Russian engineers worked desperately all summer and fall to blast their tunnels through the mountains, but when winter descended in its frozen fury they were still far short of their goal. Lake Baikal was still the unbridgeable gap in the line.
By the end of December ice had already begun to form on the surface of the lake. By the end of January, the Baikal, which had been ferrying five troop trains a day, and a smaller ferry, the Angara, which was not equipped to take troop trains, could no longer break through, and Russian troops heading for the East were obliged to march across the ice, halting at four-mile intervals in heated shelters to recover from exposure.
Storms were frequent and the ice often cracked, leaving immense fissures into which the unwary troops often fell. With a growing sense of urgency as the war clouds added their threat to the winter storms, the Russians had mobilized 3,000 horses to draw sledges loaded with supplies across the lake. Since supplies were often lost in mountainous quantities, engineers experimented with a line laid across the ice. Though the ice would not stand the weight of a locomotive, it was found that horses could be used to draw loaded trucks. In the first two weeks that the new system was in use, however, only twenty trucks reached the eastern side of the lake.609
Witte’s devotion to the development of the Trans-Siberian had inevitably involved him deeply in Far Eastern affairs, and for a time he was the chief architect of the government’s policy in that sphere. The negotiations concerning the Chinese Eastern had been entrusted to his care, and he had always been aware that any overly aggressive move might lead to military confrontation with Japan. For that reason, he had opposed the outright military occupation of Manchuria, and had also objected to the acquisition of Port Arthur and Dalny, since a policy of gradual economic penetration promised more solid and enduring gains. In 1898, he had been astonished to hear Russia’s Foreign Minister suggest that to secure Port Arthur and the peninsula, all that was required was “One flag and one sentry, the prestige of Russia will do the rest.”610 Witte didn’t think that would be quite enough. Foreseeing war, he wrote in November 1901 to Count V. N. Lamsdorf:
An armed clash with Japan in the near future would be a great disaster for us. I do not doubt that Russia will emerge victorious from the struggle, but the victory will cost us too much and will badly injure the country economically – in the eyes of the Russian people a war with Japan for the possession of distant Korea will not be justified and the latent dissatisfaction may render more acute the alarming phenomena of our domestic life, which make themselves felt even in peacetime. Between the two evils, an armed conflict with Japan and the complete cession of Korea, I would unhesitatingly choose the second.611
Witte’s apprehensions were exactly right, and Lamsdorf shared them. But the war party was on the rise, and their adventurism completely jeopardized all that Witte had achieved.
Under international pressure, on April 8, 1902, the Russian government formally agreed to gradually withdraw its forces from Manchuria – in three phases over eighteen months – “provided that no disturbances arise and that the action of other Powers should not prevent it.” Since “disturbances” could include banditry, for example, with which the area was plagued, the Russian gesture was recognized almost at once as a delaying tactic, and indeed the Russians never moved to carry the agreement out.612 But Witte saw the writing on the wall. After visiting the Far East during the summer of 1902 to study the situation, he bluntly advised Nicholas to evacuate Manchuria and restrict subsequent efforts to extend Russian influence in the region to peaceful means. His candor was not appreciated, and quickly led to the decline of his influence, as intrigues against him by reactionaries increased at Nicholas’s court. In that court’s corrupted atmosphere, the fact that Witte’s wife was Jewish was also held against him, for the tsar’s own special hatred, it was said, “was reserved for Englishmen, Jews and Japanese.”613
One of the tsar’s more trusted advisers at this time was Vyacheslav Plehve, a former secretary of state for Finland, who became Minister of the Interior in 1902 after the assassination of his predecessor. Among other things, Plehve’s anti-Semitic convictions included the belief that revolutionary and socialist ideas were largely “Jewish in origin.” To demonstrate his zeal against dissent, Plehve even arrested his own foster parents on suspicion of treason and deported them to Siberia. His views on foreign policy reflected a similar delicacy of feeling. In 1903, he remarked to Kuropatkin: “What this country needs is a short victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.”614
On August 28, 1903, Witte was summarily dismissed as Minister of Finance. The tsar had long felt overshadowed by Witte’s reputation and influence, and perhaps already sensed, as Wine later put it, that “he was not born for the momentous historical role which fate had thrust upon him.”615 As if the former’s abilities would automatically pass to him by default, Nicholas rather pathetically wrote in his diary: “Now I rule.”616
He didn’t, in any effectual sense. Conflict with Japan eventually became inevitable because of a reckless brinkmanship in Russian diplomacy, and because by all accounts the manner in which policy was formulated at the time was negligent in the extreme. “The stagnation in the Foreign Ministry is indescribable,” one official wrote. “Everybody is asleep.” And the German ambassador reported: “In my whole life I have never seen so much laziness as in the ministries here. All officials arrive at 11 or 12 o’clock and disappear at 4 never to be seen again. During office hours they do nothing but smoke and promenade in the corridors.” 617 Nicholas himself was often away on long holidays, and the British ambassador, Sir Charles Scott, in any case judged him “incapable, either from want of sufficient experience or by natural diffidence, of taking a decided initiative on his own judgement.”618
Such a state of affairs allowed Far Eastern policy to be concentrated in the hands of the militant new viceroy at Port Arthur, Yevgeny Alekseyev, and of a special committee headed by an extremist adventurer, Alexander Bezobrazov, who had won the tsar’s confidence. Bezobrazov had “masterminded” the Yalu River timber concession; Alekseyev reportedly owed his early advancement to having once taken the blame for a brawl in Marseilles started by a member of the imperial family. The purpose of the viceroyalty, with its headquarters in Port Arthur, was to consolidate the administration, including regional defense, of all Russian territories to the east of Lake Baikal. Japan interpreted the new post (created in August 1903) as a preparation for war.
Taking advantage of the favorable climate in world opinion which had coalesced on their side, on February 8, 1904, the Japanese (without a declaration of war) launched a devastating, surprise attack on the Russian fleet at anchor in Port Arthur. Subsequently, the port itself was besieged and taken; and gradually, in spite of bitter engagements near Mukden and elsewhere, the Russians were routed from the Liaotung Peninsula and pushed deep into Manchuria. The land war as it developed was enormously costly for both sides, with the two huge battles for Port Arthur and Mukden alone costing each side over 100,000 dead.
The Japanese had deliberately struck before the Trans-Siberian could be strengthened, and when the crippling rail-gap at Lake Baikal had still to be closed. The equipment and rolling stock proved inadequate for moving heavy artillery and other modern war materiel; in addition, only a fourth of the bridges were of metal construction, the wooden bridges sagged, and the overlight rails (rolled from low-grade steel) bent under the weight and strain of the trains. Because of the sharp curves and extremely steep gradients, locomotives were severely limited in the amount of freight they could haul, and in some mountainous areas of the east slowed to a crawl. In places, the underballasted track also tended to “creep sideways,” rails buckled and sank in the permafrost, and many of the raw, untreated ties had already begun to decay. One visiting engineer remarked that “after a spring rain, the trains run off the track like squirrels.”619 Finally, there were simply not enough sidings, water-supply depots, and marshaling yards. As a result, Russian forces reached Manchuria only after five to six weeks of interrupted, fatiguing, and sometimes alarming travel. The Lake Baikal bottleneck continued to cause many delays, and in the spring and summer of 1904 whole regiments piled up while awaiting passage on the Baikal and the Angara.