The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (15 page)

This great
Völkerwanderung
was a response to a combination of pushes and pulls, some economic, some political. Many emigrants who crossed the Atlantic or took the longer journeys to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand did so simply because land was cheaper and labour better rewarded. A minority left Europe to escape racial or religious persecution; this was especially true of the Jews of Tsarist Russia (see below). New World societies were not only less densely populated than those of Europe; they were also, at least in some respects, more tolerant. Yet we should not lose sight of the role played by imperial political structures in making mass migration seem so attractive. Migrants who left Europe around 1900 were largely bound for destinations where colonization had been going on for up to three centuries. From Boston to Buenos Aires, from San Francisco to Sidney, earlier generations of colonists had built replica European cities, the languages and laws of which were fundamentally similar to those in the ‘Old Country’ and the customs of which were in many respects preferable. Even where European settlement was limited – as in India, which was already densely settled and climatically unappealing to Europeans – empire guaranteed Europeans more or less safe passage. The British-born population of India never accounted for more than
0.05 per cent of the total. But it was extraordinarily powerful, not merely governing the country but also dominating its economy. Many of the great ports of East Asia were, as we have seen, also run by privileged European minorities.

We tend to think of nineteenth-century empires as primarily seaborne. But they could cross vast expanses of land with equal, if not greater, ease. By the end of the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia had acquired not only a substantial Western empire in Europe, extending into Finland, Poland and the Ukraine, but also a string of Caucasian colonies stretching to the borders of Persia, and a vast Central Asian empire that reached across Kazakhstan and through Manchuria as far as the border of Korea and the Sea of Japan. One after another, the peoples of Eurasia were subjugated; indeed, by 1900 non-Russians accounted for more than half of the population of the Tsar’s domains. In 1858, capitalizing on Britain’s victory over China in the Second Opium War and the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, Russia had seized Chinese territory north of the Amur River; China was also forced to cede the land between the Ussuri River and the Sea of Japan. It was here that the Russians built their principal Pacific port, Vladivostok – ‘ruler of the east’.

Perhaps nothing symbolized Russian power in Asia more strikingly than the vast Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs six thousand miles from Moscow to Vladivostok, passing through Yaroslavl on the Volga, Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, before finally reaching the Pacific coast just north of the Korean peninsula. By the turn of the century it was all but complete; work had begun on the final stretch of line, across Manchuria to Vladivostok, in 1897. By dramatically reducing journey times between European and Asiatic Russia – from a matter of years to a matter of days – the railway greatly accelerated the Russian colonization of Central and East Asia. Between 1907 and 1914, no fewer than 2.5 million Russians made new lives for themselves in Siberia, the great northern strip of Asia that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific. Despite the region’s later notoriety as destination for political prisoners, only a small minority of these migrants were forced to go. In any case, many of those who were exiled there were pleasantly surprised by what they found. In 1897 Vladimir Ulyanov, a hereditary nobleman who had
embraced socialism in his student days, was sentenced to three years’ ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia for his involvement with the revolutionary Union of Struggle. He found life in Shushenskoe, in the Minusinsk district, remarkably pleasant. ‘Everyone’s found that I’ve grown fat over the summer, got a tan and now look completely like a Siberian,’ he wrote cheerfully to his mother. ‘That’s hunting and the life of the countryside for you!’ When not hunting, shooting and fishing, Lenin – as he would later prefer to be known – was free to read and write prolifically. He was even able to marry and to bring his wife and mother-in-law to live with him.

Further East, the Russian presence was spread thin. Only 90,000 people settled along the Amur between 1859 and 1900; indeed, the entire Russian population along the Siberian border was barely 50,000. Like so many Asian ports in 1900, Vladivostok was a multiethnic city, with its Chinatown on the shores of the Amur Bay, its partly Russified Korean community and its Japanese small businesses and brothels. Nearly two-fifths of the population were, as the Russians put it, yellow. There was, as so often on colonial frontiers, intermarriage; in the words of one visitor, ‘The Russian woman does not object to the Chinese as a husband, and the Russian takes a Chinese wife.’ There were also mixed marriages between European men and Japanese women. But such mingling took place in the context of an unambiguous racial hierarchy. One Vladivostok newspaper referred to ‘beating the Manza [Chinese]’ as ‘a custom with us. Only the lazy don’t indulge in it.’ In Khabarovsk, on the Siberian-Chinese border, the typical Russian settler was said to

live in a house built by Chinese labor… the stove is made of Chinese bricks… In the kitchen the Chinese boy gets the… samovar ready. The master of the house drinks his Chinese tea, with bread… from a Chinese bakery. The mistress of the house wears a dress made by a Chinese tailor… In [the] yard a Korean boy is at work chopping wood.

