Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1600–1853 · 1842

The Closed Country

The Tokugawa settlement began with a problem of victory. Tokugawa Ieyasu had won at Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603, ruling behind an emperor without power, like a military strongman behind a figurehead king. He still had to keep other lords from fighting him or one another. His own house and the fudai, families who had served him before 1600, received the strategic centre around Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, shown in charcoal. The tozama, or ‘outer’ lords, had fought him or joined late. The Shimazu of Satsuma and the Mōri of Chōshū retained large domains on the grey-tan edges of the map, but were excluded from national office.

These lords continued to govern most of Japan, so peace depended on keeping them under control. From 1635 alternate attendance required each daimyo to live every other year in Edo, the shogun’s capital and today’s Tokyo. Families remained there, tying the lords to the centre, while travel, retinues and permanent mansions consumed much of their domains’ income. The shogunate watched and weakened potential rivals without taking over their governments. The arrangement helped preserve 250 years without civil war.

That peace made economic growth possible, but growth changed the position of the people who maintained the order. Population reached about 30 million, and roads and shipping routes used by the processions carried a national market. Osaka’s Dōjima rice exchange, licensed in 1730, traded promises of rice yet to be harvested, much like a futures market. Samurai, hereditary warriors who also staffed government offices, made up about 6% of the population and ranked first officially; merchants stood last. Yet samurai received fixed rice salaries. When rice prices fell, many had to borrow from merchants, and domains also fell into debt.

The government survived severe disturbances, though survival did not mean that its people were secure. During the Tenmei famine of the 1780s, Japan’s population fell by more than 900,000. In 1837 Ōshio Heihachirō, formerly an Osaka official, led a rising that burned a fifth or more of the city. The divided state remained calm at the top while facing serious strains below.

Foreign contact was controlled, not entirely abolished. Edicts of the 1630s banned Christianity and Japanese travel abroad, while restricting European trade to the Dutch at Dejima, an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour. Three loyal domains handled relations with Korea, the Ryukyu kingdom, today’s Okinawa, and the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido. Through these guarded routes the shogunate could regulate contact, and scholars of ‘Dutch learning’ could study imported books on subjects such as anatomy and artillery.

Those channels brought alarming evidence from the Opium War of 1839–42. British steamships defeated China, the largest state in Asia; the Treaty of Nanking gave Britain Hong Kong and opened five Chinese ports. In 1842 the shogunate softened its order to fire on foreign ships. Knowing what had happened, however, did not give it the means to build a navy or raise a national tax. The resources needed for a common defence lay largely with the domains that the Tokugawa system had been designed to restrain.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Sekigahara settled who ruled and left the losers in place. Victory at Sekigahara left Ieyasu with enemies he had not destroyed. The Mōri of Chōshū lost most of their eight provinces but kept two, while the Shimazu retained their whole Satsuma domain in the far southwest. Both remained armed on the rim. Over 250 years their grievances endured, and distance gave them room to build armies and treasuries beyond close shogunal inspection. The peace settlement thus left potential rebels where the centre would find them difficult to control.

Alternate attendance bought loyalty by draining the lords. A lord contemplating rebellion had to reckon with the expense of alternate attendance. From 1635 each daimyo travelled to Edo every other year with a large retinue and kept his wife and heir there permanently. Maintaining the journeys and mansions absorbed a large share of domain revenue. The traffic also supported roads, inns and a national market, helping Edo become one of the world’s largest cities. The political safeguard came at a financial cost: domains borrowed from merchants and had less money available for defence.

A divided state had no national army or tax. Preventing another internal war and resisting a foreign navy called for different powers. The shogun taxed his own lands, while each daimyo retained his samurai and rice tax; no institution could raise money from all Japan or command all its soldiers. Even a limited attempt at centralization met resistance. In 1843 Mizuno Tadakuni tried to bring land around Edo and Osaka under direct shogunal control, but affected lords and bannermen forced him out within months. The government could not readily reorganize even its heartland.

Controlled contact gave knowledge without power. Dejima, Dutch reports and scholars of Dutch learning connected Japanese elites to Western science and news of war. By the 1840s officials knew how Britain had defeated China and what steam warships could do, giving Japan’s rulers an early understanding of the danger compared with much of Asia. Acting on it was another matter. Building a navy required money and soldiers that belonged to the domains, and the shogunate lacked machinery to draw them together.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Caution replaced preparation. The government responded to the Chinese crisis chiefly by avoiding a confrontation. It offered foreign ships fuel and water after 1842, yet rejected a Dutch royal letter in 1844 urging Japan to open on its own terms. Some coastal batteries were built; a navy and national tax did not follow. Thus Perry’s arrival in 1853 found the shogunate with the same divided machinery it had faced the crisis with in 1842.

An emperor-centred nationalism was already taking shape. How could Japan unite against the West? Mito scholars, especially Aizawa Seishisai, looked to spiritual unity around the emperor and coined the slogan of ‘revering the emperor and expelling the barbarians’. They meant to strengthen the shogunate. Yet their argument gave the emperor a prior claim on loyalty, and within twenty years opponents would use it against the Tokugawa house.

The rim domains reformed their finances first. Satsuma and Chōshū found money for change while shogunal reform stalled. In the 1830s and 1840s Zusho Hirosato reduced Satsuma’s enormous debts partly through a sugar monopoly worked by Amami islanders and trade through Ryukyu; Murata Seifū rebuilt Chōshū’s finances and trade. Twenty years later these outer domains could afford Western ships and rifles. Their financial repairs help explain why revolution would come from the map’s edges.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Tokugawa order already collapsing before 1853, or did the outside world break a system that still worked?

There is a strong case that the system had internal troubles. Samurai and domains accumulated debt, peasant protests became more frequent after 1750, famines killed hundreds of thousands, and Ōshio’s rising revealed discontent within the ruling class. Japanese Marxist historians long saw these as signs of feudalism decaying from within. Yet the order survived famine and protest, the economy grew, and for 250 years no lord challenged the shogun. Those facts also demand explanation. Marius Jansen and Conrad Totman are among the historians who distinguish vulnerability from the event that forced a response: internal strains weakened the system, while the foreign threat determined when it had to confront them. The Soviet half of this atlas raises a related question: was that system dying in 1985, or killed by the attempt to reform it? Internal weakness alone rarely brings down an old order, but it helps determine how severely an outside shock is felt.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A visit to the shogun’s court could be an unusual assignment for a European doctor. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German employed by the Dutch, accompanied their missions to Edo in 1691 and 1692. Before Shogun Tsunayoshi and his ladies, watching from behind a lattice, Kaempfer and his Dutch colleagues were ordered to walk, dance, jump, sing, play the drunkard and speak broken Japanese. Kaempfer added a German love song to his dance. His posthumous History of Japan (1727) remained Europe’s fullest account for more than a century, showing readers a ruler able to make foreign envoys perform at will.

CHAPTER 2 · 1853–1858 · 1859

The Black Ships

The United States wanted Japan to serve ships crossing the Pacific. Steamers bound for China needed coal, American whalers worked in nearby waters, and Washington wanted safety for their crews as well as trade. Perry refused to take his request to Nagasaki, the usual place for receiving foreigners. His guns did not fire in anger, but their presence near Edo forced the shogunate to decide how to respond. A month later Admiral Putyatin’s Russian squadron reached Nagasaki, shown by the arrow from the west. The American request was only one of the demands confronting Japan.

Senior councillor Abe Masahiro sought advice from the emperor’s court in Kyoto and the roughly 260 daimyo, lords who governed domains much like semi-independent states. No previous shogunal government had circulated such a question to them. Most lords wanted refusal or delay, yet none offered a fleet with which to resist. In 1854 the government signed at Kanagawa, opening Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships for supplies. Abe had sought help with an immediate decision, but the consultation also brought others into foreign policy and exposed the shogunate’s inability to settle the question alone.

The next agreement went further. Harris had been American consul at Shimoda since 1856. Pointing to Britain’s renewed war against China, he warned that a fleet might demand harsher terms. The commercial treaty opened Kanagawa, which became the port of Yokohama, as well as Nagasaki and Hakodate, in 1859. It fixed import tariffs at low rates that Japan could change only with foreign approval.

Trade brought gains and losses quickly. In Japan an ounce of gold bought about five ounces of silver; abroad it bought about fifteen. Traders could profit from that difference, and gold flowed out. To halt the drain, the shogunate debased its coins in 1860, putting less gold into them. Meanwhile exports of raw silk and tea boomed. Some merchants and silk farmers grew rich, but prices rose faster than wages and the fixed rice salaries of samurai, the hereditary warrior-officials. For many others, opening the ports became a question of how to afford everyday life.

A quarrel over succession made the treaty harder to settle. The sickly shogun Iesada had no heir. Reforming lords such as Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma favored the able Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu; conservative officials wanted a boy from the Tokugawa family’s Kii branch. In 1858 minister Hotta Masayoshi returned from Kyoto with Emperor Kōmei’s refusal to approve the Harris treaty. Supporters of agreement saw danger in waiting: Russia had just acquired the north bank of the Amur from China under the Treaty of Aigun, turning the land above the river from tan to blue on the map. Further delay, they argued, might bring harsher demands.

