Question

A short note on the effect of first world war to russia

Answer 1

Although Tsar Nicholas II described himself as a man of peace, he favoured an expanded Russian Empire. Encouraged by Vyacheslav Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, the Tsar made plans to seize Constantinople and expanded into Manchuria and Korea.

On 8th February, 1904, the Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, therefore beginning the Russo-Japanese War. The Russian Navy fought two major battles to try and relieve Port Arthur but the Russians were defeated and were forced to withdraw. In May, 1905, the Russian Navy was attacked at Tsushima. Twenty Russian ships were sunk and another five were captured. Only four Russian ships managed to reach safety at Vladivostok.

Sergi Witte led the Russian delegation at the peace conference held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August, 1905. Under the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth: (i) The Liaotung Peninsula and the South Manchurian Railway went to Japan; (ii) Russia recognized Korea as a Japanese sphere of influence; (iii) The island of Sakhalin was divided into two; (iv) The Northern Manchuria and the Chinese Eastern Railway remained under Russian control.


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Answer 2

The First World War is Russia’s ‘forgotten war’. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the memory of the war was subsumed into the history of the revolutionary process. The war was a difficult subject for the new rulers of Soviet Russia, since they viewed it as an expansionist conflict, embarked upon by Russia – and the other European Great Powers – as an inevitable consequence of their imperialist ambitions. Despite the death of some two million Russian soldiers during the war, the Bolshevik regime concentrated on the events of 1917 in their historical treatment of the period, seeing the war as almost incidental to the triumphal progress of the revolutionary movement. Western historians too have given relatively little treatment to Russia’s war; the volumes published by the Carnegie Foundation in the late 1920s remain the most comprehensive treatment of Russia’s First World War in all its aspects. The military side of the war was well covered in Norman Stone’s The Eastern Front(1975), but until now there has been no satisfactory modern treatment of the social and economic aspect of Russia’s First World War. Peter Gatrell’s book is therefore especially welcome.