Witte imagined himself a Russian Bismarck, drawing inspiration from the Iron Chancellor’s use of the state to promote economic development as well as his foreign policy realism. Witte also championed, at least rhetorically, what he called Bismarck’s “social monarchy”—that is, a conservative program of social welfare to preempt socialism.83 Witte possessed immense administrative abilities as well as the profound self-regard required of a top politician.84 Besides being awarded the Order of St. Anne, first class—a tsarist precursor of the Order of Lenin—he received more than ninety state awards from foreign governments (unthinkable in the Soviet context). In turn, using finance ministry funds, he bestowed medals, state apartments, country homes, travel allowances, and “bonuses” on his minions, allies, clans at court, and journalists (for favorable coverage). From the finance ministry’s offices on the Moika Canal, Witte enjoyed a grand vista onto the Winter Palace and Palace Square, but he also assiduously frequented the salons in the nobles’ palaces lining the Fontanka Canal. In the autocracy, for a minister to become a genuinely independent actor was near impossible. Witte depended utterly on the tsar’s confidence (doverie). Witte understood that another key to power entailed remaining well informed amid a deliberate non-sharing of information inside the government.85 This required a broad informal network coursing through all the top layers of society. (“As a minister,” wrote Witte’s successor at the finance ministry, “one had no option but to play a role in Court and in Petersburg society if one was to defend the interests of one’s department and maintain one’s position.”)86 In other words, in tsarist government relentless intrigues were not personal but structural, and Witte was a master: he developed close links to dubious types in the okhranka, whom he employed for a variety of purposes, but his underlings in the finance ministry, too, had been tasked with overhearing and recording conversations of rivals, which Witte would edit and send to the tsar. After a decade of high-profile power at the top of the Russian state, which elicited endless attacks against Witte by rivals and societal critics of his harsh taxation policies, Nicholas II would finally lose confidence in him in 1903, shunting him to a largely ceremonial post (Witte “fell upward,” contemporaries said). But his historic run at the finance ministry lasted a decade, making him one of Stalin’s most important forerunners.
Witte emulated not just Bismarck but also his British contemporary in Africa, the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), and looked upon the Far East as his personal imperial space.87 In order to shorten the route from St. Petersburg to the terminal point at Vladivostok (“rule the east”), Witte constructed a southerly branch of the Trans-Siberian right through the Chinese territory of Manchuria. Under the slogan of “peaceful penetration,” he and other Russian officials imagined they were preempting Russia’s rival imperialists (Britain, Germany, France) from carving up China the way they had the African continent.88 Other Russian officials, while insisting that each forcible conquest had to be followed by another, in order to be able to defend the original gains, competed to gain the tsar’s favor, one-upping Witte’s supposedly measured push into China. The war ministry seized, then leased, Port Arthur (Lushun), a deep warm-water entrepot on China’s Liaodong Peninsula, which jutted ever so strategically into the Yellow Sea. But Russia’s overall increasingly forward position in East Asia, in which Witte was complicit, ran smack up against not the European powers that so transfixed St. Petersburg elites, but an aggressive, imperialist Japan.89
Japan was in no way a power on the order of the world leader, Great Britain. Living standards in Japan were perhaps only one fifth of Britain’s, and Japan, like Russia, remained an agriculture-dominated economy.90 Japan’s real wages, measured against rice prices, had probably been only one third of Britain’s in the 1830s, and would still be only one third in the early twentieth century. Still, that meant that during Britain’s leap, real wages in Japan had improved at the same rate as real wages improved in the leading power.91 Although Japan was still exporting primary products or raw materials (raw silk) to Europe, within Asia, Japan exported consumer goods. Indeed, Japan’s rapidly increasing trade had shifted predominantly to within East Asia, where it gained widespread admiration or envy for discovering what looked like a shortcut to Western-style modernity.92 Japan was also rapidly building up a navy, just like Germany. (The conservative modernizer Bismarck was in his day the most popular foreign figure in Japan, too.)93 Moreover, as an ally of Britain, rather than be subjected to informal imperialism, Japan led a shift in East Asia toward free trade, the ideology of the strong. Japan had defeated China in a war over the Korean Peninsula (1894–95) and seized Taiwan. Already in the 1890s, Russia’s general staff began to draft contingency planning for possible hostilities with Japan, following the shock of Japan’s crushing defeat of China. But partly for wont of military intelligence on Japan, although mostly because of racial prejudice, Russian ruling circles belittled the “Asiatics” as easily conquerable.94 Whereas the Japanese general staff had estimated no better than a fifty-fifty chance of prevailing, perhaps hedging their bets, Russian ruling circles were certain they would win if it came to war.95 The British naval attache similarly reported widespread feeling in Tokyo that Japan would “crumple up.”96 Of all people, Nicholas II should have known better. As tsarevich, he had seen Japan with his own eyes, during an unprecedented (for a Russian royal) grand tour of the Orient (1890–91), where the sword of a Japanese assassin nearly killed the future tsar, and left a permanent scar on his forehead. (A cousin in Nicholas’s party parried a second saber blow with a cane.) But as tsar, facing possible war, Nicholas dismissed the Japanese as “macaques,” an Asian species of short-tailed monkey.97