The newly appointed tairō, Ii Naosuke, had emergency powers as chief minister. He signed the treaty despite the emperor’s refusal, installed the boy shogun Iemochi and purged his critics. Perry’s arrival had put the government under pressure from abroad; Ii’s response deepened a struggle over authority at home. Within five years, the shogunate had been unable to keep foreigners out and had lost the consent of lords it claimed to lead.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Steam and the Pacific brought America to Japan. After gaining California in 1848, the United States sought coaling stations for steamships traveling across the Pacific to China. Its whalers also worked off Japan, and wrecked sailors were sometimes imprisoned there. Japan became a stop on a commercial highway for the first time. Perry’s two steamers could move against winds that had long left sailing ships at the mercy of its coast.

A government without a navy could only delay. Chapter 1’s divided state had neither a fleet nor a national army, and could not quickly pay for them. Abe’s officials built batteries on artificial islands in Edo Bay after 1853, but knew that ships like Perry’s had destroyed Chinese forts. They faced a choice over how much to concede and how to explain it: refusal threatened war against a power they expected to defeat them.

Consultation widened the circle of decision-makers. Abe asked the daimyo and court for advice in 1853 partly to share responsibility for an unpopular choice. In doing so, he invited the outer lords and court to exercise a voice in national policy that they had been denied since 1600. The court’s refusal in 1858 therefore carried weight. An effort to support the government helped establish an alternative authority that would replace it.

A succession quarrel turned diplomacy into a feud. The succession to the heirless Iesada split the elite in 1857–58. Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma and Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito were among the reforming lords who favored Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu. Conservatives around Ii Naosuke supported a twelve-year-old from the Kii branch. These men also disagreed about the treaty. Ii’s victory in both disputes made rivals over policy and succession enemies of the shogunate itself.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Terror entered politics. After Ii’s assassination, political violence continued for a decade. Young samurai calling themselves “men of high purpose” (shishi) killed officials and foreigners in the emperor’s name, trying to force decisions on governments unable to keep order. Many came from Chōshū, Tosa and Satsuma, the domains that would lead the next stage.

Kyoto became a second capital. Lords and activists went to Kyoto after 1858, turning a court that had been powerless for two and a half centuries into a center of decision. The shogunate sought to repair relations by arranging the marriage of the emperor’s sister to the young shogun in 1862. Policy now needed approval in two places, with the emperor’s carrying moral weight.

Open ports remade prices and livelihoods. The new trade changed both places and livelihoods. Yokohama grew from a fishing village into Japan’s main trading port, and raw silk became the country’s largest export. Silk districts prospered, while inflation harmed urban workers and samurai. Merchants and officials also gained a close view of Western commerce; the Meiji state would later use that knowledge to build industry.

Russia’s advance redrew the north. Russia acquired Chinese land north of the Amur under the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and east of the Ussuri under the Treaty of Peking in 1860. It founded Vladivostok, a name meaning “ruler of the East.” In 1861 a Russian warship occupied part of Tsushima for six months. Fear of Russia shaped Japanese strategy for half a century, through Korea to the war of 1904.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the unequal treaties weaken Japan more through their economic terms or through the political crisis they caused?

The treaties imposed serious economic costs. Fixed tariffs limited customs revenue and protection for new industries until 1911; the gold drain and export boom drove inflation; and extraterritoriality put foreigners beyond Japanese law. Yet Japan’s economic losses were manageable compared with China’s, and merchants and silk districts gained from trade. The political effects were faster and larger. The shogunate signed without imperial approval, making it appear disloyal to the authority in whose name it ruled. The ensuing purge turned some of the most capable lords into enemies, and within ten years the shogunate was gone. Historians such as W. G. Beasley therefore see the treaties above all as a political catalyst, while recognizing their real economic harm. Their terms set Meiji Japan on a long campaign for equality; the crisis helped decide who would lead that campaign. Outside pressure can weaken a government most sharply by damaging belief in its right to rule.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The delegations used gifts and demonstrations to show one another their capabilities. In 1854 Perry’s party laid a circle of track near Yokohama and presented a working miniature steam railway, complete with engine and carriage. The carriage was made for children, so Japanese officials trying it clung to the roof, robes flying, at about twenty miles an hour, as Perry’s official narrative recorded. The Americans also strung a telegraph line about a mile long. Their hosts offered silks and lacquer and staged a display by sumo wrestlers, who carried heavy rice bales with ease.

CHAPTER 3 · 1858–1869 · 1868

The Fall of the Shogunate

The struggle over Japan’s future centered on a court that had little power of its own. After 1860, young activists called shishi, ‘men of high purpose’, invoked the emperor against the shogunate. Most were samurai from Chōshū, Tosa and Satsuma, outer domains whose lords governed almost independently. Like student radicals in later revolutions, they assassinated officials they considered traitors and attacked foreigners they called barbarians. Whoever could direct the court in Kyoto could issue commands in the emperor’s name. Chōshū’s leaders gained influence there and pressed him to order foreigners expelled by 25 June 1863.

Chōshū put that order into practice by firing on ships in the strait at Shimonoseki. Satsuma faced a separate confrontation with Britain after a British merchant was killed at Namamugi. Britain burned much of Kagoshima in August 1863; in September 1864 an allied Western fleet silenced Chōshū’s batteries in two days. The advocates of expulsion had tried their policy against powerful steam navies. Their defeats forced them to reconsider how Japan could defend itself.

Chōshū already had an institution suited to a different approach. Its Kiheitai trained samurai, farmers and townsmen together with modern rifles, recruiting across lines of birth. Conservatives briefly seized control after the defeats, but Takasugi Shinsaku used mixed-class units to retake the domain in early 1865. Satsuma’s leaders, Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi, bought British ships and weapons through Nagasaki. In March 1866 Sakamoto Ryōma, an activist from Tosa, brokered a secret alliance between the former enemies.

That summer the shogunate sent a large but divided army against Chōshū. It lost on every front; the arrow across the strait shows Chōshū taking the fighting into Kokura, the domain of a lord loyal to the shogun. The result mattered beyond the battlefield. If the shogun could not compel one domain to submit, his claim to protect and govern the country had become difficult to sustain.

Tokugawa Yoshinobu, shogun from early 1867, sought another arrangement. He had reformed his army with French advisers, and in November he returned his governing powers to the young emperor Mutsuhito, hoping to lead a council of lords. Satsuma and Chōshū acted to prevent that outcome. Their palace coup on 3 January 1868 removed Yoshinobu’s land and office. At Toba–Fushimi, about 5,000 of their soldiers fought under the imperial banner and defeated a shogunal force roughly three times as large.

Saigō and the shogunal negotiator Katsu Kaishū arranged the peaceful surrender of Edo in May. Resistance continued in the north, where an alliance of more than thirty domains fought until Aizu fell in November. The final holdouts surrendered at Goryōkaku in Hakodate in June 1869. About 4,000–8,000 people died in the Boshin War, named for the year it began. The toll was comparatively low for a revolution: once the emperor’s banner appeared against the shogun, many domains chose the winning side.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The emperor gave the opposition a higher loyalty. The court’s refusal of the 1858 treaty gave opponents grounds to accuse the shogun of defying the emperor. Ideas from the Mito school had urged national unity around the throne to strengthen the shogunate; activists now used them to challenge it. The emperor had no army, however, so control of the court at Kyoto allowed others to speak with his authority. That made the court a prize.

Defeat turned the expellers into modernisers. Satsuma and Chōshū had demanded the expulsion of foreigners. At Kagoshima and Shimonoseki in 1863–64 they found that coastal guns and samurai swords could not stop Western steam warships. They still sought a strong, independent Japan, but changed their means: they bought rifles and ships and secretly sent students to Britain. Defeat made their leaders more realistic about what independence required.

Chōshū recruited beyond the samurai. Founded in 1863, the Kiheitai and similar units trained farmers, merchants and townsmen alongside samurai in Western drill. By recruiting beyond birth, Chōshū gained a larger, more motivated force than its samurai alone could supply. Those troops helped reformers win the domain’s civil war in 1865 and beat a far larger shogunal army in 1866. The government had kept the rule of birth that Chōshū had broken.

The shogunate’s late reforms alarmed its rivals. Yoshinobu was trying to strengthen the shogunate: French officers trained its troops, and a stronger central administration was planned. To Satsuma and Chōshū, delay could mean facing an opponent too strong to overthrow. His return of power in November 1867 offered him another route to leadership, as head of a council of lords. Their coup in January 1868 was intended to close it.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Edo surrendered and was renamed Tokyo. Saigō and Katsu Kaishū’s negotiated handover of Edo Castle in May 1868 spared a city of about a million from siege. It became Tokyo, ‘eastern capital’, in September, and the young emperor moved there the next year. The new rulers acquired the old capital with its administrators and archives intact, making it easier to govern from that center.

The victors ruled through domain cliques. The new leadership came chiefly from Satsuma and Chōshū, with Tosa and Hizen as junior partners. Ōkubo, Kido, Saigō, Itō and Yamagata would dominate politics for decades. This experienced group could act together, but its predominance also caused resentment among outsiders, who called the system ‘clique government’.

The domains survived the war that ended the shogunate. Removing the shogun left more than 260 domains intact, including those of Satsuma and Chōshū. The government directly controlled only the confiscated shogunal lands shown in red; for soldiers and revenue elsewhere it had to bargain with lords. Its leaders came to see the domains as an obstacle to a strong state, setting up the more radical change of 1871.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Meiji Restoration made by ideas, by guns, or by the shogunate’s own mistakes?

