More than a century ago, the battles of the Russo-Japanese War died down, but disputes about it still do not subside. How could it happen that a small island state utterly defeated a huge and powerful empire before? No, of course, there have been defeats in the history of Russia before, but I’m not afraid of this word, an unprecedented pogrom has never happened. Even when, during the unfortunate Crimean campaign for us, our weapons were opposed by the first-class army and navy of the two great powers and their allies, our ancestors managed to resist them with dignity, and in some cases even deliver sensitive blows to their troops and pride. The events of the Russo-Japanese War are a chain of continuous defeats, all the more offensive since the opposing side for us was a semi-feudal state, which had recently embarked on the path of reforms.
This article, in no way pretending to be a comprehensive analysis of those distant events, is an attempt to understand: what happened after all? What caused our defeat?
First, let's remember the events that preceded that unfortunate war in order to better understand the situation in which our ancestors found themselves. For many years, if not centuries, the main vector of the policy of the Russian Empire was the European vector. It was there that our enemies and friends were located, or, as they say now, strategic partners. We delivered our goods there, be it bread, hemp or furs. From there we received the industrial goods we needed, new technologies, as well as political ideas (however, the need for the latter can be argued). But in the second half of the 19th century, it became obvious that the eastern borders of our Motherland require no less attention. Of course, attempts to develop Siberia and the Far East were made before, but this was done with extremely limited means, inconsistently and, I would say, inconsistently. The Crimean War, which ended in 1857, clearly showed that such a situation was intolerable, and the bureaucratic machine of the Russian Empire began to move. It was at this time that relations with Qing China were settled, and the current Primorsky Territory began to develop rapidly. Its main centers were Khabarovsk, Nikolaevsk and Vladivostok, which became the main base of the Siberian flotilla. The situation was complicated by the fact that it was problematic to get to these remote places by land, and we, one might say, did not have a powerful merchant fleet. It cannot be said that the government was not aware of the current situation and did not take any measures. To begin with, the so-called "Voluntary Fleet" was created, whose task was to deliver people and goods to these remote places. In addition, in the event of war, the Dobroflot ships were to be converted into auxiliary cruisers and military transports and thus serve the fatherland in this capacity as well.
People who know history might argue: how can this be, because the Volunteer Fleet was created on voluntary donations from Russian citizens (which is reflected in its name), what does the government have to do with it? However, as the native Crimean women and the daughters of officers say, not everything is so simple. Yes, the ships for this company were bought with private donations, but the government provided it with orders, crews and generously subsidized, in general, unprofitable transportation.
Another measure designed to radically solve the problem of tying the Far East to the territory of the rest of the empire would be the construction of a railway connecting the country's lands into a single whole. The first projects of such a highway began to appear almost simultaneously with the beginning of the construction of railways in Russia, but for a number of reasons it was impossible to carry out such a large-scale construction at that time. And the point here is not only in the inertia of the tsarist government, which undoubtedly took place, but to a much lesser extent than the "classics" wrote about it. The underdevelopment of industry, the lack of sufficient financial resources and the mass of problems in the state forced the government to carefully prioritize. Indeed, in those conditions it was much more important to develop the railway network in the European part of Russia, along the way developing industry, economy and gaining the necessary experience. However, by the beginning of the 1890s, these tasks were mostly solved, and the government began to build the famous Transsib. On March 17, 1891, our last autocrat, then Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich, drove the first symbolic wheelbarrow of earth to the bed of the future road, and the construction project was directly supervised by the Minister of Finance Sergei Yulievich Witte, himself a railway worker in the past.
The latter should be discussed separately. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was no brighter figure among the Russian bureaucracy than Sergei Witte. At one time, a little-known official dared to demand the unthinkable: reduce the speed of the imperial train! Say, an accident can happen! Of course, no one listened to him, but when the famous crash of the royal train in Borki happened, in which the imperial family survived only by the most perfect miracle, they remembered about him. And so his fast-paced career began.
Sergei Yulievich is an extremely controversial figure in modern historiography. On the one hand, he is praised as a talented financier who ensured the steady growth of the economy of the Russian Empire, and on the other hand, he is criticized for a number of reforms carried out under his leadership. In particular, for the introduction of the gold ruble. However, the discussion of the monetary reform, as well as the state monopoly on vodka and other deeds of the future Count Polusakhalinsky, goes beyond the scope of the article, but what can be said absolutely for sure is that it was he who had the idea to run the last section of the Trans-Siberian Railway through the territory of Manchuria. Many still believe that it was this decision that launched the chain of events that ultimately led to a military conflict with Japan.
