SIX
CASUS BELLI
The choice of the Manchurian route might have seemed clever from both a practical and a strategic point of view, but that decision was bound to cause problems, and so it proved. The two sections in Russia connecting the railway with Manchuria proved relatively simple to build. In the summer of 1897 work started on a seventy-mile line, stretching eastwards from the Ussuri Railway near a town now called Ussurisk, north of Vladivostok, towards the Manchurian border at Pogranichny, and was completed two years later. From the west, Pushechnikov, who was still involved in completing the Transbaikal, began work around the same time on the longer Western section from a point between Chita and Sretensk towards the border. Under pressure from the Russian government to speed up the job because of its desire to have a continuous railway line all the way through to the Pacific, he completed the 215 mile line to the frontier town of Manchouli by 1901, a year earlier than planned. Both these relatively easy sections opened quickly to traffic, even though initially they were effectively branch lines that did not serve anywhere significant.
The main section through Manchuria involved a delicate diplomatic situation which was fluid and potentially dangerous. In 1898 the hitherto covert imperial ambitions of the Russian government afforded by the railway came to the fore when it concluded an agreement to obtain the whole of the Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria from China on a 25-year lease. This arrangement belied Witte’s previous statements about the Chinese Eastern Railway not being part of an agenda to colonize Manchuria. The Russians had designs on Port Arthur and neighbouring Dalny (now Dalian) at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula, which are, unlike Vladivostok, warm-water ports open all the year round. Ever since the agreement to build the Chinese Eastern Railway had been signed with Li, Russia had begun establishing itself in Manchuria as the dominant power. Harbin, the key town and headquarters of the railway, quickly assumed the identity of a Russian provincial capital and a flood of Russian incomers arrived to set up the administration of the railway.
Russia’s invasion by stealth of Manchuria was part of the machinations by all the great powers at the time – notably Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States – to establish trading centres and colonies in the Far East. Ports were the key to such expansion, as they afforded both a toehold and access to the hinterland. Russia appeared cleverly to have got in there first, but its every move was being watched carefully by its rivals, who were waiting for their opportunity to pounce. The pretext for Russian involvement had come in November 1897 when Germany grabbed Tsingtao, a port on the East China Sea, under the guise of defending its missionaries after two had been killed by local people resisting attempts to spread Christianity. Russia’s response was brazen. In March 1898 the Russians strong-armed the Chinese into the leasing agreement for the peninsula and the foreign minister, Count Mikhail Muravev, immediately organized the takeover of Port Arthur. As part of the arrangement, the Russians promised to build a railway to connect the port with the Chinese Eastern Railway at Harbin, effectively creating a through-railway route all the way from Moscow to eastern China. The Russians claimed their takeover of the Liaodong peninsula would protect Chinese interests against the Germans and other European powers, but this was a paper-thin excuse that did not fool anyone. The takeover was clearly part of a wider imperialist strategy that was in clear violation of the treaty negotiated with Li. Witte had been expressing his honest view when, during the negotiations to build the Chinese Eastern Railway, he had told the Chinese that Russia harboured no such intentions, and therefore was genuinely horrified by the military action. He wrote afterwards in his memoirs: ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway was designed exclusively for cultural and peaceful purposes, but jingoist adventurers turned it into a means of political aggression involving the violation of treaties, the breaking of freely given promises and the disregard of the elementary interests of other nationalities.’1 Witte was so angered that he offered his resignation to the tsar, but this was turned down. He was far too useful to lose, although eventually his career would founder on the issue of Russia’s Far East policy.