Each explanation addresses a different part of the outcome. Imperial loyalty gave a small group of domains a claim to authority and made other lords reluctant to fight the banner. The shogunate’s errors, from Ii’s treaty without imperial approval to the failed 1866 expedition, gave the challenge an opening. Chōshū’s mixed-class infantry and Satsuma’s modern equipment helped turn that opening into victory over larger forces in 1866 and 1868. Historians give these elements different weight: Marxists stress social forces, Beasley lower samurai ambitions, and Totman the shogunate’s reforms and mistakes. A strong answer connects legitimacy, opportunity and organized force; without any one of them the outcome would have been different. The broader lesson is that a rival to an old regime needs both a claim to higher legitimacy and a force willing to act on it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The last shogunal holdouts established what they called the Republic of Ezo at Hakodate. In January 1869 its officers chose their leaders by vote, electing naval commander Enomoto Takeaki president; this is often described as Japan’s first election. Among his advisers was Jules Brunet, a French artillery officer who resigned from the French mission to remain with his Japanese students. Enomoto was imprisoned after surrender, pardoned in 1872, and later served the Meiji government as envoy to Russia and as a cabinet minister.

CHAPTER 4 · 1868–1877 · 1877

Dismantling the Old Order

In April 1868 the fifteen-year-old emperor swore the Charter Oath, a five-article statement drafted by former samurai. It promised assemblies where “all matters decided by public discussion”, the abandonment of the “base customs of the past”, and a search for knowledge throughout the world. The promise of assemblies was vague enough to reassure the lords. The other articles gave the leaders room to contemplate extensive change.

Their first steps left familiar figures in place while changing the source of their authority. In 1869 the lords, led by those of Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen, handed their land and population registers to the emperor. The daimyo continued to govern their old territories as appointees, receiving a tenth of domain revenue for their households. Like former owners kept on salary after a company is nationalized, they appeared to carry on much as before. The principle had changed: land and people now belonged to the state.

The government made that principle effective in August 1871. Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and Saigō Takamori assembled an imperial guard of about 10,000 men from their three domains. On 29 August the emperor summoned the former lords to Tokyo and announced the abolition of their 261 domains. More than 300 prefectures took their place; by the end of the year these had been merged into 72, governed by officials from outside the territories. On the map the patchwork turns red in a single step.

The settlement combined compensation with the possibility of force. The government assumed domain debts, continued samurai stipends for the time being, and made the lords wealthy, titled residents of the capital. Many domains were close to bankruptcy, so the lords surrendered responsibilities they could no longer afford as well as power. The guard stood behind the decree. Together, these arrangements allowed the government to transform local rule without fighting every lord.

The next reforms reached households directly. Conscription, compulsory military service, began in January 1873. Household heads and those who could pay were exempt, leaving poor farmers’ younger sons to bear much of the burden. In July the land-tax reform replaced rice levies with a cash payment of 3% of assessed land value and gave owners title deeds. Land could be sold, and the state gained a steadier income; the payment remained due when a harvest was poor. Riots followed both measures. Protests in 1876 helped force a reduction of the tax to 2.5% in 1877.

Samurai lost their hereditary rice stipends, converted into bonds worth five to fourteen years’ income, and their swords. Former samurai rose at Saga in 1874 and in three western towns in 1876. In 1877 Saigō’s army besieged Kumamoto, but the rebellion was crushed by September. Meanwhile the 1874 expedition to Taiwan and the arrow to Ganghwa Island in 1876 show the new state using force abroad. At home, Saigō’s defeat ended the prospect that samurai could fight their way back to power.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The domains kept the new state weak. The government that emerged in 1868 directly controlled only confiscated shogunal lands and relied on domains for revenue and soldiers. Its leaders had traveled abroad or read Western works, and saw that the nation-states threatening Japan raised national armies and taxes. More than 260 lords still held their own samurai and collected rice levies. The restoration’s ambition to create a strong state pointed toward ending that division.

The unequal treaties made centralisation urgent. Japan could seek revision of the 1858 treaties from 1872. Its leaders believed Western powers would accept equality only if Japan had modern laws, courts and armed forces. Those institutions required a government able to legislate throughout the country. Foreign pressure made centralization urgent and gave its supporters a patriotic case that even reluctant lords found difficult to oppose.

Many domains were bankrupt. Borrowing over decades, the costs of alternate attendance and military spending in the 1860s left many domains deeply indebted to Osaka merchants. Their paper money was often of doubtful value. The government’s offer to assume debts and guarantee the lords an income therefore offered rescue as well as taking away authority. Financial weakness helped make peaceful abolition possible.

The state needed a fixed money income. Rice levies varied across domains and from year to year, leaving the central government without a dependable budget. It needed cash for an army, schools, railways and inherited samurai stipends, which accounted for roughly a third of spending in the early 1870s. A national cash tax on assessed land value promised predictable income; imposing it required ending the domains.

WHAT IT CHANGED

One army, one tax, one school system. Once the domains were gone, the Education Ordinance of 1872 aimed at compulsory primary schooling for boys and girls. Conscription and the land tax followed in 1873. Each measure connected households directly with the state; together they helped create a large, literate and obedient conscript population available for mobilization in industry and war.

Opposition moved from swords to petitions. Armed samurai resistance ended with Saigō’s defeat in 1877. Some former samurai had already chosen another route: Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa and others petitioned for an elected assembly in 1874. After Saigō’s death the Freedom and People’s Rights movement expanded nationally through newspapers, speeches and political societies, seeking a share of power through a constitution.

Japan began to push outward. The state also acted beyond Japan. It sent an expedition to southern Taiwan in 1874, settled its northern border with Russia in 1875 by exchanging its claim to Sakhalin for all the Kurils, and forced Korea to open its ports in 1876. The red dot at Busan marks Japan’s first settlement imposed on a neighbor. Japan was beginning to treat Korea as Western powers had treated Japan.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did Japan’s centralising revolution of 1871–77 cost so much less blood than most revolutions that remove an entire ruling class?

The leaders gave the strongest potential opponents a settlement they could accept. Lords received debt relief, titles and incomes; samurai stipends continued long enough for the first change to settle. Many domains were bankrupt, so losing authority also meant relief from obligations. The leaders acted quickly and together, used imperial authority to make resistance appear disloyal, and had an army capable of enforcing their decisions. But the transition was not bloodless. Thousands died in samurai revolts, perhaps 12,000 or more in the Satsuma Rebellion alone. Farmers faced taxes and conscription and protested, as Stephen Vlastos has documented. To judge the speed and scale of the change, we must also count these costs and ask who bore them. The powerful could bargain for compensation; much of the price fell on people who could not.

AN INTERESTING FACT

No confirmed photograph of Saigō Takamori survives. His familiar image was drawn after his death from the features of relatives. The government pardoned him in 1889, twelve years after he died as a rebel, and in 1898 unveiled a bronze statue in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. It depicts him walking his dog in a plain cotton kimono. His widow Itoko reportedly objected at the unveiling that her husband had never appeared like that in public. The man who fought the state had become a national hero honored by it.

CHAPTER 5 · 1877–1894 · 1889

Building the Meiji State

In 1871 Japan sent about half its government’s leaders abroad on the Iwakura Mission. Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and the young Itō Hirobumi hoped, among other things, to revise the unequal treaties. They returned in 1873 without that agreement. Factories, schools and laws appeared to them essential if Japan was to claim equality with the powers they had visited. The government hired foreign experts and sent students overseas, taking different institutions as models: the navy from Britain, the army from France and later Germany, and schools from American and French practice.

Who would carry the program through? After Ōkubo was assassinated in 1878, an unelected circle later known as the genrō, or elder statesmen, held power. Like a permanent board of senior partners, it included Itō, Yamagata Aritomo and Matsukata. Its members took turns as prime minister over thirty years, giving successive governments a continuity of purpose.

The government used public money to build railways, telegraphs and model factories such as Tomioka. The war of 1877 left inflation behind it. To restore the currency, Matsukata cut spending, raised taxes and withdrew paper money from 1881; in 1882 he founded the Bank of Japan as a central bank. The remedy changed the position of farmers who had borrowed. Rice prices roughly halved in some regions between 1880 and 1884, leaving them less income to pay debts fixed in money. Indebted farmers lost land, and in November 1884 thousands of silk farmers took up arms at Chichibu.

Meanwhile, the government sold most of its enterprises, often below cost, to houses including Mitsui and Mitsubishi. These future zaibatsu brought banks, mines and trade together, much like modern holding companies. Private cotton mills powered the late-1880s industrial boom; their workers were mainly teenage girls whose families arranged their contracts. The costs reached beyond the mills. Pollution from the Ashio copper mine poisoned farms along the Watarase River. Japan was growing, but many of the people who paid for that growth had no vote.

From 1874 former samurai, members of the abolished warrior class, organized for an elected assembly. Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa and others used newspapers, lectures and parties to build support. The leaders answered with both a promise and repression: in 1881 they promised a constitution by 1890 while expelling their most liberal member, Ōkuma Shigenobu; in 1887 they expelled hundreds of activists from Tokyo. Itō had created a cabinet in 1885 and wrote the constitution with German advisers. It declared the emperor “sacred and inviolable” and made the army answer directly to him. The lower house of the Diet was elected by men over 25 who paid at least 15 yen in direct tax.

