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September 13, 2002
Pleshakov
Takes a Look at the Battle of Tsushima
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Members
of MHC's fire brigade will be on hand at the September 17
fire expo. They are (left to right) Russ Billings, Mike
Russell, Dave Perrault, Jerry Blain, and Daryl Kirby. Bill
Bragiel, also a member of the group, was not available for
the photo.
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He was just a boy
in the coastal town of Yalta when he first learned of the 1905
Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese trouncing of the Russian navy
that decided the Russo-Japanese War. In a musty book from his
grandmother's closet, Constantine Pleshakov, fascinated yet
frustrated, read and reread about Russia's defeat in the
Sea of Japan and the events that preceded it. "Even then
it struck me as incomplete," explains Pleshakov, who grew
up to become a visiting assistant professor of Russian and Eurasian
studies at MHC. "It was a Soviet account of the event with
obvious political biases."
Thirty years later,
Communist restrictions on Russia's archives were finally
eased, and Pleshakov gained access to historical documents beyond
the innocuous "lists of furniture ordered by the Kremlin."
He uncovered personal communications by Zinovy Petrovich Rozhestvensky,
Russia's naval commander at Tsushima, as well as telegraph
cables between Rozhestvensky and his port contacts, from Russia
to Japan. In his new book, The Tsar's Last Armada: The
Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima (Basic Books, 2002),
Pleshakov retells the dramatic story of what he found in the archives.
Those unfamiliar with
Russian history should not be intimidated by The Tsar's
Last Armada, which begins with a discussion of late nineteenth-century
Russia and its tsars, who sought land in the Far East for the
Trans-Siberian Railroad and other territorial expansions. By the
turn of the century, Russia had established the naval base of
Port Arthur in the Yellow Sea, had signed a treaty with China
against Japan, and was making incursions into Manchuria and Korea.
In 1903, Japan started preparing for war and in January 1904 attacked
Port Arthur, sinking the Russian squadron there. Thus began the
Russo-Japanese War, not an unwelcome event for Tsar Nicholas II,
who hoped to unite a country that was showing signs of unrest.
By April, Nicholas had decided on what Pleshakov calls a "most
audacious plan." He would send a fleet commanded by Admiral
Rozhestvensky to rescue Port Arthur and eventually master the
sea.
The plan seemed doomed
from the start, and Rozhestvensky knew it. Faced with bottlenecked,
frozen, and unfriendly waterways, Rozhestvensky was forced to
follow an unprecedented 18,000-mile route from the Baltic Sea
around Europe, Africa, and Asia. He was saddled with 7,500 inexperienced
crew members and incompetent, insubordinate naval admirals, many
of whom had never been to sea. Embezzling bureaucrats "economized"
on ammunition and other essentials, and the foolish, vain Nicholas
insisted that Russia's fleet be bulked up with every available
ship, including antiquated clunkers and "royal toy"
yachts. Watched by British spies and under constant fear of attack
by torpedo boats, this lumbering fleet was further handicapped
by poor communications (British foes controlled most of the telegraph
terminals) and a lack of friendly ports to supply food, water,
and coal for its fuel-guzzling steamers.
Despite the tsar's
increasing unresponsiveness and mounting disobedience, disease,
and demoralization among his men, "Mad Dog" Rozhestvensky
relied on his iron will and undying loyalty to Russia to lead
his clumsy armada. On May 14, after a nine-month journey to the
Tsushima Straits near Japan, his entire fleet was quickly annihilated
by Japan's newer, faster, better-trained and equipped fleet.
The Japanese lost but a few ships, the Russians twenty-two ships
and thousands of sailors, who are still honored with wreaths when
Russian ships pass the Korea Strait.
