ABSTRACT
The Russo-Japanese War demonstrated as never before to what an extent the fate of the tsarist regime at home was tied to its policies of war and peace abroad. With political stability insecure, the danger of defeat on the battlefield (as will be examined in this chapter) could take on existential proportions. It was, of course, the French Revolution of 1789 (and thereafter) that had first exposed the political vulnerability of the ancien régime in Europe, thereby undermining forever the supreme self-confidence that had characterized the reformist policies of such “enlightened despots” as Frederick II of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria. In Russia, Catherine II (“the Great”), who for so long had been proud to count such radical critics of the traditional order as Voltaire and Diderot among her friends, turned savagely in the years 1790-2 against prominent local representatives of the European Enlightenment, Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov, even having the former sentenced (initially) to death. The final elimination of Poland, with its constitutional system of government, in 1795-a country now carved up among its three great autocratic neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria-was another sign of the fear then stalking the courts of St Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna.
