It is tempting to see tsarist Russia's loss in the Russo-Japanese War as an important stepping stone towards the Soviet Union. The 1905 Revolution appeared on the heels of defeat and the Bolsheviks would claim that 1905 was a dress rehearsal for the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. But this teleology is on shaky ground historically. The Russo-Japanese War's relationship to the Revolution of 1905 is a complicated one. At first glance, the calculus would seem that that a government that loses a war faces the consequences of this loss through this type of revolt. However, very few of the participants in 1905 Revolution had a vested interest in the war or its outcome. The Polish socialist parties for example used the war as evidence for the bankruptcy of tsardom, but the war in East Asia was not the sine qua non for the Polish movement which had longstanding grievances that stretched back a decade. The war was also peripheral to the Potemkin Mutiny and the events that led up to Bloody Sunday. Of course the war impacted many of the events of 1905, but its relationship to them was often tangential to them. The Russo-Japanese War served as a catalyst for some of the events of 1905, but it did not create the political tinderbox that exploded that year.

The war was not especially popular within Russia when it began in 1904. While there were some among liberal and conservative circles who thought the war was a good thing, there was little rallying around the flag and tsar. Part of this lack of patriotism was the fact that the war was quite distant and fought over territory in China or Korea. This was not a conflict like that with the Ottomans or Austro-Hungarians which would have touched on issues of ethnic identity, religion, and security. Various socialist parties protested the outbreak of the war, but this was to be expected. These parties and the Russian state were not friends by any means (the parties were illegal) and most of these parties treated the war as an opportunity. Lenin himself by his own admission claimed he only took the war seriously after the fall of Port Arthur some ten months into the war. By the same token, many within the Russian government itself did not believe that war with Japan would be a long or costly affair.

The initially lackadaisical war effort added kindling to the revolutionary tinderbox. The call-up of reserves and the hasty requisitions of rail lines to fight what was supposed to be a short war created havoc within the Russian economy. This economic disruption was keenly felt in the industrialized Western Provinces where there already was a strong and active socialist movement among Poles and Jews. The failing war effort also underscored to many the needs of reform. Some in Father Gapon's movement of urban reformism claimed that the resources used on the war and sending a battlefleet across the world was a waste of resources that would be better spent alleviating poverty in cities like St. Petersburg.

This sentiment that the government wasted resources for little to gain for it ripped through the often cosmetic wartime solidarity. The manifest failures in the war justified every critique leveled against tsardom since the Great Reforms. Liberals would argue that the war showed the strength of constitutionalism and a more open political system. The Meiji state may have had an emperor, but it also had a constitution, a Diet, and a bevy of professional bureaucrats staffing the state. Tsardom, in contrast, was beholden to no one and thus could not function as a modern state. The largely middle-class and liberal Kadets (constitutional democrats) used the defeat in the war as a vindication of their position that Russia needed a constitution. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Great Russian nationalists used defeat as a sign that the empire was riven with traitorous minorities who were disloyal to the tsar. The fact that a good many of the Navy's officer corps were Baltic Germans and some Polish nationalists called for independence was evidence for these groups of potential fifth columns that needed to be stomped out by a more rigorous program of nationalism and Russification.

Lenin's famous January 1905 article in Vperyod "The Fall of Port Arthur" encapsulates one of the common perceptions of 1905 among the Russian left: tsardom was vulnerable. The defeat and inability of the state to manage the war was a propaganda boon for the underground left as it revealed the feared autocratic state had feet of clay. The idea that Russia could be defeated by a non-white power and decisively so made a revolution appear to be more practical. The biggest pillar for the Romanovs' autocracy in the nineteenth century had been the army. The control of the military had allowed it to threaten counterrevolution in 1848 as well as crushing various Polish revolts such as the 1863 one. That the Romanov military could be defeated was a powerful example for any would-be revolutionary in 1905.

The Russo-Japanese War did not create all these conditions though, it only exacerbated them. There already was a growing discontent among the urban poor and laboring classes over industrialization. Men like Lenin were likewise going to be enemies of tsardom even if Russia had triumphed over Japan. More importantly, Nicholas II presided over a political system that was ill-suited to navigate modernity. Autocracy generally did not distinguish between the character and goals of opposition parties, often reflexively lumping in liberal ones such as the Kadets with more radical groups like the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In the eyes of the state, arguing for a constitution was akin to calling for a Marxist overthrow of the state. This meant that autocracy had very few political allies in a crisis. Defeat in the war was one such crisis, but the tarnished reputation of the Romanovs did not exist in a vacuum. Instead, defeat and tales of state incompetence became part of a larger process of grievances and would-be revolutions that exploded in 1905. The Romanovs weathered the storm in 1905, but barely. Many of the contradictions and inadequacies of tsardom remained in place and the situation exploded again in 1917. Nicholas II found himself even more politically isolated than 1905 and to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there were to be no second acts for tsardom.

Sources

Ascher, Abraham. The Revolution of 1905. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Weeks, Theodore R. Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945. Chichester, West Sussex (UK): Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.