The Formless Empire by Mott Christopher;

Author:Mott, Christopher; [Mott, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westholme Publishing

Russia faced unique national security problems. Historically, its expansion had been the elusive quest for defensible borders largely absent on the great plains of Russia. But expansion created only very long and remote borders that proved extremely costly to defend. Enormous funds had to be funneled away from the civilian economy to defend the empire.

An empire approaching the size of Mongolia was much harder for even a semi-industrial society to keep hold of if it was a centralized and sedentary state. No matter the lessons learned from nomadic peoples and the success of the state in expansion, the cracks of the industrial era were starting to appear. Fear of the exposed frontiers of Primorye meant that even if Russia had wanted to evacuate Manchuria, it could not, at least in its way of geopolitical thinking. And so the stage was set. Japan began to plan to evict Russia before it added Manchuria to its ever-growing empire. In fact, over the course of the fifty years from the Treaty of Shimonoseki to Japanese surrender in the Second World War in 1945, a colossal proportion of Japanese foreign policy was aimed, directly or indirectly, at imperial and Soviet Russia. The first stage of this proxy war started with the Sino-Japanese War, and from 1904 on, it became a much more obvious battle for supremacy in eastern Eurasia. It was almost a precursor to US Cold War containment policy, and it was far more influential for the evolution of the Formless Empire.32

While Russia’s navy was defeated in the Battle of the Yellow Sea and the decisive Battle of Tsushima (1905), its army received a series of defeats on land that crippled much of its offensive fighting power. Tellingly, all the land battles took place in Manchuria proper. The war ended with the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, in which Russia agreed to evacuate southern Manchuria, cease all interference with Korea, cede its lease on the Liaotung Peninsula to Japan, and cede its territory on the southern half of Sakhalin Island. Both sides became suspicious, however, that the arbitrating United States was playing them off of each other for its own interest. They suspected, rightly or wrongly, that the Americans wished to apply the Open Door policy they advocated for China proper to Manchuria via an American railroad magnate given permission to construct lines through the area by the Qing. So just a few years after their war, Russia and Japan began to collaborate on barring any influence from outside powers. Soon the private railroad scheme was blocked by both powers using legal methods, and Manchuria was regarded as a split venture, north and south. In exchange for Russia’s many concessions in the war, Japan guaranteed that it would respect the de facto control Russia increasingly had over Mongolia.33

Both powers, having found a rough regional balance of power for the moment, now turned back to dividing their primary prey. The faltering Qing were no more popular in their traditional home-base frontier provinces than in China proper.

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