Russia Has Had Its Dick Caught In Basically This Same Beehive Before
It was called the Russo-Japanese War
***NOTE: I’m not a historian or expert or person who should be talking about anything, ever. I read things, summarize them, and add jokes — it’s sort of a Doris-Kearns-Goodwin-meets-Henny-Youngman-if-neither-had-talent situation. Virtually everything in this article is taken from “The Tsar and the Tsunami” by Jordan M. Peters, “The Russo-Japanese War: Complete History of the Conflict” by Sydney Tyler, Kenneth Andres’ article in “Medium”, and Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions” podcast.***
See if you can spot anything not weird about this photo:
That was a trick question: Everything about that photo — which is of the room where Vladimir Putin conducts diplomacy — is weird. Negotiating across a Siberia-sized white marble table means that, in a way, everything you say will be translated as “I have a small penis”. The mega-table is a juvenile ploy straight out of Jack Donaghy’s Negotiate to Win course, and speaking to your negotiating partner from that far away makes about as much sense doing sex talk during tennis. I’d describe the room’s decorating aesthetic as “Johnny Winter and Marie Antoinette design a whorehouse”, and I’d bet that some master woodworker spent the better part of a decade earning kid-with-a-lemonade-stand-level wages making that beautiful inlay floor that they’ve covered with a rug.
But surely the most notable thing about that room is that — according to diplomat Fiona Hill — it contains four statues: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander the Great, and Nicholas the…well, not “great”, but Nicholas-The-One-Who-Didn’t-Get-Killed-By-The-Bolsheviks.1 The message Putin is sending is about as subtle as a $2 bottle of wine: He belongs among the great leaders in Russian history.
Putin is a student of history. He’s not a good student — I’d give his 5,000 word essay about how Russians and Ukrainians are one people a D-minus, and it looks like most Ukrainians would give it an F — but he’s aware of history. His opinions and goals seem to be filtered through a historical lens. So, he surely has opinions about how the Ukraine War is similar to and different from Russian conflicts in Afghanistan, Hungary, and Crimea, to name a few. But the conflict that really jumps out at me in terms of similarity is the Russo-Japanese War. It was a conflict that few people saw coming and in which Russia’s grandiose ambitions were smashed against the harsh reality of their lower-than-thought standing in the world. It sparked a crisis in Russia that set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution. I think it contains lessons for the current conflict, and not all of them are good news.
The Russo-Japanese war was basically about spheres of influence. In 1904, Russia thought its sphere of influence included definitely Manchuria and maybe Korea, while Japan thought its sphere of influence included definitely Korea and maybe Manchuria. Not considered: the opinions of Koreans and Manchurians. As far as I can tell, to Russians and Japanese back then, the idea that people should make their own decisions in their own land was as radical of a concept as space flight or soft drinks without cocaine. To suggest that Korea and Manchuria should be ruled by Koreans and Manchurians would have been as strange to people of that time as suggesting that rocks should have drivers licenses would be to us.
Russia was thought to be far more powerful than Japan. Russia had three times as many people (140 million to 46 million) and their GNP was ten times as large.2 Contributing to Russia’s sense of superiority was pulsing, burning, Gilded Age-level racism. I’ve always been fascinated by people from the distant past who were known as racists in their time. Like Ty Cobb — just how racist was that guy? People singled him out for racism back when the president was screening Birth of a Nation in the White House. Remarkable. At any rate: Russia’s Tsar Nicholas-Yes-The-One-Who-Gets-Killed-By-The-Bolsheviks was known as a racist. His blithe dismissal of Japan’s concerns was motivated largely by the belief that Japan was a backwards nation populated with inferior people who could never do something as impressive as, say, defeat the Russian empire, or for that matter build a successful electronics industry or create some of the greatest stoner content in the history of cartoons.