The restricted electorate did not make the lower house inconsequential. It could reject the government’s budget, and the genrō had to bargain with elected politicians through the 1890s. The map shows another measure of the state’s reach: Shuri Castle in annexed Ryukyu, today’s Okinawa, and Sapporo, capital of Hokkaido, taken from its native Ainu.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Iwakura Mission taught that strength must come first. The 1871 mission sought to begin revising the unequal treaties, but Western powers politely judged Japan’s laws and institutions unacceptable. Visits to Manchester’s factories, American railways and Bismarck’s Germany gave its members a picture of the strength they thought equality required. They returned convinced that economy and army must come first, and that belief shaped the order of reform.

Inflation forced financial discipline. To pay for the Satsuma Rebellion, the government had printed paper money. By 1880 prices were rising rapidly and confidence in the currency was failing. Finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi responded from 1881 with higher taxes, lower spending, a central bank and convertible notes. The yen and budget stabilized, but lower prices made farm debts harder to bear and pushed farmers into tenancy. Chichibu’s silk farmers rose in 1884.

A popular movement demanded a voice. Former samurai, rich farmers and urban journalists gave the Freedom and People’s Rights movement an organization after 1874. Meetings and dozens of privately drafted constitutions made its demand concrete; by 1880 petitions for an assembly reached Tokyo from every region. The movement could not take power, but the leaders could no longer ignore the demand for a constitution. They chose to write one themselves before their critics could do so.

Treaty revision required a legal order the West would accept. Extraterritoriality placed foreigners beyond Japan’s ordinary courts. Western governments would not surrender it until those courts and Japan’s legal codes met their standards. The constitution, cabinet, criminal code and civil code thus served a diplomatic purpose as well as a domestic one: they supplied evidence for Japan’s claim to equality.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Treaty revision became possible. Britain agreed in a July 1894 treaty to end extraterritoriality from 1899; other powers followed. Japan’s constitution, cabinet and legal codes supplied the institutional evidence Western governments had demanded. Full tariff control came in 1911, completing the escape from the unequal treaties that began with Perry’s ships.

Parties won a foothold in the state. The first Diet met in 1890, and its elected lower house used budget disputes to press the cabinet. The oligarchs needed party cooperation to govern. The franchise widened in 1900 and 1919, before all adult men gained the vote in 1925. What began as a restricted parliament gave the party governments of the 1920s a foothold.

A state ideology entered every classroom. On national holidays schools read the 1890 Rescript on Education aloud, and pupils bowed before the emperor’s portrait. The demands of this loyalty could be exacting: in 1891 the Christian teacher Uchimura Kanzō was forced from his post after hesitating to bow deeply enough before the Rescript. A literate conscript nation learned loyalty to the emperor in school; that ideology would be mobilized in later wars.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Meiji constitution a step towards democracy or a device to prevent it?

The constitution’s designers wanted to contain participation. No assembly approved the document granted from above; the emperor was sovereign, ministers answered to him, and only about 1% of the population could vote. The supreme-command clause later helped the army escape civilian control in the 1930s. But the elected Diet could refuse new budgets. Its politicians acquired leverage, and within a decade the oligarchs had to bargain with parties. The electorate grew until all men could vote in 1925. As historians such as Carol Gluck show, the document supported an ideology of obedience alongside lively public politics. A channel intended to limit participation also gave later generations a way to demand more.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Tsuda Umeko was only six when she joined the Iwakura Mission, its youngest member and one of five girls sent to the United States for education at government expense. Her father, Tsuda Sen, a former shogunate interpreter turned agricultural reformer, volunteered her. She lived with an American family in Washington and returned in 1882 barely able to speak Japanese. She later studied biology at Bryn Mawr College and in 1900 founded a women’s school that became Tsuda University. In 2024 her portrait appeared on Japan’s new 5,000-yen banknote.

CHAPTER 6 · 1894–1912 · 1910

A Great Power

Japanese leaders saw Korea as a question of security. A rival established on the peninsula would be close enough to threaten Japan itself; the image of Korea as a dagger pointed at Japan was later attributed to the Prussian adviser Jakob Meckel. In 1894 a peasant rebellion led by the Donghak religious movement prompted Korea to ask China for troops. Japan sent a larger force, seized the royal palace in Seoul and declared war on Qing China in August.

The Japanese victories were swift. The army won at Pyongyang and the navy off the Yalu in September. In November troops took Port Arthur and massacred prisoners and many civilians, an event marked on the map. The Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895 ended China’s claim over Korea and gave Japan Taiwan, the Pescadores and Liaodong, as well as an indemnity of 200 million silver taels—a forced payment like war reparations. The settlement did not stand intact for long. Within a week Russia, Germany and France made Japan return Liaodong. In the imperial scramble for colonies, Japan had won territory only to find stronger powers could take it away.

Japan conquered Taiwan after five months of resistance in 1895; that October Japanese agents murdered Korea’s Queen Min. Then Russia strengthened its position on the mainland. After the anti-foreign Boxer rising in northern China in 1900, Russian troops occupied Manchuria, while Russian railways advanced toward Korea. Japan allied with Britain in 1902 and attacked Port Arthur in February 1904.

The fighting with Russia showed both the strength and the cost of the new military. General Nogi’s army suffered nearly 60,000 killed and wounded in the siege of Port Arthur. At Mukden in March 1905, shown by the arrow north of the peninsula, Japan won the war’s largest land battle. In May Admiral Tōgō destroyed the Russian Baltic fleet at Tsushima. The Portsmouth peace awarded Japan southern Sakhalin, the Kwantung lease and the South Manchuria Railway, but no indemnity. Tokyo crowds rioted at Hibiya. Japan had defeated a European great power, but roughly 80,000–90,000 Japanese had died and the country carried heavy foreign debt.

Korea’s rulers had less and less room to decide their own future. In November 1905 Japan forced its ministers to accept a protectorate controlling foreign policy; Itō Hirobumi became resident-general, effectively governor. Emperor Gojong sent envoys to protest at the 1907 Hague peace conference. Japan then forced him to abdicate and disbanded the Korean army. Soldiers, peasants and scholars fought as “righteous armies”. By 1911 Japanese records counted more than 17,000 Korean fighters killed, many during the 1909 sweep through Jeolla province shown on the map.

The decision to annex Korea had already been made in Tokyo in July 1909. When the nationalist An Jung-geun shot Itō dead at Harbin that October, Japan used the killing as a pretext to move faster. Annexation followed in August 1910, and Korea was ruled as the colony of Chōsen until 1945. The state that had escaped unequal treaties at home now held two colonies by force.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Korea sat between three empires. Korea’s kingdom was weak and divided at court, and had traditionally been a tributary of China. Russia approached from the north; Japanese strategists feared that control of the peninsula by a rival would threaten Japan. Japanese merchants and officials had built influence there since the 1876 Treaty of Ganghwa. The competing ambitions of China, Russia and Japan around Korea produced two wars within ten years.

A modern state earned treaty revision. Britain demanded institutional changes before revising the treaties. Japan’s 1880s constitution, cabinet and legal codes supplied them, and on 16 July 1894 Britain agreed to end extraterritoriality from 1899. The agreement came days before war with China. Its negotiator, foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu, saw proof that reform at home brought respect abroad. Equality with the West and expansion in Asia advanced together, each strengthening the other.

The Triple Intervention taught that only power counted. Russia, Germany and France advised Japan in April 1895 to return Liaodong. Japan could not fight all three and complied in exchange for an extra indemnity. In 1898 Russia leased the peninsula’s tip, including Port Arthur, itself. Japanese leaders and the public drew a lesson about international law: the strong could make the rules serve them. The episode encouraged rearmament and an alliance capable of matching Russia.

Russia’s railways and Britain’s alliance set the timing. The Trans-Siberian Railway and its Manchurian branch to Port Arthur threatened to bring Russian armies close to Korea within a few years. Japan’s January 1902 alliance with Britain guaranteed that no third power would join Russia against it. Japanese leaders saw an opportunity to fight before the railway was finished, and struck first in February 1904.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Japan joined the great powers. The last clauses of the 1858 treaties had been undone by 1911, when Japan regained full control of tariffs and renewed its alliance with Britain. It negotiated with Western powers as an equal and held colonies like theirs. Within a lifetime it had reached the goal set in 1868: a nation “standing with the nations of the world”.

Korea and Taiwan under colonial rule until 1945. Governors-general, usually generals or admirals, ruled Taiwan from 1895 and Korea from 1910. Railways, ports and schools served Japan’s purposes. Land surveys transferred land to the state and Japanese owners, while police controlled populations and suppressed resistance. Japan held both colonies until its defeat in 1945.

An expensive empire and a restless public. The bills for empire remained: war debts, special taxes and a large standing army became permanent demands on the budget. At Hibiya, crowds had demanded both imperial strength and political influence. Urban protests helped bring down cabinets in 1913 and 1918. The Meiji state’s success had created pressures its successors would struggle to control.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

To what extent was Japan’s transition a success by 1912, and for whom?