This complex political situation provided the backdrop to the construction of the line, and did not make the task of the builders easier, since there was considerable hostility towards the Russians from local people. Construction of the Manchurian section of the Chinese Eastern Railway began in 1897 under the responsibility of a very experienced Russian engineer, Alexander Yugovich. If the various sections of the Trans-Siberian presented daunting prospects to the builders in the initial surveys, the near 1,000-mile-long Chinese Eastern Railway through Manchuria undoubtedly surpassed them. The railway was to run through mountainous, inaccessible country and there were no maps available to plot the route in advance. The few roads were in poor condition and turned into impassable quagmires in the rainy season. The rivers were unbridged and carts could only cross them at fords or on pairs of small boats lashed together. There was a shortage of timber on most of the route and insufficient stone on the eastern section. The surveyors reckoned there were no fewer than fourteen major waterways, frozen for four months, that would require bridges. Moreover, whereas the main route of the Trans-Siberian was built with no significant tunnels, eight lengthy ones were required, with the longest, through the Great Khingan Range in the west, envisaged to be two miles long. The hostility of the natural terrain was exacerbated by the hostility of the local people, especially in the hilly areas which were controlled by local warlords.
Not only was there a shortage of materials, but, again, there was no local labour to build the line. Local people did not speak Russian and few interpreters were available to enable them to come to work on the railway. The need to import labour and materials led to an innovative construction plan. Rather than building the line conventionally, Yugovich’s Number Two, Stanislav Kerbedz, put forward a novel strategy. Given the lack of access, he decided, with Witte’s acquiescence, to lay a crude, rough track through the territory on which a temporary railway could be laid to provide access, so that material, more sophisticated tools and equipment and, indeed, the workers – Russian artisans and thousands of Chinese ‘coolies’ (hired labourers) – could be brought in to carve out the railway formation and lay the track bed to create the permanent way, with the labour force reaching a maximum of 200,000 at the peak of construction. The first wave of labourers started carving out the track alignment in August 1897, westward from the Ussuri, while others travelled by rail and steamer to reach Harbin, which grew from village status to – by 1903 – a sizeable town with 40,000 inhabitants, half of them Russian.
Given the need for haste, money was always made available by the Committee to ensure rapid progress and that allowed work to be carried out simultaneously at more than twenty sites, each covering a section between fifty and one hundred miles long. As on the Transbaikalia Railway, large stretches of permafrost had to be broken up using explosives or thawed with fires stoked by wood that in many parts had to be brought in from hundreds of miles away. Many of the difficulties encountered on the Trans-Siberian were repeated, such as spring floods washing away sections of newly built line, but nevertheless progress was remarkably rapid thanks to the resources thrown at the project.
However, apart from the elements, there were two further barriers to the construction of the railway: disease and rebellion. In order to consolidate Russia’s land grab of the Liaodong peninsula and Port Arthur, work had started in the summer of 1898 on the 550-mile-long South Manchuria Railway, the name given to the line between Harbin and Port Arthur. Russia was already fortifying and developing the port into a naval base and marine coaling station for its Far East Fleet and merchant navy, and needed the railway to supply it. The line traversed the most populated area of Manchuria and soon after the start of construction a particularly virulent epidemic of bubonic plague broke out at Yingkou, about 200 miles north of Port Arthur. Thanks to swift action by the Russian authorities, the outbreak was largely contained,
but the epidemic caused panic among the Chinese labourers across the various construction sites and many walked off the job. There was, too, a cholera outbreak in southern Manchuria in 1902, which spread up to Harbin and along the line. This time many Russian workers caught the disease, and again panic set in, resulting in the loss of much of the summer construction period at several sites.