Russia thought itself vastly superior to Japan, but their standing in Europe was basically the opposite. Though Churchill’s famous quote that Russia was “a shit show wrapped inside a clusterfuck covered in ten feet of fucking snow” was still decades away, Russia often failed to command respect on the continent. They lacked the faraway colonial holdings of their European rivals; notably, they didn’t have a warm water port. Much of the country was rural and undeveloped; serfdom had only been abolished in the last half of the 19th century. To put it in American terms, Russia was basically the West Virginia of Europe, which is a cheap shot at West Virginia, but West Virginia doesn’t have internet yet so I think I’ll get away with it.
In 1904, Russia was basically crashing on Manchuria's couch. Have you ever had a guest show up uninvited, hang around, and not say when they plan to leave? That's basically what Russia was doing in Port Arthur in Manchuria in the early 1900s. In 1897, Russia had coerced a lease for the much-coveted warm water port from China, and by 1904 Japan was disturbed by Russia’s presence out of altruistic concern for their Chinese brethren haha no I’m kidding they wanted it for themselves. Japan had taken Port Arthur from China in the First Sino-Japanese War and they wanted it back. But Russia was making itself at home at the port, metaphorically clogging the toilet and eating all the Cheez-Its, not giving half a fuck about what Japan or China or anyone thought about their presence.
Japan tried to get the port back through diplomacy. Russia responded with the time-honored diplomatic tactic of taking their sweet-ass time. Japan found the delays to be annoying at best and suspicious at worst, so in 1904 they launched a surprise attack against the Russia fleet at Port Arthur. The attack was successful enough that Japan obviously thought “let’s try that again some time.” Tsar Nicholas was shocked by the attack and vowed to beat back the existential threat that the Japanese supposedly posed to Christendom; he apparently had forgotten that he had also labeled the Japanese genetically inferior. So, according to the Tsar, this was one of those all-encompassing existential threats posed by inferior cave people who would be easily brushed aside.
The war went badly for Russia. The Russian war machine — thought to be a thoroughly modern juggernaut — turned out to be outdated and disorganized. In many ways, it reflected the regime that built it: It was sclerotic, incompetent, and soon to be ousted by Bolsheviks whose main advantage was simply not being the old regime. Russian intelligence performed terribly, which was mainly the result of underinvestment. In 1903, the military section of the Russian Military Academic Committee employed seventeen intelligence officers,3 which would barely be enough to surveil a gang of teens TP-ing houses, much less all of Europe and Asia. The ranking Russian intelligence agent in Japan before the war was — I hope you’re sitting down — extremely racist, and predicted that the Japanese army would not be an established force for “perhaps a hundred years”. The main impact of Russian intelligence throughout the war was to underestimate their opponent about as badly as the snobs in an ‘80s screwball comedy.
Morale was also a problem in the Russian army. Most Russian soldiers were from the West, but were sent far East via a grueling train-and-sleigh trip across the not-yet-finished Trans Siberian Railway. Tsar Nicholas was, at that point, about as popular as genital warts, and got less popular with every defeat. Moreover, mostly-poor soldiers were sent far from home to fight for abstract ideas and quite-piddly material concerns. Do you know what one of Russia’s main economic interests in Manchuria was? Timber. Russian noblemen wanted to harvest Manchurian forests.4 This despite the fact that Russia is home to the largest forest in the world. Imagine being a Russian peasant, getting uprooted from your home, sent thousands of miles away to war, and told “You’re fighting so that noblemen can cut down trees. And not the trees we already have — they want different trees.” I think I would be less than jazzed.
You can probably see how the war bears similarities to Russia’s current situation. Russia found itself in a war it thought it would easily win. But — due largely to a blinkered and autocratic ruling regime — the fight ended up being much tougher than they anticipated. Intelligence failures abounded; they completely underestimated their opponent. Troop morale was low. The poor performance of the Russian military presented an existential threat to the regime back in Russia. Far from demonstrating Russia’s might on the world stage, the war revealed Russia as a weak, antiquated, and shambolic state led by an out-of-touch autocrat who managed the war about as well as a dog might run a hotel. Once in the war, Russia didn’t know how to get out, because their objectives were unclear, and Plan A — win decisively and have a big parade with ribbons and music and mirth throughout the land — was quickly off the table.