"These were particularly
ugly, unfamiliar, hellish deaths, the first of the modern age,"
says Pleshakov, describing newly developed Japanese artillery
shells that exploded upon impact and released an explosive called
shimosa to set whole ships ablaze. "The Russian sailors were
terrified by what looked like 'liquid fire' leaping
on the sides of the ship as if the steel itself was on fire,"
writes Pleshakov. Battleships of 800 to 900 men were sunk in minutes;
any survivors were churned up in massive engines.
Those hoping for a
logbook of dry military strategy will be sorely disappointed.
Pleshakov's tale is a fast-paced, suspenseful narrative filled
with lively descriptions and marvelous detail—the nauseating
smell and "yellowish" color of the meat preserve called
solina. The humidity in which "towels and underwear
would not dry." The disappointment of sailors and officers,
"wearing only crosses" in the unbearable heat of the
tropics, as they opened parcels of warm clothes mailed from Russia.
The plagues of cockroaches that wandered the ships "eating
clothes, boots, and books" and gnawing the faces and hands
of sleeping sailors. The names Rozhestvensky devised for his inept
subordinates, "Slutty Old Geezer," "Polished Fidget,"
"Brainless Nihilist."
Pleshakov's portraits
are equally vivid. Of his tragic hero, Pleshakov writes, "Zinovy
Petrovich Rozhestvensky was reported to have an iron will and
an iron hand. Everybody who saw him on the bridge agreed that
the man inspired immediate awe. Tall, powerfully built, his balding
head a proud well-proportioned dome hinting at determination and
obstinacy, Rozhestvensky, at the age of fifty-five, was one of
the handsomest admirals in the Russian navy. He was frightfully
imposing, almost the embodiment of a savage Russian admiral, which
he was in the eyes of many. Bushy eyebrows did not hide his bright
eyes, which were lit sometimes with passion, sometimes with uncontrollable
rage, and occasionally accompanied by a sarcastic smile. A short,
graying beard partly concealed sensual lips more accustomed to
foul obscenities, by virtue of his métier, than to words
of tender passion, which they were nonetheless fluent in."
The story of Tsushima
has been overshadowed by the battles of World War II and largely
undocumented (Rozhestvensky declined huge sums of money to write
a memoir, refusing to criticize his government even after being
courtmartialed for Russia's surrender to the Japanese). But
the battle deserves attention as a major turning point in history,
says Pleshakov, who ranks it with the famous naval battles of
Lepanto, Trafalgar, Jutland, and Midway. Tsushima launched the
"modern age" of battle technology, says Pleshakov, and
established Japan as a superpower in the years leading to World
War II. It also was pivotal in encouraging the unrest that led
to revolution against Russia's corrupt and inept tsarist
government. "The Russian people had been totally humiliated,
its entire navy defeated in just minutes in one of the ugliest
battles ever known," Pleshakov explains. "Seeing such
power and modernization in Japan was particularly horrifying to
the Russians, who called the Japanese 'those monkeys.'
Defeat to a race they saw as inferior was far more shameful than
defeat to an 'equal' power, such as France or England."
Pleshakov graduated
from Moscow State University in 1982 and earned his doctorate
at the Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies, Russian Academy of
Sciences, in 1994. He was director of the Geopolitics Center at
the Institute, where, he says, "you could say anything you
wanted about Soviet policy making as long as you supplied no philosophy,
just pragmatic advice on foreign relations, the economy, and national
interests." He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton and at the Norwegian Nobel Peace Institute.
Winner of a MacArthur Foundation Writing and Research Grant, he
is the author of numerous academic publications, as well as novels,
short stories, novellas, and essays in Russian and English. He
is the coauthor of Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin
to Khrushchev (Harvard University Press, 1996), which won the
Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on international relations and
has been translated into three languages. He is also coauthor
of The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga (Basic Books,
1999), which tells the story of Russia's last imperial dynasty
during its last century of rule.
Since 1998 Pleshakov
has been visiting assistant professor of Russian studies at Mount
Holyoke, teaching Russian history, literature, and culture and
relishing the flexibility of courses ranging from Russian nationalism
to the poetry of Alexander Pushkin.
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