There was a suspicion in Chinese circles that the Russians were making an unnecessary fuss about the difficulties of building the Chinese Eastern Railway and that this was all part of an imperialist plot. A former manager of the line, Chin-Chun Wang, writing in the 1920s, reckoned that most of the railway was relatively easy to build, apart from the long tunnel under the Great Khingan and a bridge at Harbin, and that it was effectively ‘gold-plated’ in order to attract Russians to come and live in Manchuria: ‘There seems to be much evidence to fortify the impression that unnecessary lavishness in the spending of money was generally encouraged. Enormous sums were spent for the erecting of magnificent residences, numerous barracks, palatial club-houses, magnificent churches and schools, etc., all with the idea of inducing Russians to settle along the Chinese Eastern.’2 It was this, he suggested, rather than the difficulties in construction, that led to the huge cost of the railway, which reached 400 million roubles, about £40,000 per mile, much more than the Trans-Siberian itself, because all these extras were rolled up into the overall cost. That rather makes light of the construction difficulties, since 912 steel bridges, as well as 258 in stone, were required to build the line, but Wang is correct in asserting that the very high cost was due to the fact that the railway was envisaged as more than just a transport system. What is not in dispute is that the Russians used the construction of the line and the need to guard it as a way of driving a Russian wedge into Chinese territory and effectively colonizing Manchuria. The Railway Guard that had been agreed in the negotiations between Witte and Li was more like a small army than a police force, given that it quickly built up to an establishment of 25,000 men.
The very existence of the railway, with its ability to transport people across the continent so quickly, changed the military dynamic of the whole region. Within a few days a bunch of Cossacks, traditionally used to impose Russian power at the local level, could be transported on the railway to wherever there was trouble. In effect, Russia did precisely what Witte had promised it would not, using the railway as the driving force for an occupation. This became apparent with the onset of the Boxer Rising in 1899. Right from the start of construction there had been raids by outlaws – known as hunghutzes (literally, ‘redbeards’) – who attacked local inhabitants and extorted protection money from travellers. Indeed, this was a semi-legitimized system, because merchants intending to travel in the countryside could buy insurance in offices in Manchuria’s main cities, and in return they were provided with documentation and little flags to attach to their vehicles which ensured immunity from attack. These raids, however, were insignificant compared with the level of attacks when the Boxer Rising spread northwards with the Chinese Eastern Railway as a key target. The Boxers were a group of conservative nationalists with a mystical bent, since they believed that with enough effort and discipline it was possible to learn to fly. They were, briefly, given encouragement by the Dowager Empress Cixi, who ruled China at the turn of the century, which resulted in an intensification of their assaults on foreign targets. They destroyed much of the South Manchuria Railway around Mukden and Russian workers fled in terror of being massacred. There were attacks, too, on the Chinese Eastern Railway as both lines were seen as an overt expression of the hated foreign invasion.
Overreacting to bandit attacks had already provided the perfect cover for expanding military involvement and the Boxer Rising gave Russia further ammunition to establish control over Manchuria and widen its territorial control. In fact, despite the attacks, according to Witte, the Boxer Rising was never strong in Manchuria and could easily have been seen off by the Railway Guard. Witte saw through the subterfuge: ‘Our army behaved in Manchuria as a conquering country, thus preparing the ground for catastrophe. The forces of the Boxers in Manchuria were practically insignificant.’3 Despite the army defeating the Boxers and summarily executing any hunghutzes they came across, the War Ministry insisted on a strong presence in the country, exacerbating tensions. The Russians did not help their cause by committing a series of outrages against the local population. Most notoriously in July 1900, at Blagoveshchensk on the Russian side of the Amur river, the army, seeking to enforce the deportation of all the local Chinese, simply drove them, men, women and children, into the river at gunpoint and all but 160 of several thousand4 were drowned. This was by no means the only recorded instance of war crimes committed by Russian troops and, inevitably, they led to further conflict and violence. Yugovich, the engineer, was unequivocal about Russian intent, later writing: ‘It is an open secret that from the very beginning of the campaign it was the desire of the military party not only to punish the Boxers, but also permanently to annex Manchuria.’5
Despite the attacks and the damage to the line caused by the Boxers, work proceeded thanks to Yugovich’s army of Chinese labourers. By November 1901 it became possible, at last, to go by train from Moscow to Vladivostok, with the exception of the ferry or sled journey over Lake Baikal, and to reach Port Arthur by way of the South Manchuria Railway. The Chinese Eastern Railway was, however, by no means complete. The main tunnel was unfinished, with trains routed on a tortuous line around the summit, and many of the bridges were temporary, rickety affairs. Moreover, it was a slow railway with a limited capacity. The railway, single-track throughout, was planned for an initial capacity of ten trains in each direction daily, but there were insufficient loops where trains could pass to reach that target and the maximum speed was 14 mph, although that fell to 10 mph on hilly sections. Consequently, Yugovich’s job was not finished. With extra money granted by the Committee, in the knowledge that a war with Japan was a distinct possibility, a crash programme of improvements was instituted. Almost 150 new sidings – essential both to accommodate waiting trains and to increase the potential to carry freight – were built, but a plan to double-track the line throughout was put on hold, because of the imminence of the war.