The war ended the way many sad failures end: In a small town in New Hampshire. In 1905, a thoroughly defeated Russia signed the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ceded Korea and Manchuria — including Port Arthur — to Japan. Back at home, Russia was rocked by the rebellion that many call the First Russian Revolution; it ended with Tsar Nicholas giving up a great deal of power, which set the stage for the Revolution of 1917. It turns out that losing a war everyone thought you would easily win is not popular. That’s probably especially true in an autocracy, where the entire upside is supposed to be power and effectiveness, which ostensibly justifies the down-side, which is that the regime might sort of murder you a bit.
I take two lessons from this story:
1. There was once an era in which “spheres of influence” was a universally accepted concept. Putin is still in that era; other countries are not. Nobody joined the war on Japan or Russia’s side. The was no massive international sanctions regime, or — God forbid — any real consideration for the people of Korea or Manchuria. 1904 was a time when spheres of influence — i.e. colonies, buffer states, some fucking fruit company dictating policy — was a widely accepted concept. Consider that Teddy Roosevelt, the man who helped negotiate the treaty that ended the war, spent his presidency throwing his weight around in the Western Hemisphere with all the brio of Chris Farley in the SNL Chippendales sketch.
But that was then. Today, people find the concept of transforming a nearby country into a vassal state abhorrent. Putin is clearly still very much in the old world mindset — I called him a “student of history”, but it might be more accurate to call him “stuck in the past”. I don’t know if Putin is surprised by the international response or if he just doesn't care, but it’s clear that Russia will be a pariah state for as long as he’s in charge. If he thought that the world was still okay with the forcefully-carve-out-a-sphere-of-influence game, he was extremely wrong.
2. Putin surely understands that losing this war would have disastrous implications for his regime. If not for the Russo-Japanese War, Tsar Nicholas might still be alive today. I mean, probably not — he’d be 152 — but the war made him very unpopular and opened the door for the Bolsheviks.
What would losing this war mean for Putin? Definitely nothing good, from his perspective; losing a war in an embarrassing fashion hasn't become popular in the last century-plus. There’s also an obvious connection between Putin’s foreign adventures and domestic politics; personally, I find explanations for Putin’s actions that focus on domestic politics to be some of the most convincing. Putin won’t view a defeat in this war as an unfortunate occurrence that he can just shrug off; he’ll see it as an existential threat to his rule.
For that reason, I think we need to get comfortable with the idea of this war reaching a conclusion that appears to be something less than total defeat for Putin. It’s tempting to react to such a brutal attempt at conquest in a maximalist way; it’s tempting to think that this can’t end with Putin still in charge. And, of course, if the Russian people overthrew Putin, that would be fantastic; I’d happily hold every Olympics, World Cup, and Magic: The Gathering Tournament in Russia for the next hundred years if they can pull that off. But that’s unlikely; if we make Putin’s removal a condition of the war ending, then the war might never end. And, of course, what counts as an “acceptable” concession is up to Ukraine, but we should probably think about fig leaves that Putin might be able to hide behind so that he can say “I won” even though he didn’t. The “good news” is that Putin’s control over Russian media is so complete that if all he gets is a commemorative t-shirt and 10% off pretzels at all Auntie Anne’s locations in Ukraine, he still has a shot at spinning that as a win.
The Russo-Japanese War isn’t a perfect proxy for the war in Ukraine. Japan fired the first shot, and it was emphatically not an effort by Russia to unite people they viewed as ethnically the same. But it was an unexpected military disaster that Russia stumbled into and didn’t know how to escape. If what happened to Tsar Nicholas is any indication of what might happen to Putin, then Putin will be desperate to somehow, some way claim victory. He’ll know this if he knows history, which — in his own very weird way — he sort of does.
That would be Nicholas I, who took a hard line against the revolutions of 1848.
“The Tsar and the Tsunami”, page 12.
“The Tsar and the Tsunami”, page 139.
Entertaining and extremely edifying! Thanks for your research & sharing your unique perspective. Sharing with my 40-something son! Really enjoying your work.
Good article. I know enough history to see that you did your research, and you had me entertained all the way through.