Цусима — знамение конца русской истории. Скрываемые причины общеизвестных событий. Военно-историческое расследование. Том II

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Японо-Русская война. Сборник статей и материалов. Выпуски 1–5. Издание Общества ревнителей военных знаний. СПб., 1905.

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Connaughton R. The War of the Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear. L.-NY, 1988.

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TSUSHIMA: A SIGN OF THE END OF THE RUSSIAN HISTORY

This treatise reviews the eastward progress of the Russian State, beginning with the Ermak March all the way to the Russo-Japanese, while in fact the Japanese-Russian, War, culminating in the Tsushima Battle which put an end to the March.

The main subject of this work is the Russian Navy and Russian seamen that played a great, if not the decisive, role in those turns of Russia's history. Their destinies, like the events of the rest of the world around the turn of the 19^th century, may not look but as belonging to the bygone days to one living in this our tempestuous time. And probably they do. However, this War of the days of yore has produced an unfeigned interest in the author when he came across some material that for one reason or another had escaped attention of the learned researchers who devoted their attention to the War, and the Tsushima Battle in particular.

Already under the Czar, the plan of the navy officers was to assign secrecy to those documents, some under the threat of criminal persecution, for the period of at least a quarter of a century. The year 1937 could have become the possible declassifying date. The special secrecy of the documents was the reason why they had been issued in a very limited number of copies; some did not see light before the Bolshevist Revolution. The revolutionary turmoil and the shaking events that followed in the Russian State in and after 1917 prevented these documents from receiving the attention they deserved even after they were removed from the secrecy list.

This fully applies to the portfolio of documents related with the Russia's seizure of Port Arthur and the Quantung (now Liaotung) Peninsular. Only the fact that they had been totally out of the scope of historians' interest can explain why, quite paradoxically, those “acquisitions” have been considered a success of the Czar's diplomacy right to this day by all researchers, even the patriotically-minded ones.

However, even a cursory glance at these documents sheds a very different light on this historical period. In actuality it presents itself as one of the gravest failures of the Russian Foreign Ministry, bordering on a high treason case. Rather than the much talked about concessions at the Yalu River, it was the Quantung events of 1897–1898 that conditioned the tensity of the situation in the Far East, that stipulated and facilitated the preparation, by certain forces, of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War.

With the purpose of determining the natural role these events played in the context of Russia's multi-centennial advancement towards the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the treatise contains a brief overview of the historical background, beginning with the annexation of the Czardom of Siberia as a result of the Ermak's March. As we worked on it we found that there were unexpected omissions in the traditional accounts of our eastward progress to Amur, and further on to the transoceanic Siberia — the Russian America. This prompted the author to call the first part of the Trilogy, The Wind from the East, or The long Way to Port Arthur.