By the founders’ own goals, the transition succeeded. Japan kept its independence, ended the unequal treaties, built industry, railways and schools, adopted a constitution and defeated China and Russia. In the 1960s modernization theorists such as Edwin Reischauer presented it as a peaceful, well-managed model. Later historians including John Dower and Carol Gluck asked who bore the costs: indebted farmers, girls in textile mills, the Ainu and Ryukyuans, and above all Taiwanese and Koreans whose lands were taken by force. Some also trace the military’s later independence and the wars of the 1930s to choices of this period. Both sides of the judgment need evidence. The state became strong, while much of the cost fell on people with no voice in it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō had trained as a young officer in Britain in the 1870s aboard HMS Worcester. Before Tsushima he hoisted a signal echoing Nelson’s at Trafalgar: the empire’s fate depended on the day, and every man must do his utmost. His flagship Mikasa had been built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in England and launched in 1900. Weeks after the war a magazine explosion sank her at her moorings, killing hundreds of crew. Raised and repaired, she later became a memorial ship. She remains preserved in concrete at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, one of the last surviving battleships of her era.

CHAPTER 7 · 1964–1985 · 1980

The Stagnant Superpower

Brezhnev’s promise of stability had a particular appeal to the people who governed. The party controlled important appointments through the nomenklatura, a list of posts requiring its approval. Imagine one organisation appointing a country’s managers, editors and generals: that gives some idea of the party’s reach. “Stability of cadres” assured officials that they would no longer face continual reshuffles or purges. The result was a leadership that grew old together. By 1980 the Politburo, the party’s ruling committee and effectively its cabinet, averaged about seventy years of age.

Citizens received security of another kind: guaranteed work, subsidised food and housing, free healthcare and education, and a slow rise in living standards. Many found the exchange for obedience acceptable. Yet a leadership committed to stability had difficulty changing the system that supplied it. A 1965 reform associated with Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin gave factories more freedom. After Warsaw Pact armies crushed reform in Prague in 1968, the Soviet reforms were quietly dropped. The arrow into Czechoslovakia crosses the grey-tan Soviet bloc, Eastern Europe’s communist states tied to Moscow by that military alliance; the Union itself appears as one red block. The authorities preserved order, while leaving difficult decisions for later.

Earlier Soviet growth had come largely from adding labour, capital and land. Economists call this “extensive” growth. A farm can expand by ploughing more fields without learning to cultivate its existing land better; Soviet industry had likewise grown by putting more resources to work. By the 1970s labour was growing slowly, old factories were wearing out, and extracting oil and minerals from distant Siberia cost more. Simply adding inputs was becoming a less effective way to grow.

The planning system gave enterprises weak incentives to use what they had carefully. A nail factory judged by output in tonnes could satisfy its target with heavy nails, regardless of whether customers needed them. The state rescued loss-making firms. Agriculture, meanwhile, was so weak that the Union regularly bought Western grain after 1972, importing about 55 million tonnes in 1984–85. Huge projects continued: the BAM, a second Siberian railway, absorbed vast resources, and cotton irrigation drained the Aral Sea. Mobilising resources on a grand scale was a Soviet strength; improving their everyday use was a different problem.

The oil boom made that problem easier to postpone. Samotlor and other West Siberian fields made the Union the world’s largest oil producer. The arrow westward shows exports to Eastern Europe and to Western buyers who paid hard currency, usable to buy goods on world markets. World prices quadrupled in 1973–74 and doubled again in 1979. With the proceeds leaders could buy grain and machinery and sustain the arms race, whose defence costs Western estimates put at perhaps 15–17% of national output. Oil paid bills that might otherwise have forced earlier choices about reform.

The same leadership could still act decisively abroad. In December 1979 a small group of ageing leaders sent the 40th Army into Afghanistan to replace a communist ruler they distrusted. The war lasted nine years and killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and between half a million and 2 million Afghans. Brezhnev died in 1982, followed within three years by two elderly successors. Their gerontocracy, or rule by old men, passed on a war and economic difficulties that had accumulated during two decades of postponement.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Khrushchev’s campaigns made stability attractive. Officials who removed Khrushchev in October 1964 had lived through a succession of upheavals. He had denounced Stalin, twice reorganised the party, launched the Virgin Lands campaign and brought the world to the brink over Cuba in 1962. His plan to rotate officials out of office threatened their own positions. His successors made predictability and security for officials central values of the next eighteen years.

Extensive growth ran out of inputs. Soviet industrialisation from the 1930s drew peasants into factories and concentrated investment in heavy industry. By the 1970s that supply of additional inputs was harder to maintain: birth rates had fallen in the Slavic republics, the cheapest resources in European Russia were exhausted, and new oil and gas lay thousands of kilometres east in harsh climates. Each extra rouble invested yielded less growth. A different source of productivity was needed to prevent a slowdown.

Prague 1968 made reform look dangerous. Alexander Dubček’s Czechoslovak reforms in 1968 relaxed censorship and promised “socialism with a human face”. Soviet leaders feared both the spread of reform and the possible loss of Czechoslovakia from the bloc. Warsaw Pact armies invaded in August, and Brezhnev claimed that socialist states could intervene where socialism was threatened. At home, the episode reinforced the fear that economic changes could open the way to political ones; the Kosygin reforms faded.

Oil windfalls postponed hard choices. West Siberian fields began producing as world oil prices soared in 1973–74 and again in 1979. The resulting rise in hard-currency earnings from oil and gas paid for grain, Western machinery and the arms race. Yegor Gaidar argued that the windfall allowed leaders to avoid reform for a decade. It also made state solvency depend on world prices that Moscow could not control.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A generation of reformers waited. Mikhail Gorbachev was among the younger officials who watched the Prague Spring crushed and later discussed change privately while rising through the party. He joined the Politburo in 1980 as its youngest member and served under Andropov, whose brief rule in 1982–84 attacked corruption and indiscipline. As the old leaders died in quick succession, this generation inherited the difficulties it had seen accumulate.

Dependence on oil set a trap. Oil and gas supplied most Soviet hard-currency earnings by the early 1980s. When world prices fell by more than half in 1985–86, that income fell away just as Gorbachev launched costly plans to accelerate growth. The revenue that had helped postpone reform now exposed the budget to a shock.

The bloc became a burden. Eastern Europe demanded resources as well as loyalty. Moscow sold its allies oil below world prices, sacrificing billions in hard currency that could buy goods on world markets. In Poland, the Solidarity trade union founded in 1980 demonstrated that workers could organise against a communist state; martial law, army rule with ordinary rights suspended, contained it in December 1981. By 1985 the bloc cost money Moscow could no longer spare, while its loyalty was uncertain. This made Gorbachev’s later choice not to defend it by force easier.

Afghanistan’s war outlived the decision. Afghanistan continued to cost the Union money and international standing, isolating it in the Muslim world and at the United Nations. About 15,000 Soviet soldiers died, army morale suffered, and veterans known as afgantsy returned to a society that preferred not to hear about the war. Withdrawal became one of Gorbachev’s first foreign-policy goals.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Soviet system in 1985 doomed, or could a different reform have saved it?

The evidence for an unavoidable crisis is substantial. By some estimates growth was near zero; the Union depended on oil prices and imported grain, while an expensive empire and ageing elite added to its difficulties. Yegor Gaidar argued that the oil-price collapse made crisis unavoidable. But a crisis need not end in collapse. Stephen Kotkin and others note that in 1985 the Union faced no revolt, no war it was losing on its own territory and no bankruptcy. North Korea shows that a poorly performing system can survive for decades. China after 1978 suggests another possible reform: opening agriculture and small business to markets while retaining the party’s monopoly of power. Soviet decline was real, but collapse required a trigger and choices, which the next chapters examine. Weak performance creates pressure for reform; the way leaders undertake it helps determine whether the system survives.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In summer 1972 Soviet buyers quietly purchased roughly a quarter of the American wheat crop at subsidised prices before United States officials grasped the scale of the sales. American bread prices rose. The press called the episode the “Great Grain Robbery”, a name used as the title of a 1975 book. Before 1914 the Russian Empire had been one of the world’s largest grain exporters. Six decades later its Soviet successor, despite possessing some of the richest farmland on earth, depended on harvests from its Cold War rival.

CHAPTER 8 · 1985–1989 · 1988

Gorbachev’s Gamble

Gorbachev’s first attempt at reform did not abandon the Soviet system. It asked the system to work harder. As general secretary, and thus the country’s leader, he sought “acceleration” through investment in machine-building and tighter discipline. His campaign against drinking, launched in May 1985, reduced vodka production and raised its price. It also removed tens of billions of roubles from the budget over three years, because alcohol taxes were one of the state’s largest sources of income. Many drinkers turned to moonshine in place of state vodka.

The government was losing another source of revenue at the same time. World oil prices fell from about $27 a barrel in 1985 to around $14 in 1986, reducing export earnings used to buy grain abroad. Spending continued, and the state printed money to cover the difference. Western estimates put the budget deficit—the gap between spending and revenue—at about a tenth of national output by 1989. There was unrest as well: in December 1986 students protested in Alma-Ata after Kazakhstan’s Kazakh party chief was replaced by a Russian outsider. Gorbachev needed resources and political cooperation for his program. Both were in short supply.

The explosion of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 exposed a different obstacle. Pripyat was evacuated the next day, but the outside world learned of the disaster when Swedish monitors detected radiation carried northwest along the arrow on the map. Thirty-one people died within months and more than 100,000 were evacuated that year. Estimates of later cancer deaths range from about 4,000 to tens of thousands.

For Gorbachev, the concealment mattered to the prospects of reform. If officials hid failures, how could the leadership correct them? From 1987 censorship loosened rapidly. Newspapers exposed corruption, banned books appeared, and the press reopened Stalin’s crimes. Glasnost, or “openness”, was intended to rally people behind reform. It also gave them evidence with which to judge the system itself.

