Friday 26 November 2010

Summary Question on the Russo-Japanese War from the Textbook

How Far Was the Political Unrest of January-September 1905 the Result of Developments in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05?

Political unrest during this period was exacerbated by developments during the Russo-Japanese war, but the root causes of the instability were much broader and reached further back in time, to at least the 1850s.

As occurred half a century before in the Crimean War, Russia’s poor performance and ultimately her defeat in the war served to highlight her backwardness and heightened existing tensions in the country. Rather than the ‘short swift victorious war’ predicted by Plheve and the expansion of her territory, Russia found herself defeated by an enemy that the Tsar had promoted as being inferior (‘monkeys who play as Europeans’). The war also showed that despite Alexander II’s reforms in the 1860s and subsequent developments in industrialization and the transport infrastructure, Russia’s military was poorly supplied and could not effectively maintain its supply lines. While the Peace Treaty of August 1905 was not as harsh against Russia as it could have been, it, nevertheless, was a humiliation to Nicholas II and Russia.

That said, however, the unrest and calls for reform that accompanied Russia’s defeat did not arise in this period, but, again, can be traced back at least half a century. Calls for reform, for example, as well as demands for freedom of speech and censorship had been made by the liberal intelligentsia since the 1850s and particularly since the mid 1860s when Alexander II retreated on his earlier reforms. Alexander III and Nicholas II’s emphasis on maintaining autocracy and increasing use of repressive measures heightened calls for reform. Growing unrest in both the towns and the city could also be traced back to at least the 1890s and the ways in which the working conditions of the peasants and urban poor had been sacrificed in the drive for industrialization. In the case of the peasants it could be even arguably traced back to the 1860s and their dissatisfaction with the terms of the Emancipation Act.

To sum up, while the failure and ultimately the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war did not help the situation in the country, it did not produce the social unrest in itself. Rather, the root causes of the unrest stretched back over half a century through various attempts by the Tsars to balance autocracy with the modernization of the country.

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