Portsmouth, Treaty of

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PORTSMOUTH, TREATY OF

On 5 September 1905, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, representatives of the Russian and Japanese governments signed the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. The war had occurred as the result of conflicting imperial ambitions between Russia and Japan in Manchuria and Korea. The Japanese had won all the major naval and land battles of the war and were therefore able to demand that their imperial preeminence in the region be acknowledged. Russia agreed in the Treaty of Portsmouth to recognize Japanese dominance in Korea, to sign over the leases of the Chinese ports of Port Arthur and Dalian (Dalny) to the Japanese, and to evacuate their troops from Manchuria in order to allow all the imperial powers to "develop" that region equally.

Still, the treaty was recognized nearly universally as a diplomatic success for Russia. Though the principal Russian negotiator, Count Sergei Witte, had been forced to accept the redivision of Asia to Russia's detriment, his mission was praised because he had made the Japanese blink on the next two most important issues: the disposition of Sakhalin Island, which Japanese forces had taken from Russia during the war, and the question of whether Russia would owe Japan a war indemnity. The indemnity question proved to be the thorniest one. Paying for the expenses of the winning party by the loser had become a tradition in recent years. Prussia had received one from France (after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871), Japan had gotten one from China (following the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895), and even the Russians had expected to claim an indemnity in the event they had emerged militarily victorious over Japan. Each side was spending about a million dollars per day on the war, and each faced financial crisis. Witte had clear instructions from the tsar to reject any claim of indemnity, but the Japanese firmly desired monetary satisfaction.

At the last moment, with the Russian delegation's bags literally packed, the Japanese diplomats relented. Two factors tipped the scales. First, though the Russian military had been humiliated, it had not been destroyed, and a new wave of reinforcements was now making Russian military prospects look much brighter. The second factor was that Theodore Roosevelt, the American president who had agreed to host and mediate the conference, had quietly changed his mind. He had supported an indemnity at the outset, having admired the Japanese war effort and deplored Russian "mendacity" during the wave of Asian expansion. But a concerted public relations blitz by Witte in the United States had convinced important journalists and congressmen that Russia was right to reject the indemnity. Faced with the prospect of domestic political costs, Roosevelt pressured the Japanese to accept, pressure that gained added weight when New York financier Jacob Schiff telegraphed the Japanese delegation to inform them that they would be denied further loans in international markets if they allowed the conference to break up over the indemnity question. At this point, the Japanese leadership in Tokyo cabled their negotiators to accept the Russian offer, which included a compromise on Sakhalin that would divide the island in two. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize that year for his efforts.

The importance of the indemnity dispute, however, was not simply financial. Both sides understood that imperial status was the key issue at stake. Russia felt the need to recover some of the prestige it had lost on the battlefield by forthrightly rejecting the claims of an Asian state to demand war spoils, and Japan felt that it had to be able to press an indemnity claim on a European empire in order to be accepted into the club of Great Powers. It was this high-stakes contest that Witte had won. After the treaty was signed, the Russian delegation retired to its rooms to celebrate, while the Japanese delegation wept in their quarters. Their dismay was shared by Tokyo mobs, which rioted upon hearing the details of the treaty. The so-called Hibiya Riot resulted in seventeen deaths and demonstrated the public commitment to empire on the part of urban Japanese citizens. This manifestation of "imperial democracy" would have significant repercussions for Japanese politics in the following decades.

The Russians appeared to have maintained their Great Power status at the expense of their Japanese diplomatic counterparts. But more careful observers were not fooled. Japanese military success impressed the many neutral military observers posted to the Manchurian battlefields, and the Russian defeat caused deep concern for its allies and at home. The Russian military now focused on reform and attempted to keep out of Asian entanglements. The balance of power had clearly shifted in East Asia.

See alsoMukden, Battle of; Russia; Russo-Japanese War.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Witte, Sergei. The Memoirs of Count Witte. Translated and edited by Sidney Harcave. Armonk, N.Y., 1990. Translation of Vospominaniia. Includes an invaluable but tendentious account of the conference and Witte's strategy.