Perestroika, the “restructuring” of the economy, loosened some controls while retaining others. The Law on State Enterprise, passed in 1987 and effective from 1988, let firms keep profits, set wages and sell output beyond state orders. A 1988 law permitted cooperatives, member-owned businesses that were private firms in all but name. Most prices, however, remained fixed. As wages rose, more money competed for the goods on sale at those prices. Shops emptied and regions began to hoard supplies.

Economic change also met resistance from the party apparatus, the full-time officials who ran the party. In 1988 Gorbachev turned to political reform to overcome it. The March 1989 elections to the new Congress of People’s Deputies gave voters a choice of rival candidates for the first time since 1917. In Leningrad the regional party chief lost even though he had no opponent; in Moscow the dismissed reformer Boris Yeltsin won almost 90% of the vote. In July miners in the Kuzbass, the Donbas and Vorkuta struck over soap, food and pay. The party’s authority to govern by command was slipping away, before a new means of governing had taken its place.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A generational change at the top. Three general secretaries died in office between November 1982 and March 1985. Their deaths opened the leadership to a younger man whose career had taken him through regional party work in Stavropol and agriculture. Gorbachev and allies including Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze had seen the West and believed Soviet renewal was possible. The decline described in chapter 7 created the demand for change; the passing of the old guard gave them an opportunity to attempt it.

Falling oil prices and the vodka campaign emptied the budget. The government depended on alcohol taxes at home and oil and gas sales abroad, its two largest sources of income apart from enterprise profits. Gorbachev’s temperance campaign reduced the first, and falling world oil prices in 1985–86 cut the second. Afghanistan, the Chernobyl clean-up and an investment drive still required funding. Printing money covered the immediate gap but added to the excess of cash over goods that undermined later reforms.

Chernobyl discredited secrecy. At Chernobyl, failures and concealment extended from plant managers to ministries in Moscow. The accident persuaded Gorbachev that hidden problems could not be fixed and gave reformers a reason to challenge censorship. Glasnost helped him expose opponents of reform, but citizens used the same opening to criticise the party itself. The discussion soon went beyond his control.

The apparatus resisted economic reform. Ministries and regional party bosses had built careers within the plan and controlled resources through it. They diluted measures that threatened that control. By 1988 Gorbachev believed political competition was needed to overcome them. At the 19th Party Conference in June–July 1988, contested elections to a new parliament were approved. Reform would now be fought over at the voting booth as well as inside party offices.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An elected opposition gained a national stage. The new Congress gave opponents a national platform. Yeltsin, Sakharov and several hundred allies formed the Inter-Regional Group of deputies, the first organised opposition since the 1920s. In March 1990 the Congress removed the constitutional article guaranteeing the party’s leading role. That spring, elections to republic parliaments brought nationalist and democratic movements to power in the Baltic states, Russia and elsewhere.

Shortages turned into a crisis of supply. Basic goods were no longer reliably delivered by the state in 1989–90. Rationing spread, while regions and republics kept food and raw materials for themselves. Perestroika left its successors with empty shops and a monetary overhang: too much unspent money relative to available goods. That was the starting point for price liberalisation in January 1992.

National movements found their voice. Glasnost opened space for national grievances as well as criticism of the party. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hatched on the map, voted to leave Azerbaijan. That year popular fronts formed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. A reform begun at the centre was enabling demands to escape its authority.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Should Gorbachev be judged a failure for losing the system he set out to save, or credited for ending it without a major war?

Gorbachev did not achieve what he set out to do. He sought a more productive socialism in a renewed Union; by 1991 the economy was in free fall and the Union had dissolved. His vodka campaign and enterprise law made deficits and shortages worse. Yet the outcome of his political choices deserves separate consideration. Archie Brown and William Taubman stress his acceptance of competitive elections, his role in ending the Cold War and his refusal to use mass force to retain power at home or in Eastern Europe. Violence occurred in Tbilisi in 1989 and Vilnius in 1991, showing that force was used, though it was not pursued to the end. Judgment requires attention to his aims and results, to economics and politics, and to what alternative leaders could realistically have done. Many see a failed economic reformer and a remarkable political one. His refusal to use force helped determine the character of the transition.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The anti-alcohol campaign earned Gorbachev an unflattering nickname: “mineral secretary” instead of general secretary. It also brought a measurable health improvement. Deaths from heart disease, accidents and alcohol poisoning fell, and Russian male life expectancy reached about 65 years in 1987, its highest level during the Soviet period. After the campaign ended and drinking returned, life expectancy began to fall. Alcohol was among the factors considered in the severe decline of the 1990s; that collapse was partly a delayed bill for lives the campaign had briefly saved.

CHAPTER 9 · 1989–1991 · 1991

The Union Unravels

The communist governments of Eastern Europe had reason to fear opposition at home, but their opponents had reason to fear Soviet tanks. In 1989 Gorbachev removed that last assurance of rescue. His spokesman joked that the new policy was the “Sinatra doctrine”: each country could do it “my way”. Poland’s Solidarity, an independent trade union turned national movement, defeated the communists in semi-free elections in June. Hungary opened its Austrian border, allowing thousands of East Germans to travel west along the route shown by the arrow. Protests grew in East Germany itself, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall opened. Within weeks communist rule also ended in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. The former bloc states turn tan on the December 1989 map; Germany reunited in October 1990. Once Moscow would no longer defend these governments, they fell within months.

The Union faced a different problem within its own borders: national movements could make claims against neighboring peoples as well as against Moscow. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to leave Azerbaijan for Armenia. Pogroms against Armenians in Sumgait and later Baku, and the expulsion of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, sent refugees in both directions, along the arrows on the map. Soviet troops killed 21 peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989 and more than a hundred civilians when they entered Baku in January 1990.

In the Baltic republics the history of annexation gave independence movements a different claim. The Soviet Union had annexed them in 1940 under the Nazi–Soviet Pact, whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between Stalin and Hitler. Popular fronts, bringing reformers and nationalists together, won elections; Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990. Troops seized the television tower in Vilnius in January 1991, killing fourteen people, but crowds defended parliament and the crackdown stopped. Moscow’s use of force could push moderates toward separation; its failure to sustain that force left the independence movements in place.

Russia’s defection mattered because its government could contest the Union from within its largest republic. Yeltsin became chairman of the Russian parliament in 1990 and won 57% of the vote for president in June 1991. The republic claimed supremacy for its laws, withheld taxes from the center and dealt directly with other republics. A treaty due to be signed in August would have loosened the Union further. On 19 August, the day before the signing, the heads of the KGB—the Soviet secret police—the army and the interior ministry placed Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and declared an emergency.

The plotters had powerful institutions, but they could not make them act together. Yeltsin mounted a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building; crowds built barricades, and army units refused to attack. By 21 August the coup had collapsed, with three civilians dead. Ukraine declared independence on 24 August and confirmed it by referendum on 1 December. On 8 December Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus met at Belavezha, dissolved the Union and established the loose Commonwealth of Independent States, without a common government. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December, having lost the country whose government he headed.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Glasnost and elections gave nations a voice. Glasnost made public discussion of deportations, annexations and suppressed languages possible for Balts, Georgians, Armenians and others. The 1989–90 elections gave those grievances a political route: movements could win parliaments and govern through them. Gorbachev hoped openness would renew loyalty; in several republics elected leaders used it to demand departure.

Moscow renounced force in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev announced cuts to Soviet forces in Europe at the United Nations in December 1988. The following year, communist governments fell from Warsaw to Bucharest without Soviet intervention. People inside the Union saw that Moscow could let allied governments go; restraint abroad made a threat of repression at home less convincing.

The economic crisis destroyed the centre’s case. Shortages, rationing and broken supply chains by 1990–91 made prosperity a difficult argument for keeping the Union. Republics hoarded food and fuel and withheld taxes, issuing coupons and later currencies of their own. Departure could appear a way out of the crisis, while the center had too little money to purchase loyalty.

Russia’s leaders wanted Moscow’s power for themselves. After his expulsion from the Politburo in 1987, Yeltsin rebuilt his career in the Russian republic. Its parliament, presidency and treasury gave him a base from which to contest the Union government. Russian nationalists and democrats both argued that their republic subsidized the others. As the center weakened, its elected rivals had a reason and the means to take its place.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Fifteen states with inherited borders. The lines between Soviet republics became borders between states. About 25 million ethnic Russians now lived outside Russia, and other minorities found themselves in new states that did not want them. Crimea, transferred to Ukraine in 1954, was part of independent Ukraine. Citizenship, language and military bases would trouble relations among successor states for decades.

Frozen conflicts on the edges. As Soviet authority weakened, wars began over Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, hatched on the map. They continued after dissolution, with Russian troops and arms involved in most. Ceasefires in 1992–94 stopped fighting while leaving breakaway regions beyond the control of the states to which they legally belonged. The unresolved disputes became known as “frozen” conflicts.

Russia inherited the Union’s seat, weapons and debts. Russia assumed the Soviet Union’s United Nations Security Council seat, its embassies and most of its foreign debt. By 1996 all Soviet nuclear warheads had been moved to Russian territory. The new government also inherited the economic crisis while promising its people a rapid transition to a market economy.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Soviet Union destroyed more by the nations on its edges or by Russia at its centre?