It must be said that there were quite a few opponents of this route among the statesmen of Russia. In particular, one of them was the Governor of the Amur Region, Count Alexei Pavlovich Ignatiev, the father of the future author of Fifty Years in the ranks. In the opinion of this worthy husband, it is necessary to develop our lands by building railways, and certainly not neighboring ones. Looking ahead, we can say that Alexey Pavlovich was right in many respects. The Chinese Eastern Railway, built by us, has long since become the property of China, and the Amur railway passing through our territory still serves the Fatherland.
However, the supporters of the Chinese Eastern Railway had no less weighty arguments. Firstly, the route through Manchuria was much shorter, which made it possible to save a fair amount of money, despite the fact that the cost of the Transsib, to put it mildly, was impressive. Secondly, the railway through the Chinese territories allowed in the future to conduct economic expansion in this region. Thirdly (and, as it seems to me, this argument was the main one for Witte), this route made it possible to bring the railway to self-sufficiency as soon as possible, and then to make it profitable. The fact is that the Russian Far East in general and Primorye in particular were rather sparsely populated and completely undeveloped regions, and therefore there was simply nothing to take out of them. Manchuria, especially southern, on the contrary, was quite densely populated (of course, not in the same way as today, but still), and its wealth was well explored. Looking ahead, we can say that Witte was right about something. Although immediately after the commissioning of the Chinese Eastern Railway, the war began, and all traffic was occupied by military cargo, however, after its end and the return of our troops from the Far East (and this was a rather long process), the railway switched to the transportation of local goods and by 1909 showed profit. And this despite the fact that at least half of the traffic passed through the South Manchurian Railway inherited by the Japanese. By the way, in addition to the railway, the transportation of goods was also carried out by river transport through the Amur-Sungari water system.
And some numbers.
Before the construction of the Transsib, the cost of delivering a pound of cargo from Moscow to Vladivostok was 10 rubles through Siberia and 2 rubles 27 kopecks by sea from Odessa to Vladivostok. Unfortunately, the exact cost of cargo delivery by rail is unknown to me. However, according to some reports, even after the commissioning of the Transsib, it was three times higher than by sea.
The throughput capacity of the CER and Transsib did not exceed 10 pairs of trains per day (and even less on many sections), while on the railways of Germany and the United States this figure was close to 20-25 pairs of trains for single-track roads and up to 40 pairs for double-track ones.
In the first year of operation, 19,896 thousand poods of private cargo were transported.
The cost of a ticket in a first-class carriage of the Moscow-Port Arthur high-speed train was 272 rubles. The cost of a ticket in the third passenger class is 64 rubles.
But I would like to touch upon another very interesting question. How did it happen that this Russian territory turned out to be so poorly populated? Sadly, but in order to answer it, we must admit: the main reason for this was the order in Russia, the very one that we lost. As I already wrote (and not only me), feudal Japan took the path of bourgeois reforms only in 1867, that is, after the events that went down in history as the Meiji revolution. However, few people pay attention to the fact that the Russian Empire in this sense did not go very far, because in our country these reforms began only a little earlier, namely in 1861. It was then that such a vestige of feudalism as serfdom was abolished in our country. I am far from thinking that due to the late abolition of serfdom, we, as some not particularly smart people assert, have lagged behind Europe by a century and a half. Moreover, Europe is large, and in a significant part of it serfdom was abolished only in 1848, that is, only 13 years earlier than in Russia. However, I cannot but admit that this reform was largely formal and half-hearted, and its main drawback was that the peasants remained tied to the land. That is, legally they became free, but in fact turned into the so-called "temporarily liable". That is, until the payment of the value of the land (considerably overstated), they were obliged to live and farm at their place of residence. Worst of all, the peasants, even in theory, could not give up everything and go to a new place of residence, since there was enough land in the empire. In the "holy 90s," rivers of crocodile tears were shed over collective farmers deprived of passports in the Stalinist USSR, but at the same time the crying ones forgot (or rather never knew) that the situation in tsarist Russia was similar for a long time. It was possible to travel around the country only with a passport, and the police issued it only in the absence of arrears, that is, arrears in taxes and ransom payments. That is why a paradoxical situation developed in the Russian Empire. In the central regions, the peasants were suffocating from the lack of land, and the outskirts were extremely poorly populated, despite the abundance of free land. The redemption payments were finally canceled only in 1906. At the same time, the peasants received the right to independently choose their place of residence.
However, it cannot be said that the government was completely unaware of the pernicious nature of such a policy. There were resettlement programs in which Russian peasants could move to another place. True, the place was determined by officials, the number of immigrants was insufficient, mainly in order not to “offend” the recipients of payments, that is, the landowners. The lost Russo-Japanese War and the bloody events of the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907 forced the government to come to grips with the problems of settling Siberia and the Far East, but it was too late.
So, I suppose we can summarize the first results. Among the reasons for our defeat were:
- completely unsatisfactory development of the Russian Far East, including the poorly populated territories;
- long length of communications and insufficient capacity of the Transsib.
