The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was a huge failure for Russia, practically a disgrace. It also exposed a host of internal problems, helped fuel the 1905 Revolution, and set in motion events that, twelve years later — after the failures of World War I — led to the collapse of the entire Russian Empire.
But I hadn’t really come across many books about that war, and then I suddenly spotted the memoirs of one of its participants. Nikolai Voronovich began his military career in the Page Corps, where he studied quite well, but at some point he ran off in search of glory and adventure to the Russo-Japanese War as a volunteer. He didn’t get much adventure, especially since he only reached the war closer to the end, when the grim outcome was already a foregone conclusion. Still, even in that period he managed to earn a St. George Cross; after returning, he was reinstated in the Page Corps (though only after nearly a month in the guardhouse for his escape), graduated with honors, and would have continued climbing the military ladder, but… World War I, the Revolution, the Civil War on the side of the “Greens,” and then emigration.
Voronovich started writing back when he was still studying at the Kyiv Real School; he also sent notes from the front during the Russo-Japanese War, and they were published in Russkoye Slovo.
In 1952, already in New York, what we’d now call a “samizdat” little book of his memoirs about the Russo-Japanese War was published — typed on a typewriter, but accompanied by several photographs and the author’s own illustrations.
The grand title is actually misleading. Because you expect it to be subjective, sure, but still a set of stories about the war as a whole — while Nikolai Voronovich, as I mentioned above, didn’t see the whole war at all. The war began with the Japanese fleet’s surprise attack on Port Arthur, and the unit he ended up in was sent to the front — judging by the chronology — only after Port Arthur had already fallen to the Japanese. What’s more, during the very unhurried journey by rail, the Russians lost the Battle of Mukden, and the volunteer arrived in China, to the Asian front, only to immediately witness the Russian army’s panicked retreat with his own eyes.
Almost immediately after that, the Russian army suffered a crushing defeat at Tsushima, when the Russian squadron was completely destroyed, and Tsarist Russia had no choice but to sign a humiliating — though still a peace — treaty with Japan as quickly as possible.
As we can see, the future cavalry captain — and at the time just a volunteer, Voronovich — didn’t take part in a single major battle and wasn’t even “anywhere near it.” Yes, signing the peace took some time, and so the Russian troops in China still managed to fight the Japanese here and there, but these weren’t battles so much as sluggish skirmishes, when both sides already understood that peace wasn’t far off, and nobody wanted to die for nothing.
In fact, Voronovich spent very little time in the combat zone. The Battle of Mukden was on May 27–28 (New Style) in 1905, and the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on September 5 of the same year. So less than half a year for everything.
And yet even those events are described in the book in a very superficial, sparse way. Honestly, once I saw how slim the book was, I wasn’t expecting much detail: it’s only 79 pages of typed text, plus a few illustrations.
The author first describes his journey to China, then spends a lot of time on everyday life and a few skirmishes there, and he ends with his return home as a guard escorting convicts — men who had “atoned for their guilt with blood.”
There’s almost nothing about the war itself in the book. You won’t find analytical descriptions of the causes of the war, the course of the fighting, or assessments of the defeats. It’s simply the notes of a young man who saw the army from the inside — with a few of his own illustrations, which are, by the way, quite decent for a non-professional:
And what’s interesting here is that even though 120 years have passed, the army back then had the same problems we often see even now. From the outside, the Russian army seemed exemplary and unbreakable, even though we know that most of it consisted of conscripts — men drafted by force and serving for 25 years. The officers, of course, were educated people and, as a rule, of noble origin. But that was part of the problem, too.
For example, the author describes several episodes where small skirmishes with the Japanese involved young officers sent from headquarters — and their entire “participation” amounted to showing up for a day or two in the combat zone and then going back home, collecting medals for taking part in hostilities. Some of these fights were completely unnecessary, and others were lost only because there was no real need for them — the junior officers had to achieve entirely different goals, ones that had nothing to do with combat:
What the headquarters really needed was a “war game” — and its participants had no desire to provoke the enemy or expose themselves to danger. They only needed the careerists who arrived toward the end of the war to have time, before the armistice was signed, to visit the front-line positions so that their service records could state that they had “taken part in actions and firefights with the enemy.”
In his memoirs, Voronovich gives another example as well: prisoners they had captured were taken away from them by force by soldiers from a neighboring unit, so they could escort them to headquarters themselves and present it as their own military prowess. I’ll be honest — that’s not how I imagined the Tsarist army. But turns out, that’s how it was. Nothing changes for centuries.
Even the very process of sending troops to the front is telling. The Russian army has just taken a blow in Asia and urgently needs fresh forces — but they’re shipped by rail with the lowest priority: the trains sit and let passenger trains pass, there’s no proper heating or rations provided for the soldiers, and as a result they have to resort to theft and looting on their own territory.
And once they arrived in China, they forgot about decency altogether. If the Chinese learned that Russians were heading toward their villages, entire families would pack up their belongings and move farther away, because they knew the Russians wouldn’t stand on ceremony. And why was that? Because the army’s supply system was disastrously bad — so Russian soldiers stole everything around them they could get their hands on. They even tore apart the straw roofs of Chinese huts to feed the horses.
From that kind of war — and from the way the higher-ups treated their own men — the army began to rot back in Manchuria. And when it was time to return home, a rail strike broke out, further stoking unrest among both soldiers and civilians. The soldiers had gotten used to obeying no authority and looting the Chinese, and so they saw no reason to behave any differently on the way home — which meant their own compatriots suffered at their hands too.
Those very convicts Voronovich had to escort turned out to be more tight-knit and better organized. And they didn’t stand on ceremony with the strikers at the stations either, threatening to burn everything down if they weren’t allowed to pass on immediately.
However, the army’s problems turned out to be only part of the trouble that had been building in society. Next came the first revolution, which they still managed to suppress using the remaining loyal military units. Twelve years later, there would be almost none of those left.
To sum it up, the book didn’t live up to my expectations. There’s no coherent picture of the war here, and even the memories of that small slice of the war the author actually took part in are very fragmented and superficial. It’s interesting to see it through an eyewitness’s eyes, but you won’t get any overall understanding. Interesting — but far too little. Just an eyewitness’s sketches.
My rating: 2/5
