With the outbreak of the war, no further hesitations in construction were allowed. Blasting their way through the rocky spurs that close in on the water around the lake’s southeastern end, the engineers threaded the line through thirty-nine tunnels from Baikal to Kultuk. On September 25, almost seven months after the beginning of the war, the loop was done.
Meanwhile, throughout the line, an army of workers laid heavier rails and ballast in critical sectors, modified curves and inclines, added two hundred sidings, and rerouted track. Supplementary rolling stock was rounded up from other parts of the empire, and new locomotives were being produced at record speed. By March 1905, 300,000 men had already been carried by rail to the front, and 400,000 more were on the way, which swung the preponderance of land forces in Russia’s favor. As the war entered its second year, Russia’s solitary advantage, its vast manpower reserve, began to be felt, as reinforcements continued to arrive at the front.
But command of the sea had been won by the Japanese at the outset, and in a series of hard-fought engagements in southern Manchuria the Japanese had been victorious, preeminently in the capture of Port Arthur in January 1905. Finally, in May, Russian naval reinforcements, dispatched all the way from the Baltic, were annihilated by Admiral Togo in the Battle of Tsushima Strait.
The Japanese, however, feared an exhausting war of attrition, and in response to their secret request, President Theodore Roosevelt arranged a peace conference between the belligerents at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. To strengthen their bargaining position before the conference convened, the Japanese attacked and occupied Sakhalin Island in July, as most of the free settlers and part of the small improvised convict army fled. The tsar now summoned Witte, whom he was constrained with some humiliation to appoint head of the Russian delegation. Witte proved the man of the hour. In a treaty signed on September 5, 1905, Russia acknowledged a paramount Japanese interest in Korea, ceded to Japan its lease of the Liaotung Peninsula and the southern half of Sakhalin Island, but retained its position in northern Manchuria as the dominant power. Although Russia lost, with the Liaotung Peninsula, the branch lines to Port Arthur and Dalny, Witte had salvaged for Russia the rest of the Chinese Eastern, and against all odds, had overcome Japan’s insistence on an indemnity. International opinion regarded it as a stunning diplomatic victory. The New York Times wrote: “A nation hopelessly beaten in every battle of the war, one army captured and another overwhelmingly routed, with a navy swept from the seas, dictated her own terms to the victors.”620
In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, the two powers reconciled. In opposing the Open Door policy of the United States, both realized that there was more to be gained through collaboration, and through a series of secret agreements (in 1907, 1910, and 1912) they created two exclusive spheres of influence in China north of the Great Wall – the Russian sphere comprising northern Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, and Sinkiang, the Japanese southern Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. Without Russian opposition, Japan in 1910 also annexed the prize for which it had fought – Korea.
In the ensuing years, the Russians and Japanese also developed their respective halves of Sakhalin Island – its fisheries, forests, coal and oil reserves – although the Japanese worked with more efficiency and zeal. In the north, the Russians faced a daunting task of reconstruction, with a population that had dwindled from 40,000 to 7,000 as a result of the war. The island’s penal colony was abolished in April 1906, forty-seven years after its founding, but Sakhalin still suffered from its reputation, so that it wasn’t until the outbreak of World War I, when the government announced that its inhabitants would be exempt from military service, that over fifteen thousand prospective colonists suddenly rushed across Siberia to settle there. Meanwhile, the demise of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912 facilitated Russian domination of Outer Mongolia, whose people were kindred to the Buryats, and which was physically separated from China proper by the Gobi Desert. At Russian insistence, China granted Outer Mongolia autonomy, thus preparing the way for its later emergence as a satellite of the Soviet state.
Yet between rival powers cooperation seldom, if ever, leads to genuine trust. Russia remained wary of Japan’s ultimate intentions, and because the Chinese Eastern (now partly under Japanese control) lost its value as a military road, the government revived its plans for an Amur line, along a route somewhat to the north of where it had originally been drawn. Aside from helping to provoke a disastrous war, the Chinese Eastern Railway had (as its original critics predicted) merely helped develop a territory Russia did not truly own. As a result, it had contributed to the impoverishment of the Amur region by diverting its fledgling river traffic (as well as new colonists) to Manchuria. Vladivostok had also atrophied as a port, since its military and commercial functions had been transferred to Port Arthur and Dalny. One visitor to the lower Amur reported that the typical settlement there consisted of “a collection of dilapidated log huts, one or two decent houses belonging to officials, a handful of filthy-looking skin-clad natives, and some mangy dogs and attenuated pigs wallowing in the mire.”621 In short, the welfare of a Russian province had been sacrificed to that of a Chinese one, and the government now sought through the Amur Railroad to redirect Russian enterprise and capital back to the Russian Far East.
Inevitably, the line also became part of a new overall defensive strategy for the region, which included the taming of the wilderness through colonization, the expansion of the Pacific Fleet, construction of new military and naval bases, and the fortification of the harbors at Vladivostok and Nikolayevsk.
Construction began in the spring of 1908, along a route that ran from a junction near Sretensk in an irregular arc to Khabarovsk through a forbidding, unpopulated wilderness of mountains, forests, bogs, and marshy plains. The supply roads the workers built became the highways of the region; the swamps they drained and the bogs they filled became its fields. Artesian wells were drilled in the permafrost; forest land was cleared. Rice and flour mills, sawmills, tanneries, soap, brick, cement, candle and match factories were established, along with railway shops and large shipping plants. Emigrants were moved down the Amur on huge rafts – a method found to be just as efficient and more economical than by steamer – built of rough-hewn logs, with a shed at either end for the accommodation of people and horses. Families had all their household goods and domestic animals on board, and upon reaching their destination, dismantled the raft and used its timber to build houses without delay. At Khabarovsk, a bridge nearly a mile and a half long was built – Russia’s longest span.