The borderlands made secession a public question. Baltic popular fronts, the Karabakh crisis and Georgian protests opened the crisis; Lithuania declared independence first, and Ukraine’s vote of more than 90% made a Union without it impossible. Mark Beissinger shows how mobilizations encouraged later ones. But the Union also needed its core. Russia asserted sovereignty and withheld taxes; Yeltsin defeated the coup and took the initiative at Belavezha. Serhii Plokhy emphasizes Russia and Ukraine’s choices together, while many Central Asian leaders received independence they had scarcely sought. The borderlands began the crisis, but the core decided its outcome. Russia’s leaders saw more to gain by leaving than by sustaining the Union, illustrating how an empire can end when its core judges the periphery too costly to hold.

AN INTERESTING FACT

At a hunting lodge in the Białowieża forest on 8 December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the agreement dissolving the Union. Boris Yeltsin then called US President George Bush while Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich tried to reach Gorbachev. Yeltsin got through first, and Gorbachev was angry that Washington already knew. Shushkevich later insisted the calls were almost simultaneous. In either account, a foreign president learned of the decision as quickly as the man who still nominally governed the Union.

CHAPTER 10 · 1992–1993 · 1993

Shock Therapy

The reformers inherited an economy in which a price on a shop shelf told only part of the story. By late 1991 prices were fixed, but shops were nearly empty and people held far more money than there were goods to buy. Gold and foreign currency reserves had been spent. Keeping controls meant queues; freeing prices would mean an immediate rise. Yegor Gaidar, aged 35, Anatoly Chubais and their colleagues, advised by Western economists including Jeffrey Sachs, chose rapid change. They expected free prices to bring goods back and feared that delay would give the old bureaucracy time to regroup. Shock therapy promised one sharp operation rather than a series of smaller ones.

On 2 January 1992 the government freed most prices, keeping controls on energy and some staples. Goods appeared again, but many people could barely afford them. Inflation reached about 2,500% that year. The central bank was still lending cheaply to failing enterprises, adding money to an economy whose prices had just been released. Free prices could fill shelves without stabilizing the money people needed to shop there; stabilization came only years later.

Chubais’s privatization program faced another practical problem. Reformers wanted to transfer ownership quickly enough to make a return to planning difficult, but factory directors already controlled the enterprises whose cooperation they needed. Every citizen received a voucher with a face value of 10,000 roubles, about 144 million in all, to sell or invest in share auctions. The law also allowed employees and managers to buy a controlling stake in their own firms, and most chose that option. Managers bought up workers’ shares and some entrepreneurs bought vouchers cheaply. At Uralmash, businessman Kakha Bendukidze gained control this way. Many Russians concluded that the state’s wealth had gone to a few.

For households with fixed incomes, the change was costly. Output fell 14.5% in 1992, wages and pensions arrived months late, and male life expectancy declined from about 64 years in 1990 to under 58 in 1994. The arrows beyond Russia trace other upheavals: Russians returning from Central Asia, Georgians fleeing Abkhazia after the fall of Sukhumi, and Tajiks escaping south into Afghanistan.

Russia’s argument over reform became a fight over who had the right to govern. The amended Soviet constitution gave both the president and the Congress of People’s Deputies—a large Soviet-era parliament able to rewrite that constitution—a claim to supreme authority. Congress forced Gaidar out in December 1992. On 21 September 1993 Yeltsin dissolved it by decree, which the Constitutional Court ruled illegal. Deputies barricaded themselves inside the White House. Their armed supporters attacked the mayor’s office and the Ostankino television center on 3 October; the following morning tanks shelled parliament into surrender.

The December referendum approved a new constitution with 58.4% of the vote, although turnout remains disputed. In the election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist party won the largest share of votes cast for parties, a sign that hardship had pushed many voters toward nationalism. The constitution gave Russia a powerful president, but the first great dispute over its democratic institutions had been settled by force.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Soviet economy left too much money and too few goods. Perestroika left people holding savings for which state shops had little to offer, while the government financed its budget by printing money. Price controls kept the prices down but lengthened queues and increased rationing. Removing them would bring a sudden rise. Gaidar chose immediate liberalization, believing that postponement would make the eventual shock larger.

Reformers believed speed protected reform. Gaidar, Chubais and their Western advisers had seen communists and old ministries obstruct Gorbachev’s reforms. They feared slow change would give those opponents another chance. Rapid privatization would create owners with an interest in the new system and make a return to planning impossible. That political aim placed speed ahead of fairness and careful design.

Two branches claimed the same authority. The parliament elected in 1990 under Soviet rules and the president elected in 1991 could both claim supreme authority under Russia’s constitution. Inflation and falling living standards turned parliament against the president’s government. Neither side accepted a way to settle the dispute, and each exercised its claimed powers until force decided it.

The Union’s collapse broke trade and supply. Soviet factories depended on suppliers across fifteen republics. Independence made those transactions foreign trade, often paid in roubles that new states printed themselves. Until 1993 the shared currency allowed republics to create rouble credits, adding to inflation. Broken supply chains also cut output: some decline attributed to shock therapy came from the Union’s dissolution itself.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A new owning class took shape. Millions received nominal shares through privatization, while managers, bankers and traders gained effective control over much of the property. Among the bankers who made fortunes were Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky; they would soon lend to the state in exchange for its best companies. Ownership had moved faster than the laws governing it.

A presidency above parliament. After December 1993 the president could appoint governments, issue decrees and dissolve the Duma. Yeltsin governed through the crises of the 1990s with these powers, including the decision to go to war in Chechnya. His successor inherited a constitutional system already weighted toward the executive.

The borderlands were left to Russia’s soldiers. The wars left Russian soldiers with a continuing role beyond Russia. Ceasefires in Transnistria and South Ossetia in 1992, and Abkhazia and Karabakh in 1994, left Russian peacekeepers or garrisons in several successor states. Their presence gave Moscow lasting influence over neighbors and set precedents for its treatment of breakaway regions within Russia.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did shock therapy cause Russia’s economic collapse in the 1990s, or was it a response to a collapse that had already begun?

The crisis began before shock therapy. Anders Åslund and Yegor Gaidar point to empty shops, exhausted reserves and a budget financed by printing money in 1991; the Union’s breakup also severed supply chains that no policy could have saved. Some defenders argue that central-bank money creation prolonged inflation because reform was too timid. Critics including Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski hold that freeing prices and selling assets before institutions were built caused hyperinflation and theft amid an output fall deeper than America’s Great Depression. Poland’s rapid reforms worked better, while China’s gradual reforms took place in a very different society. A strong answer separates the collapse Russia inherited from decisions about who bore its costs, and asks who made those decisions. Markets need governing institutions if their outcomes are to be fair, whatever the speed of change.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The architect of Russia’s market reforms at 35 had deep roots in Soviet culture. Yegor Gaidar’s grandfather Arkady Gaidar wrote children’s adventure stories read by generations of Soviet pupils. His other grandfather, Pavel Bazhov, wrote Ural folk tales that became a classic Soviet book and a famous ballet score. His father, a naval officer and Pravda correspondent, reported from Cuba. Gaidar himself edited economics at Kommunist, the Central Committee’s theoretical journal and ideological voice, before taking charge of reform.

CHAPTER 11 · 1994–1998 · 1996

A State at War with Itself

Before the Soviet Union fell, Yeltsin had a reason to encourage the republics inside Russia to resist Moscow. In his struggle with Gorbachev, he told them to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow”. Tatarstan, Sakha and others declared sovereignty in 1990, claiming that their laws took precedence over Moscow’s. The dashed outlines on the maps of 1990–94 mark those claims. Regional leaders retained tax revenue, controlled local police and courts, and bargained with the center.

After the Union’s collapse, those bargains became a means of keeping Russia together. Tatarstan, an oil-rich Volga republic whose population was about two-fifths Russian, held a sovereignty referendum in 1992. Its February 1994 treaty kept it in Russia while giving it control over its oil, budget and much of its law. Dozens of regions had made similar agreements by 1998. The price of agreement was a center with less revenue and authority: federal tax collection collapsed, firms paid one another in goods, and teachers, doctors and soldiers waited months for wages.

Chechnya’s leaders sought a different settlement. The former Soviet air force general Dzhokhar Dudayev declared full independence in November 1991, and Russian troops withdrew in 1992. After a covert attempt to remove him failed, Yeltsin ordered an invasion in December 1994. Three columns approached Grozny from the north, west and east. The New Year’s Eve assault was disastrous for poorly trained conscripts, young men drafted for compulsory service. The army took the city with artillery and air bombardment instead; by March 1995 tens of thousands of civilians had been killed.

The fighting reached beyond Chechnya. In June 1995 Shamil Basayev’s fighters seized a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, taking more than 1,500 hostages. The official count put the dead at about 130; other counts put it at about 165. Chechen fighters retook Grozny in August 1996. Alexander Lebed then signed the Khasavyurt accord, ending the war while postponing the question of independence. Estimates of the war’s dead range from about 35,000 to 100,000, most of them civilians.

While the government fought the war, it was also looking to bankers for money. Vladimir Potanin proposed in 1995 that banks lend against state shares in major companies. Unpaid loans would lead to auctions, and the banks bidding for the shares also ran those auctions. Potanin’s Oneximbank acquired Norilsk Nickel for $170.1 million; Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Menatep acquired Yukos for about $309 million. The resulting owners, oligarchs whose wealth carried political power, had a stake in Yeltsin’s survival. They and their television channels backed him against the Communist Gennady Zyuganov in 1996, and Yeltsin won the run-off with 53.8%.