Russo-Japanese negotiators had tried to find a modus vivendi through a division of spoils, exchanging recognition of a Russian sphere in Manchuria for recognition of a Japanese sphere in Korea, but each side’s “patriots” kept arguing that they absolutely had to have both Manchuria and Korea to protect either one. Japan, which felt its weakness in the face of a combination of European powers encroaching in East Asia, would likely have compromised if Russia had been willing to do so as well, but it remained unclear what Russia actually would settle for. A clique of courtier intriguers, led by Alexander Bezobrazov, exacerbated Japan’s suspicions with a scheme to penetrate Korea while enriching themselves via a forestry concession. Bezobrazov held no ministerial position, yet Nicholas, as an assertion of “autocratic prerogative,” afforded the courtier frequent access, cynically using Bezobrazov to keep his own ministers, Witte included, off balance. Nicholas II’s changeable and poorly communicated views, and his failure to keep his own government informed, let alone seek its members’ expertise, rendered Russia’s Far Eastern policy that much more opaque and incoherent.98 Japanese ruling circles decided, before negotiations for a deal with Russia had been exhausted, and after prolonged internal debate and disagreement, to launch an all-out preventative war. In February 1904, Japan severed diplomatic relations and attacked Russian vessels at anchor at Port Arthur, a quick strike against the slow-moving Russian giant to demonstrate its underestimated prowess, before possibly seeking third-party mediation.99 Russia’s Pacific fleet fell to the Japanese, who also managed to land infantry on the Korean Peninsula to march on Russian positions in Manchuria. The shock was profound. “It is no longer possible to live this way,” editorialized even the archconservative Russian paper New Times on January 1, 1905. That same day, Vladimir Lenin called the autocracy’s immense military structure “a beautiful apple rotten at the core.”100 Russia dispatched its Baltic fleet halfway around the world, 18,000 nautical miles. Seven and a half months later, upon reaching the theater of hostilities in May 1905, eight modern battleships, built by St. Petersburg’s skilled workers, were promptly sunk in the Tsushima Strait with the colors flying.101
The Russian state had subordinated everything to military priorities and needs, and the Romanovs had tied their image and legitimacy to Russia’s international standing,
so the Tsushima shock was devastating.102 On land, too, the Japanese achieved startling victories over Russia, including the Battle of Mukden, then the largest military engagement in world history (624,000 combined forces), where Russia enjoyed a numerical advantage.103 The stinging Mukden defeat came on the anniversary of Nicholas II’s coronation.104
This debacle in the very arena that justified the autocracy’s existence—great power status—not only exposed tsarism’s political failings but threatened political collapse. Strikes had erupted at the military factories producing the weaponry for the war, so that by January 8, 1905, Russia’s wartime capital was bereft of electricity and information (newspapers). On Sunday, January 9, 1905, seven days after a besieged Port Arthur fell to Japanese forces, thousands of striking workers and their families assembled at six points in the working-class neighborhoods, beyond the Narva and Nevsky gates, to march on the Winter Palace in order to present a petition to the “tsar-father” for the improvement of workers’ lives, protection of their rights, and dignity by means of the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.105 They were led by a conservative priest, carried Orthodox icons and crosses, and sang religious hymns and “God Save the Tsar” as church bells tolled. Nicholas II had repaired to his main residence, the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, outside the city, and had no intention of meeting the petitioners. The haphazard authorities on hand in the capital decided to seal off the city center with troops. The priest’s group got only as far as the Narva Gate in the southwest, where imperial troops met them with gunfire when they sought to proceed farther. Amid dozens of bodies, the priest exclaimed, “There is no God anymore, there is no Tsar!” Shooting also halted unarmed marching men, women, and children at the Trinity Bridge, the Alexander Gardens, and elsewhere. Panic ensued and some petitioners trampled others to death. Around 200 people were killed across the capital that day, and another 800 were wounded—workers, wives, children, bystanders.106 St. Petersburg’s “Bloody Sunday” provoked far greater strikes, the looting of liquor and firearm shops, and all around fury.