The conflict was made inevitable by the increasingly jingoistic posturing of a group of hawkish Russian generals who gained the support of the tsar. They were intent on an expansionist policy that was bound to lead to confrontation, despite Witte’s persistent opposition and warnings. Witte had already counselled that once the Boxer Rising was put down in 1901 the Russian troops brought in to support the Railway Guard should return home. The Great Powers were all concerned at Russia’s presence, especially given their own ambitions in the Far East, and were clearly not going to allow the Russians to establish hegemony over the whole region. The doves still seemed to hold sway in 1902, when a treaty with China that involved the withdrawal of Russian troops by September 1903 was concluded, and Witte visited Manchuria that summer to assess the situation. After he returned home, however, it became clear that the Russians were not sticking to the agreement and only part of Manchuria was evacuated.
The tsar himself resisted a total withdrawal. Instead, he sent a bellicose new adviser, General Pyotr Bezobrazov, to the Far East (in a luxurious train, Witte noted sourly) and seems to have been taken in by what Witte called ‘grandiose fantastic schemes of exploiting our Far Eastern possessions, among which they reckoned Manchuria and northern Korea’.6 Bezobrazov indeed had designs not just on Manchuria, but also on Korea, the neighbouring peninsula to Liaodong. The Japanese had expansionist designs on both Manchuria and Korea, too, but probably would have settled for the latter, but the tsar favoured Bezobrazov’s aggressive intent over Witte’s more cautious approach.
The intervention of Bezobrazov ensured that war broke out. He portrayed Witte’s desire to pull out the troops as a sign of weakness and the tsar sided with him. Witte resigned from the government, warning of war. Negotiations
between Japan and Russia over their respective territorial ambitions in the region inevitably foundered and the tsar failed to understand that Japan was not sabre-rattling. The completion of the Trans-Siberian, and, more precicely, the building of the China Eastern Railway and its southern extension, was (as Witte had warned) a provocative act. Japan was duly provoked.
Like many wars it started almost by mistake, through misunderstanding rather than any desire to fight. The Russians did not believe that Japan seriously intended to attack, while, for their part, the Japanese were convinced Russia would accede to its demands. Tupper sums it up brilliantly: ‘In broad terms, the Russo-Japanese War resulted from the competition of two nations for mastery over alien territories to which neither had the slightest shred of legal or moral right.’7 Both nations’ assumptions about each other proved wrong and in February 1904 Japan launched an attack on Port Arthur, and after several attempts to take over the port eventually landed an army on the Liaodong peninsula.
The timing of the Japanese was not accidental, but was prompted by its concerns that the Trans-Siberian and the Chinese Eastern Railway, when completed and improved, would be able to deliver large numbers of troops rapidly to Manchuria. The Japanese wanted to take advantage of the lack of ability of the recently-completed railways to carry the burden of war, and the fact that the Circum-Baikal was not due to be completed until 1906 was crucial in the decision on the timing of the attack. The supply line between Moscow and Manchuria was five or six weeks long, rather than the ten days or so when the lines were functioning efficiently. In a way, Russia was paying the price for not having carried out the Trans-Siberian project much earlier, given that the idea had been more than forty years in gestation. Had the line been completed, say, twenty years earlier, when Japan was only just emerging from its isolation, it would not have been in a position to prevent Russian territorial ambitions. Now, unfortunately for Russia, Japan was a well-organized and growing military power.
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