At the railway station, foreign visitors were reminded of British India:

Instead, however, of British officers walking up and down with the confident stride of superiority while the Hindus… gave way… there were Russian officers clean and smart promenading the platform while the…
cowering Chinese and the cringing… Koreans made room for them… The Russian… is the white, civilized Westerner, whose stride is that of the conqueror.

Chinese workers were indispensable when it came to the bigger jobs too, not least railway construction and shipbuilding. In 1900 nine out of ten workers in the Vladivostok shipyards were Chinese. Yet Russian administrators felt no compunction about expelling surplus Asians in order to maintain Russian dominance. In July 1900, at the time of the intervention against the Boxers, between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese were drowned at Blagoveshchensk when they were forced by whip-wielding Cossacks and local Russian police to swim across the wide and fast-flowing Amur to the Chinese side. No boats were provided and those who resisted or refused to get in the water were shot or cut down with sabres. This little-known incident, a harbinger of so many twentieth-century massacres, lay bare the utter contempt with which the Russians regarded all Asiatic peoples. As Nikolai Gondatti, the governor of Tomsk, explained in 1911: ‘My task is to make sure that there are lots of Russians and few yellows here.’

Vast though their Asian domains had become, the Russians were not content. Influential figures, led by Admiral Evgenii Ivanovich Alekseev, commander of Russian forces in the Far East, and the Minister for War Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin, argued that at least the northern part of the Chinese province of Manchuria, the ancestral home of the Qing dynasty, should be added to the Tsarist Empire, not least to secure the final Trans-Siberian rail link to Vladivostok. The Russians already leased the Liaodong peninsula from China and had a permanent naval presence at Port Arthur (modern Lüshun). The Boxer Rebellion offered an opportunity to realize the scheme for a partial or total annexation of Manchuria. On July 11, 1900, the Russian government warned the Chinese ambassador in St Petersburg that troops would have to be sent into Manchuria to protect Russian assets in the area. Three days later, hostilities broke out when the Russians ignored a Chinese threat to fire on any troopships that sailed down the River Amur. Within three months, all Manchuria was in the hands of 100,000 Russian troops. ‘We cannot stop halfway,’ wrote
the Tsar. ‘Manchuria must be covered with our troops from the North to the South.’ Kuropatkin agreed: Manchuria must become ‘Russian property’. The only obstacle that seemed to stand in the way of a complete takeover was the resistance of the other European powers. This alone imposed caution on St Petersburg. The Russians promised to withdraw their troops but dragged their feet, pressing the Chinese to concede
de facto
if not
de jure
sovereignty. What the complacent Russians forgot was that their strengths – above all, their technological superiority – were not a permanent monopoly conferred by Providence on people with white skin. There was in fact nothing biological to prevent Asians from adopting Western forms of economic and political organization, nor from replicating Western inventions. The first Asian country to work out how to do so was Japan.

Since the restoration of imperial authority in 1868, when the fifteen-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito had been plucked from Kyoto to become the figurehead of a new regime in Tokyo, Japan had been engaged in a breakneck modernization of its economic, political and military institutions. The divine emperor had become a Prussian-style monarch. Shinto had been transformed into a state religion, like the nationalistic Protestantism of the North European established churches. The feudal warriors known as
samurai
had been transformed into a European-style officer corps, their retinues replaced by a conscript army. The country had also acquired entirely new political and monetary institutions. In 1889 a constitution had been adopted that was closely modelled on that of Prussia. Japan’s fiscal and monetary institutions had also been reformed; she now had a central bank and a currency based on the British gold standard. Moreover, her hitherto agrarian economy had begun to industrialize with the growth of textile production and the emergence of the business conglomerates known as the
zaibatsu
. Even sartorially, Japan’s leaders went West, the civilians in sober, black frockcoats, the soldiers in close-fitting blue uniforms. Yet the men who engineered this transformation – men like Itō Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo and Matsukata Masayoshi – were
far from slavish Westernizers. Rather, they sought to harness Western institutions to Japanese ends, a programme encapsulated in the slogan
fukoku kyōhei
(‘rich country, strong army’), in the belief that Japanese ‘essence’ could only be preserved by embracing ‘Western science’. The aim was not to subordinate Japan to the West, but precisely the opposite: to make Japan capable of resisting Western dominance. The new Meiji (literally ‘enlightened’) constitution might bear the stamp ‘made in Prussia’, just as the new navy looked British and the new schools looked French. The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces. There was only one certain means of doing so, and that was by winning wars.

