incident and would forever hold the Japanese responsible for the attempt on his life. Like his father, he was an unapologetic racist, and he encouraged national prejudice against Jewish people as well as east Asian peoples like the Chinese and especially, the Japanese. In 1894, Alexander III died and the Tsarevich became Tsar Nicholas II.
Evidence suggests that Tsar Nicholas II was not very well-prepared for the job, and during the early years he relied heavily on his uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and Sergei Witte, the Russian Empire’s longtime minister of finance. While Sergei Witte was generally apolitical, uncle Sergei the Grand Duke was an arch-conservative reactionary whose greatest political hits included the expulsion of 20,000 Jews from Moscow and a violent repression of a political movement of reform-minded college students.
The question at the forefront of every politically-active Russian citizen’s mind upon the ascension of Tsar Nicholas II was whether he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps and, like his uncle, rule as an authoritarian conservative or whether he might instead follow the way of his reform-minded grandfather Alexander II.
The answer was very quickly revealed: he was going to stick with reactionary conservatism. From Nicholas’ perspective, his grandfather the Tsar Liberator had taken great pains and considerable risks to free the serfs and establish liberal reforms throughout Russia and had been rewarded by an assassin’s bomb. Nicholas had been a young man when his grandfather was brought into the palace, his body shredded and torn from the explosive. He had witnessed the painful and hideous death that followed some hours later. It is easy to understand, given this formative childhood experience, why he assumed that authoritarian conservatism, in which all political, spiritual, and legal power was vested in the Tsar, was the safer option.
Unfortunately for the new Tsar, the people were clamoring for liberal reforms. The zemstvos, village assemblies which had been established by the Tsar’s grandfather, were petitioning for the creation of a national assembly similar to Britain’s parliament. The Tsar largely ignored these requests but his refusal to even consider reforms contributed to a growing unpopularity which began almost as soon as he was installed as Russia’s new emperor.
Hoping to establish widespread support among the peasantry for the new Tsar, a large public party was arranged to take place in Khodynka Field, a large expansive park just outside Moscow. A few days after the coronation, the party began and thousands gathered in Khodynka Field to eat free food, drink free beer, and even take home special souvenir cups made just for the occasion. Sounds like a good time to me. However, rumors swirled that the food and beer were limited and that there wouldn’t be enough for everyone. A panic ensued as people rushed to receive their rightful share and over a thousand were killed from being trampled or otherwise crushed. Tsar Nicholas II rightfully felt alarmed by the Khodynka Field Tragedy and wanted to spend that evening in his room, alone, praying for the dead. His uncle the Grand Duke, however, convinced him to instead join him and the French ambassador for a special coronation party in the palace. When word got out that the Tsar had spent the night of the Khodynka Field Tragedy at a lavish party, the people were understandably shocked. The whole affair was perceived as a bad omen over the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.
Nevertheless, the new Tsar continued following a relatively conservative path. He also seems to have been somewhat “high on his own supply,” to put it mildly. He believed that his position as the Tsar of the Russian Empire meant that he was ordained by God to rule with absolute impunity. His dictates, his commands, and policies were the dictates, commands, and policies of God. Thus he rejected out of hand any suggestions of creating a popular assembly or elective branches of the Russian government. He believed that the majority of the Russian people were devout Orthodox practitioners and that they were therefore supportive of his absolute authority.
Tsar Nicholas II’s international reputation was initially much more positive than his domestic image. His father had been known as a peacemaker and the Russian Empire’s general foreign policy toward their fellow world powers was to preserve the status quo as far as possible. Nicky worked toward strengthening Russia’s alliance with France while also pursuing a policy of peace in Europe. He was a vocal proponent of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, which encouraged European powers to end the ongoing arms race that continually produced deadlier guns and more destructive artillery. Of course, while Nicky might have enjoyed casting himself as a great agent for human pacification, conflict with Japan loomed on the horizon.
In 1895, Russia had joined with France and Germany in convincing Japan to give Liaodong Province back to China in exchange for a larger indemnity. Shortly thereafter, Russia leased much of Liaodong Province from China and established their Pacific fleet at Lushunko, which they called Port Arthur.
In addition to being a dangerous mixture of naivete, bravado, and autocratic arrogance, Tsar Nicholas II was also an absolutely unhinged racist. Like his father and grandfather before him, and like his uncle the Grand Duke, he expressed open disdain for his Jewish subjects and was even more racist when discussing east Asians, especially the Japanese. Some of his attitude stemmed, no doubt, from his experience nearly being killed in Japan only a few years before his coronation but frankly his irrational belief in European racial supremacy over east Asia was about to massively backfire.
Japan had been making real gains throughout the late 1800s in nearly every arena of political and military capability. In what should have been an especially worrisome development for the Russian Empire, in 1902 the Japanese Empire concluded a defensive alliance with Britain. The Russian and British governments had a complicated history. Britain had been the driving force behind the alliance that had fought Russia in the Crimean War and because they feared a potential British seizure of their Alaskan territory they sold the claim, part and parcel, to the United States in 1867.