Nicholas II’s image as father of the people would never be the same. (“All classes condemn the authorities and most particularly the Emperor,” observed the U.S. consul in Odessa. “The present ruler has lost absolutely the affection of the Russian people.”)107 In February 1905, the tsar vaguely promised an elected “consultative” Duma or assembly, which sent alarms through conservative ranks, while failing to quell the unrest. The next month, all universities were (again) locked down.108 Strikers closed down the empire’s railway system, forcing government officials to travel by riverboat to meet with the tsar in his suburban palace. In June 1905, sailors seized control of the battleship Potemkin, part of the Black Sea fleet—which was all Russia had left after the loss of its Pacific and Baltic fleets—and bombarded Odessa before seeking asylum in Romania. “The chaos was all-encompassing,” one police insider wrote, adding that political police work “ground to a halt.”109 Strike waves swept Russian Poland, the Baltics, and the Caucasus, where “the whole administrative apparatus fell into confusion,” recalled Jordania, the leader of Georgia’s Marxists. “A de facto freedom of assembly, strike and demonstration was established.”110 The governor of Kutaisi province of the Caucasus went over to the revolutionaries. In Kazan and Poltava provinces, the governors had nervous breakdowns. Others lost their heads. “You risk your life, you wear out your nerves maintaining order so that people can live like human beings, and what do you encounter everywhere?” complained Governor Ivan Blok of Samara. “Hate-filled glances as if you were some kind of monster, a drinker of human blood.” Moments later Blok was decapitated by a bomb. Placed in a traditional open casket, his twisted body was stuffed into his dress uniform, a ball of batting substituted for his missing head.111
The homefront had imploded. On the war’s two sides, some 2.5 million men had been mobilized, with each side suffering between 40,000 and 70,000 killed. (Around 20,000 Chinese civilians also died.) In fact, because Japan could not replace its losses, its big victories like Mukden may have actually edged Tokyo closer to defeat.112 But if Nicholas II was tempted to continue the war to reverse his military setbacks, he had no such opportunity. The failure of the Japanese to have sabotaged the Trans-Siberian—one of the critical transport modes for the enemy’s troops and materiel—remains mysterious.113 But the peasants were refusing to pay taxes and would destroy or damage more than 2,000 manor houses. Already by March 1905, the interior ministry had concluded that owing to uprisings, military call-ups had become impossible in thirty-two of the fifty provinces of European Russia.114 European credits, on which the Russian state relied for cash flow, dried up, threatening a default.115 On August 23, 1905 [September 5, in the West], Russia and Japan signed a peace treaty in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brokered by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Invited to intercede by Japan, Roosevelt proved eager to curb Tokyo’s might in the Pacific (a harbinger of the future). Russia was well represented by Witte, who regained his lost luster and made the best of a bad situation.116 Russia had to acknowledge defeat, but was absolved of paying war indemnities, while the only Russian territory relinquished was half of remote Sakhalin Island (a penal colony). Still, the defeat reverberated internationally (far more than the Ethiopian victory over Italy in 1896). Russia became the first major European power to be defeated in a symmetric battle by an Asian country—and in front of the world press corps. In a typical contemporary assessment, one observer called news of the victory “of a non-white people over a white people” nothing less than “the most important event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime.”117
LEFTIST FACTIONALISM
Japan’s military attache in Stockholm was spreading bushels of money to tsarism’s array of political opponents in European exile, but he expressed considerable frustration. “All of the so-called opposition parties are secret societies, where no one can distinguish opponents of the regime from Russian agents,” the attache reported to superiors, adding that the revolutionaries—or provocateurs?—all went by false names. In any case, his work, which okhranka mail interception exposed, proved utterly superfluous.118 Russia’s revolutionaries got far more assistance from the autocracy itself. While Russia’s army, the empire’s main forces of order, had been removed beyond its borders—for a war with Japan on the territories of China and Korea—Russia’s revolutionaries were kept out of the battle. Even married peasants more than forty years old were targets of military recruiters, but subjects without permanent residence and with a criminal record were free to pursue rebellion at home.
