Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 173, The Mailstrom, Part 11.

So, it's finally over. For a war that lasted a year and a half, that sure took a damn long

while, so why did we spend so much time on it?

Today we're going to wrap this series up by discussing the long-term impacts of the Russo-Japanese

war on Russia, China, and Japan. So first, let's talk about Russia. Weren't they in the middle

of a revolution when this whole thing came to an end or something? Well, yeah, yeah, they were,

but the 1905 revolution ended up going nowhere fast.

By December, four months after the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty,

the last die-hard revolutionaries would be either dead or receiving their one-way tickets to Siberia.

There are a couple of reasons why the revolution ended up failing.

First, the Tsar was convinced by moderates in his government to make some concessions to

the revolutionaries, a limited charter of rights, and a representative assembly.

This convinced the majority of strikers and revolutionaries to leave the barricades on the streets,

only the diehard anarchists, communists, and the like for whom no compromise with the system

was possible were left.

And of course, that remainder then did what leftist groups have done since the French

revolution fall into infighting in a manner reminiscent of that one scene

from Monty Python's Life of Brian with the conflict between the People's Front of Judea and the

Judean People's Front. The army and navy also saw only limited defections to the revolutionaries.

While there were some, most famously the crew of

the battleship Potemkin, who would be immortalized by the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein,

their numbers were few and far between. Any revolution needs the military to go over to succeed,

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