Nikolai 1854-1918 Russky

RUSSKY, NIKOLAI (1854-1918), Russian general, was educated at the infantry military school in St. Petersburg, grad uated from the academy of the general staff in 1881, and by 1896 had reached general's rank. During the war with Japan (1904-5) he was the head of the staff of the II. Army, and planned the offensive carried out by General Grippenberg which led to the prematurely abandoned offensive of Sandepu. In 1914 he com manded the III. Army which attacked in Galicia, and advanced to Lvov (Lemberg) through which it passed in the further ad vance to the San-Dniester line. The dramatic entry of the III. Army into Lvov created for General Russky a prestige out of proportion to the real importance of his success. In Oct. 1914 he was appointed commander-in-chief of the north-western and after wards of the northern armies. He continued to hold the command in spite of ill-health, and it was at his headquarters that the final scenes of Nicholas II.'s reign and his abdication took place in March 1917.

Soon after the Revolution General Russky retired, and in 1918 he was reported killed by the Bolsheviks.

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AR (1904-5). The seizure by Rus sia of the Chinese fortress of Port Arthur, which she had a few years previously, in concert with other Powers, compelled Japan to relinquish, was from the Russian point of view the logical out come of her eastward expansion and her need for an ice-free har bour on the Pacific. The extension of the Trans-Siberian railway through Manchuria to Port Arthur and a large measure of influ ence in Manchuria followed equally naturally. But the whole course of this expansion had been watched with suspicion by Japan, from the time of the Sakhalin incident of 1875—when the island power, then barely emerging from the feudal age, had to cede her half of the island to Russia—to the Shimonoseki treaty of 1895, when the Powers compelled her to forego the profits of her victory over China. The subsequent occupation of Port Arthur and other Chinese harbours by European Powers, and the evident intention of consolidating Russian influence in Man churia, were again and again the subject of Japanese representa tions at St. Petersburg (Leningrad), and these representations became more vigorous when, in 1903, Russia seemed to be about to extend her Manchurian policy into Korea. No less than ten

draft treaties were discussed in vain between Aug. 1903 and Feb. 1904, and finally negotiations were broken off on Feb. 5.' On the 4th Japan had already decided to use force, and her military and naval preparations, unlike those of Russia, kept pace with her diplomacy.

This was in fact an eventuality which had been foreseen and on which the naval and military policy of Japan had been based for ten years. She, too, had her projects of expansion and hegemony, and by the Chino-Japanese War she had gained a start over her rival. The reply of the Western Powers was first to compel the victor to maintain the territorial integrity of China, and then within two years to establish themselves in Chinese harbours. From that moment Japanese policy was directed towards estab lishing her own hegemony and meeting the advance of Russia with a fait accompli. But her armaments were not then adequate to give effect to a strong-handed policy, so that for some years there after the Government had both to impose heavy burdens on the people and to pursue a foreign policy of marking time, and en dured the fiercest criticism on both counts, for the idea of war with Russia was as popular as the taxes necessary to that object were detested. But as the army and the navy grew year by year, the tone of Japanese policy became firmer. In 1902 her position was strengthened by the alliance with England ; in 1903 her army, though in the event it proved almost too small, was considered by the military authorities as sufficiently numerous and well pre pared, and the arguments of the Japanese diplomatists stiffened with menaces. Russia, on the other hand, was divided in policy and consequently in military intentions and preparations. In some quarters the force of the new Japanese army was well under stood, and the estimates of the balance of military power formed by the minister of war, Kuropatkin, coincided so remarkably with the facts that at the end of the summer of 1903 he saw that the moment had come when the preponderance was on the side of the Japanese. He therefore proposed to abandon Russian proj ects in southern Manchuria and the Port Arthur region and to restore Port Arthur to China in return for considerable conces sions on the side of Vladivostok.