The twenty-seven-year-old future Stalin, as described in a tsarist police report (May 1, 1904):
Jughashvili, Iosif Vissarionovich: [legal status of] peasant from the village of Didi-Lido, Tiflis county, Tiflis province; born 1881 of Orthodox faith, attended Gori church school and Tiflis theological seminary; not married. Father, Vissarion, whereabouts unknown. Mother, Yeketerina, resident of the town of Gori, Tiflis province . . . Description: height, 2 arshins, 4.5 vershki [about 5' 5"], average build; gives the appearance of an ordinary person.119
Although his date of birth (1878) and height (5'6") were wrongly recorded, this deceptively “ordinary person,” precisely because of his political activities, was exempt from military service—and as a result could position himself to be right in the thick of the 1905 uprising. The Georgian branch of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party assigned him to Chiatura, a hellhole in western Georgia where hundreds of small companies employed a combined 3,700 miners and sorters to extract and haul manganese ore.
Witte’s father, the midlevel tsarist official, had opened Chiatura’s manganese deposits around the middle of the nineteenth century.120 By 1905, thanks to Sergei Witte’s integration of Russia into the new world economy, the artisanal, privately held mines had come to account for no less than 50 percent of global manganese output. Tall piles of the excavated ore dominated the “skyline,” waiting to be was
hed, mostly by women and children, before being exported for use in the production of German and British steel. With wages averaging a meager 40 to 80 kopecks per day, rations doused in manganese dust, and “housing” under the open sky (in winter workers slept in the mines), Chiatura was, in the words of one observer, “real penal labor (katorga)”—but the laborers had not been convicted of anything.121 Even by tsarist Russia standards, the injustices in Chiatura stood not. When the workers rebelled, however, the regime summoned imperial troops as well as right-wing vigilantes, who called themselves Holy Brigades but were christened Black Hundreds. In response to the physical attacks, Jughashvili helped transform Social Democratic agitation “circles” into red combat brigades called Red Hundreds.122 By December 1905, the worker Red Hundreds, assisted by young radical thugs, seized control of Chiatura and thus of half of global manganese output.
Only the previous year, Jughashvili had been calling for an autonomous Georgian Social Democratic Workers’ Party separate from the All-Russia (imperial) Social Democrats—a vestige, perhaps, of his Russification battles at the seminary and in Georgia more broadly. But Social Democrats in Georgia rejected a struggle for national independence, reasoning that even if they somehow managed to break away, liberty for Georgia would never stick without liberty for Russia. Georgian comrades condemned Jughashvili as a “Georgian Bundist” and forced him to recant publicly. The future Stalin wrote out a Credo (February 1904) of his beliefs, evidently repudiating the idea of a separate Georgian party; seventy copies were distributed within Social Democratic Party circles.123 Other than youthful romantic poetry, and two unsigned editorials in Lado’s Brdzola that were later attributed to Stalin, the Credo was one of his first-ever publications (subsequent party historians assembling his writings never found it). This mea culpa was followed by an extended essay—which essentially launched his punditry career—in Georgian, dated September-October 1904, and titled “How Social Democracy Understands the National Question.” Jughashvili targeted a recently formed party of Social Federalists whose Paris-based periodical demanded Georgian autonomy in both the Russian empire and in the socialist movement. He strongly repudiated the idea of separate “national” leftist parties, and resorted to sarcasm about Georgian nationalism.124 In April 1905, a pamphlet addressed to the Batum proletariat noted that “Russian social democracy is responsible not only to the Russian proletariat but to all peoples of Russia, groaning under the yoke of the barbarian autocracy—it is responsible to all of humankind, to all of modern civilization.”125 Russia, not Georgia. The Credo episode had been a turning point.
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