In 1895 Japan went to war with China. So swift and comprehensive was the Japanese victory that European observers were both impressed and alarmed. The governments of Russia, France and Germany hurriedly pressurized the Japanese to drop their territorial demands, beyond the island of Formosa (now Taiwan),
*
in exchange for a larger cash indemnity and other economic concessions, though these effectively acknowledged Japan as an equal participant in the system of ‘unequal treaties’ with China – hence Japan’s participation in the international expedition against the Boxers in 1900. No one was more alarmed by this new manifestation of the ‘yellow peril’ than Kuropatkin, who firmly believed that the twentieth century would witness ‘the great struggle in Asia between Christians against non-Christians’. After a visit to Japan in 1903 he reported to the Tsar: ‘I was surprised at the high level of development… there is no doubt that the population is as culturally advanced as Russians… on the whole, Japan’s army struck me as an effective fighting force.’ What worried Kuropatkin was that this army posed a direct threat to Port Arthur. Port Arthur was a very long way from St Petersburg. It was also very near to Tokyo.

The Tsar’s appointment of Admiral Alekseev as ‘Viceroy’ of the Far East in 1903 and the deployment of Russian troops along the Yalu River had incensed the Japanese, who saw their own ambitions to colonize Korea directly threatened. Not unreasonably, they proposed a compromise carve-up: Russia could retain its dominance in Manchuria if Japan’s interests in Korea were acknowledged. The Russian response was dismissive. As the editor of the Port Arthur newspaper
Novyi Krai
put it: ‘Japan is not a country that can give an ultimatum to Russia, and Russia should not receive an ultimatum from a country like Japan.’ On February 5, 1904, the Japanese minister in St Petersburg presented just such an ultimatum. Four days later the first shots were exchanged in Inchon (Chemulpo) harbour. That night, the Japanese navy launched a torpedo attack on Port Arthur, hitting the battleship
Tsarevich
and the cruiser
Pallada
. The next day the Japanese inflicted further damage on Russian vessels at Inchon. These raids, which came before any formal declarations of war, were met with incredulity and then anger in Russia. A stirring patriotic song was composed in honour of the crew of the
Varyag
, who had been blockaded in Inchon harbour by fifteen Japanese warships, but who nevertheless refused to surrender:

We are leaving a safe pier for a battle,
Heading for threatening death.
We shall die for our Motherland in the open sea
Where yellow-faced devils are awaiting us!

…

Neither stone nor cross will show where we died
For the glory of the Russian flag.
Only sea waves will glorify
The heroic wreck of the
Varyag
.

The Tsar and his ministers resolved to retaliate with maximum force. Kuropatkin was appointed commander in the Far East and Admiral Stepan Ossipovich Makarov sent to take charge of naval operations at Port Arthur. In June it was also decided to send the pride of the Imperial Russian navy, the Second Fleet, from its base in the Baltic to what was literally the other side of the world. People in
St Petersburg looked forward with confidence to victory and vengeance. As one Russian officer remarked, although ‘no longer the rabble of an Asiatic horde’, the Japanese army was ‘nevertheless no modern European army’. It would be enough for Russian troops simply to ‘pelt them with our caps’ to throw them into disarray. The press portrayed the Japanese as puny, jaundiced monkeys (
makaki
), fleeing in panic before the giant white fist of Mother Russia; or as Oriental spiders, crushed beneath a giant Cossack hat. According to Prince S. N. Trubetskoi, Professor of Philosophy at Moscow University, Russia was now defending the whole of European civilization against ‘the yellow danger, the new hordes of Mongols armed by modern technology’. Academics at the University of Kiev preferred to portray the war as a Christian crusade against ‘insolent Mongols’, a sentiment echoed by the painter Vasilii Vereshchagin, who actually sailed with the Pacific Fleet.