Russia established diplomatic and commercial relations with Japan by three treaties between 1855 and 1858. In 1860, by the Treaty of Beijing, Russia acquired from China a long strip of Pacific coastline south of the mouth of the Amur and began to build the naval base of Vladivostok. In 1867 the Russian government sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million. The Treaty of St. Petersburg between Russia and Japan in 1875 gave Russia sole control over all of Sakhalin (Sakhalin Island) and gave Japan the Kuril Islands.
The systematic Russian conquest of Turkistan, the region of settled population and ancient culture lying to the south of the Kazakh steppes, began in the 1860s. This was watched with distrust by the British authorities in India, and fear of Russian interference in Afghanistan led to the Anglo-Afghan War (Anglo-Afghan Wars) of 1878–80. In the 1880s Russian expansion extended to the Turkmen lands on the east coast of the Caspian Sea, whose people offered much stiffer military resistance. The Russian conquest of Merv in 1884 caused alarm in Kolkata (Calcutta), and in March 1885 a clash between Russian and Afghan troops produced a major diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia. An agreement on frontier delimitation was reached in September 1885, and for the next decades Central Asian affairs did not have a major effect on Anglo-Russian relations. At the same time, Russia and Britain battled for influence over the weakening Iranian state.
Much more serious was the situation in East Asia. In 1894–95 the long-standing rivalry between the Japanese and Chinese in Korea led to a war between the two Asian empires, which the Japanese won decisively. Russia faced the choice of collaborating with Japan (with which relations had been fairly good for some years) at the expense of China or assuming the role of protector of China against Japan. The tsar chose the second policy, largely under the influence of Count Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf). Together with the French and German governments, the Russians demanded that the Japanese return to China the Liaodong Peninsula, which they had taken in the treaty of peace. Russia then concluded an alliance with China in 1896, which included the establishment of the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway, which was to cross northern Manchuria from west to east, linking Siberia with Vladivostok, and was to be administered by Russian personnel and a Russian police force with extraterritorial rights. In 1898 the Russian government went still further and acquired from China the same Liaodong Peninsula of which it had deprived the Japanese three years earlier. There the Russians built a naval base in ice-free waters at Port Arthur (Lüshun) (Lüshun; now in Dalian, China). They also obtained extraterritorial rights of ownership and management of a southern Manchurian railroad that was to stretch from north to south, linking Port Arthur with the Chinese Eastern Railway at the junction of Harbin. When in 1900 the European powers sent armed forces to relieve their diplomatic missions in Beijing, besieged by the Boxer Rebellion, the Russian government used this as an opportunity to bring substantial military units into Manchuria. All of this bitterly antagonized the Japanese. They might have been willing, nonetheless, to write off Manchuria as a Russian sphere of influence provided that Russia recognize Japanese priority in Korea, but the Russian government would not do this. It was not so much that the tsar himself wished to dominate all of East Asia; it was rather that he was beset by advisers with several rival schemes and could not bring himself to reject any of them, particularly since he underestimated Japan's resolution and power. The British government, fearing that Russia would be able to establish domination over the Chinese government and so interfere with the interests of Britain in other parts of China, made an alliance with Japan in January 1902. Negotiations between Russia and Japan continued, but they were insincere on both sides. On the night of Jan. 26/27 (Feb. 8/9, New Style), 1904, Japanese forces made a surprise attack on Russian warships in Port Arthur, and the Russo-Japanese War began.
Hugh Seton-Watson Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Dominic Lieven
The last years of tsardom
The revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905)–06
The Russo-Japanese War brought a series of Russian defeats on land and sea, culminating in the destruction of the Baltic fleet in the Tsushima Strait. The defeat finally brought to a head a variety of political discontents simmering back at home. First the professional strata, especially in the zemstvos and municipalities, organized a banquet campaign in favour of a popularly elected legislative assembly. Then, on Jan. 9 (Jan. 22, New Style), 1905, the St. Petersburg workers, led by the priest Georgy Gapon (leader of the Assembly of Russian Factory Workers), marched on the Winter Palace to present Emperor Nicholas with a loyal petition containing similar but wider-ranging demands. They were met by troops who opened fire on them, and about 130 were killed.
News of this massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, spread quickly, and very soon most of the other social classes and ethnic groups in the empire were in uproar. There were student demonstrations, workers' strikes, peasant insurrections, and mutinies in both the army and navy. The peasants organized themselves through their traditional village assembly, the mir, to decide when and how to seize the land or property of the landlords. The workers, on the other hand, created new institutions, the Soviets (soviet) of Workers' Deputies: these, consisting of elected delegates from the factories and workshops of a whole town, organized the strike movement there, negotiated with the employers and police, and sometimes kept up basic municipal services during the crisis.
The revolutionary movement reached its climax in October 1905, with the declaration of a general strike and the formation of a soviet (council) in St. Petersburg itself. Most cities, including the capital, were paralyzed, and Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf), who had just concluded peace negotiations with the Japanese, recommended that the government yield to the demands of the liberals and create an elected legislative assembly (Duma). This the tsar reluctantly consented to do, in the manifesto of Oct. 17 (October Manifesto) (Oct. 30, New Style), 1905. It did not end the unrest, however. In a number of towns, armed bands of monarchists, known as Black Hundreds, organized pogroms against Jewish quarters and also attacked students and known left-wing activists. In Moscow the soviet unleashed an armed insurrection in December, which had to be put down with artillery, resulting in considerable loss of life. Peasant unrest and mutinies in the armed services continued well into 1906 and even 1907.