Part of the motivation for Russia cultivating close relationships with Germany and France was to potentially contain Britain’s continued imperial ambitions. However, the defensive alliance with Japan was not automatically triggered merely by either nation declaring war. The stipulations clarified that Britain or Japan would join a war on the side of the other only if that ally was being attacked by more than one nation. If Russia and Germany waged war on Japan, Britain would certainly be expected to support Japan. However, if Russia alone waged war on Japan, Britain had no obligation to help either way.
None of which is to say that Tsar Nicholas II factored any of these considerations into his foreign policy vis-a-vis Japan. In his imagination, the Japanese were short, effeminate, and cowardly. Throughout the first few years of the 1900s, Japan was gradually increasing its fleet size and expanding its naval capabilities. However, reports of this alarming increase in naval activity went largely ignored by the Tsar, who truly believed that there would only be war between Russia and Japan when Russia wished it. It was impossible, in his mind, that Japan would ever initiate such a conflict.
This belief in the eternally submissive and cowardly attitude of the Japanese informed Russian foreign policy in a major way throughout Tsar Nicholas II’s early years. One of the major ambitions of former Tsars was the national unification of all Orthodox believers across eastern Europe under the flag of the Russian Empire. The Balkans, Greece, and European territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire, especially Constantinople, hosted a significant number of Orthodox believers, which justified Russian attempts at expansion into eastern Europe throughout the early 1800s. However, Tsar Nicholas II and his father before him had both supported a general peace throughout Europe and settled for checking in once in a while with the Austria-Hungarian Empire, who controlled much of the Balkans, and broadly supporting Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Westward expansion was, as far as the Russian Empire of Nicholas II was concerned, a dead issue.
The east, however, was wide open. The weakness of the Qing Dynasty continued to attract competing imperial powers like the British and French, and Russia was eager to claim their own slice of Chinese territory and economy. Their foray onto the Liaodong Peninsula had been legalized by a sweetheart lease deal which they had extracted from China. Their seizure of Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion, however, had been considered out-of-bounds by the international community.
Obviously Manchuria was not an unpopulated area and the local residents had no desire to become citizens of the Russian Empire. Not that they were really given much of a chance in the matter; the Russian army engaged in a campaign of destruction and mayhem upon their entry into Manchuria. Gangs of Cossack horsemen raided Manchu villages in the Amur River area, raping, pillaging, burning, and looting. Those who were able to mobilize fled in a panic before the Russian onslaught, mostly seeking shelter in Qing dynasty domains to the south. However, because this was occurring in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion, many of these refugees became victims of the foreign armies campaigning against the Boxers.
It was not immediately clear, thanks to the fog of war, that Russia intended to possess Manchuria indefinitely. When the Boxer Rebellion was concluded, the Boxer Protocols which Russia had co-signed contained the provision that all previously-held Chinese land would be returned to the Qing dynasty. However, the Russian army under orders from their top brass abjectly refused to reverse the occupation of Manchuria.
Not everyone within the upper echelons of the Russian government agreed with this particular maneuver. Sergei Witte, the level-headed Minister of Finance and arguably the only person in the room who understood the larger dynamics of economics and politics, urged Tsar Nicholas II to withdraw the troops from Manchuria and restore the previous status quo.
Aleksey Kuropatkin, Russia’s Minister of War, however, advocated for continuing the occupation. Russia’s diplomats were already pressing hard to extract extra favorable agreements from the Qing Dynasty, holding Manchuria out like bait. However, the Chinese government had, at this point, little more left to give. The other members of the Eight-Nation Alliance roundly condemned Russia for failing to abide by the Boxer Protocol and instead engaging in what amounted to a geopolitical shakedown.
Meanwhile, their own invasion of Manchuria inspired the Korean Empire to stage its own invasion. The Jiandao region, which lies just to the northeast of the Korean Peninsula, was a contested region which the Korean government claimed should belong to them by rights. From 1901 through 1904, they invaded this region with their army and essentially annexed it, for the time being.
Thus Russia’s position on the international stage in the early 1900s was one of isolation among its fellow imperial powers. For the moment, they were treated as something of a pariah by the international community and even longtime allies began to urge them to give up Manchuria and avoid provoking Japan. The Tsar laughed at the idea that Japan was anything he ought to fear, and found the idea that they might initiate war even more laughable. Japan had been attempting to engage Russia diplomatically over Manchuria and their continued presence in Korea, but to no avail.
In early 1904, Tsar Nicholas II was as confident as ever that nothing could threaten Russian superiority in the east. It was an inevitability, as certain as the rising sun. Imagine his surprise on February 9 when he was informed that the Japanese had, without warning, attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Next time, we will begin our discussion of the Russo-Japanese War, one of the most consequential events in the histories of both Russia and Japan.