The transfer of valuable companies did not solve the treasury’s problem. Unable to collect enough tax, the government borrowed through short-term bonds, IOUs repayable within months, at rising interest rates. Wages went unpaid, and miners blocked railways in the May 1998 rail war. Falling oil prices and investors’ flight after the Asian financial crisis made borrowing still harder. On 17 August 1998 the government defaulted; within weeks the ruble lost about two-thirds of its value. Private wealth had grown alongside public poverty, while the state accumulated debts it could no longer pay.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The state could not collect its own taxes. The government depended on revenue from large firms after privatization and inflation, but those firms often paid late, in goods or not at all. Regions retained much of what they collected, and the new rich moved money abroad. The shortage made it difficult to pay soldiers, officials and creditors; it ran through crises from the poor performance of conscripts in Grozny to the 1998 default.

The regions had taken power as the Union fell. Yeltsin had encouraged the republics to claim sovereignty in 1990–91 to weaken Gorbachev. Once the Union fell, their leaders controlled resources, police and votes that Moscow needed. Bilateral treaties kept most regions in the federation, but the special terms produced a patchwork of authority, echoing the domains Japan’s leaders abolished in 1871.

Chechnya’s history made compromise harder. Chechen resistance to Russian conquest in the nineteenth century was followed by Stalin’s deportation of the entire nation in 1944; survivors returned only in 1957. Dudayev’s demand for independence drew on that memory. After Russian authority withdrew, weapons and smuggling flourished. Moscow refused serious negotiations with the elected leader and expected a quick victory, turning a political problem into war.

The government needed cash and a re-election. With an empty budget and the 1996 election approaching, Yeltsin’s government needed both money and allies. Banks lent against valuable state shares, then auctioned them when the loans went unpaid, usually to themselves. The arrangement resembled a pawnbroker selling an unredeemed pledge to his own relatives. Ownership gave the bankers a reason to support Yeltsin; the immediate struggle for survival helped shape one of modern history’s largest transfers of wealth.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Oligarchs became a power in politics. Ownership gave oligarchs tools with which to shape politics after 1996. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky used banks and television channels to influence ministers and elections; Berezovsky briefly became deputy head of the Security Council. Their leverage depended on a weak Kremlin, and a stronger president would move first against the most politically active among them.

An unresolved war and a humiliated army. Khasavyurt left Chechnya effectively independent, but did not settle its future. The elected president Aslan Maskhadov struggled to control warlords and kidnapping gangs. Many Russian officers saw the accord as betrayal, and many Russians blamed Chechens for kidnappings and bombings. Raids from Chechnya into neighboring Dagestan in 1999 would provide the occasion for a second war.

The default cleared the ground for recovery. The cheaper ruble made imports expensive and Russian products more competitive, helping output grow in 1999. Oil prices rose afterward and state revenue recovered quickly. Yeltsin’s successor inherited a country emerging from its deepest crisis and a budget refilled by oil; he would take much of the credit for recovery.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Were Russia’s oligarchs a product of weak state institutions, or the cause of their weakness?

Both directions matter. Weak courts, an ineffective tax service and a government desperate for money and votes created the opportunity: loans-for-shares exchanged assets for loans and political support. Once oligarchs controlled banks, natural resources and media, they could lobby for tax exemptions, capture regulators and shape elections through their television channels. The 1996 campaign shows how their resources could help determine who governed. David Hoffman and Daniel Treisman describe a cycle in which weak institutions enabled oligarchs and their influence deepened that weakness. A later president broke the cycle by restoring central power, while also curbing media and courts. The case suggests a wider danger: markets built before the rule of law can create owners with an interest in keeping it weak.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The 1996 slogan “Vote or lose” was aimed at young voters. In June, the 65-year-old Yeltsin danced on stage at a Rostov-on-Don rock concert before the cameras. Just over two weeks later, between election rounds, he suffered a serious heart attack. Staff concealed it with old footage and statements in his name; voters learned the truth only after his run-off victory. In November Russian surgeon Renat Akchurin performed quintuple bypass surgery, advised by American heart surgeon Michael DeBakey.

EPILOGUE · 1999–2000 · 2000

Two Transitions Compared

On 9 August 1999 Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin prime minister. Two days earlier fighters led by Shamil Basayev had crossed from Chechnya into Dagestan, along the arrows on the map. Putin had headed the FSB, the KGB’s successor as Russia’s security service, since 1998. Within weeks the country faced a terrifying series of attacks: between 4 and 16 September bombs destroyed apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing about 300 people. The government blamed Chechen militants.

The beginning of the war remains disputed. On 22 September residents found explosives in an apartment basement in Ryazan. The men who planted them proved to be FSB officers, and the FSB described the incident as a training exercise. No independent inquiry has settled the questions it raised.

Russian forces entered Chechnya on 1 October. After weeks of bombardment they took Grozny, later described by the United Nations as the most destroyed city on earth. Putin promised victory and became Russia’s most popular politician. Yeltsin’s resignation on 31 December made him acting president and brought the election forward. His first decree granted Yeltsin immunity from prosecution; in March 2000 Putin won 52.9% of the vote. War and a managed succession had carried him to the presidency.

Putin now had a mandate to rebuild central authority. He divided Russia into seven federal districts, super-regions supervised by presidential envoys, and ordered regional laws brought into line with federal law. The special treaties Tatarstan and other regions had won in the 1990s were wound down. Prosecutors pursued the independent television channel NTV. Oligarchs, tycoons who had turned wealth into political power, were told they could keep their fortunes if they stayed out of politics. The center regained power as the democracy of the 1990s narrowed.

Russia’s position abroad was changing as well. The 2000 map shows Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in blue: they were the first former Soviet-bloc members admitted to NATO, the Western military alliance led by the United States. Moscow resented their admission.

Both transitions began as revolutions from above, led by members of an old elite. Japan’s leaders were samurai, hereditary warrior-officials from Satsuma and Chōshū; Soviet reformers came from the party elite. A foreign threat helped unite the Japanese group. Within three years they abolished the domains, the lords’ semi-independent territories, then spent two decades building revenue, an army, industry and schools before granting a constitution with limited participation.

The Soviet sequence was different. Reformers opened politics first, and the republics gained elected parliaments while Moscow struggled to offer a working economy. The center lost control of them. Independent Russia then freed prices and sold state property before courts, tax collection and regulators could govern a market. Insiders captured many of the gains. Japan built a strong state before widening participation; Russia gained political and economic freedoms while its governing capacity weakened.

A state’s strength does not tell us who bore the cost of building it. In Japan peasants, mill girls, the Ainu of Hokkaido and the people of annexed Ryukyu paid at home; Taiwanese and Koreans later paid under Japanese rule. Russians lost savings, wages and lives, while Chechnya and other borderlands suffered war. Japan exported much of its cost. Russia lost an empire, built a market and then rebuilt a strong state at the expense of many of its new freedoms.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Chechnya’s interwar chaos and the Dagestan raid. Khasavyurt ended the first war without giving Chechnya’s elected president Aslan Maskhadov control over field commanders such as Shamil Basayev. Kidnapping for ransom became an industry. In August 1999 Basayev and Khattab led fighters into Dagestan in support of a local Islamist rising. Moscow could cite the raid as a reason for another war and present that war as defense against terrorism.

Yeltsin needed a successor who would protect him. Yeltsin’s circle needed a successor who could win and protect him. By 1999 he was ill and deeply unpopular, while corruption investigations threatened family and associates. Putin appeared to fit the requirement: loyal, disciplined and unknown to the public. As acting president, his first decree granted Yeltsin immunity.

The 1998 crisis discredited the reformers and the oligarchs. The 1998 default destroyed savings for the second time in a decade. Governments that had promised a quick transition to Western prosperity lost credibility, and many Russians associated democracy and markets with chaos, theft and humiliation. Promises of order spoke to that experience; curbs on oligarchs and independent media were popular with much of the public.

Oil prices rose again. Oil gave the government resources to rebuild. Its price had fallen to around ten dollars a barrel in late 1998, then roughly tripled by 2000. Revenue returned, wages and pensions were paid on time, and growth resumed. As in the 1970s, Moscow received resources that did not depend on reform; this windfall helped finance central power.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The centre reclaimed the regions. The separate bargains regions had made with Moscow in the 1990s gave way to federal districts under presidential envoys, control over parliament’s upper house and a requirement that regional laws match federal ones. From 2005 governors were appointed rather than elected. Japan’s abolition of domains in 1871 offers a softer parallel: both centers took power from regions. The difference is that the Kremlin reclaimed powers lost in 1990–91, while Japan’s new government took powers no earlier Japanese center had held.

The war in Chechnya became a long insurgency. Taking Grozny did not end the war. Fighting continued in the mountains for years, with terrorist attacks inside Russia. Moscow governed Chechnya through loyal Chechen leaders, Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan. The counter-terrorist operation officially ended only in 2009, and human rights groups documented disappearances and killings on a large scale throughout.

Two transitions, two strong states. The institutions left by each transition shaped what later leaders could do. Meiji Japan’s emperor-centered constitution and powerful military allowed the army to escape civilian control; its empire expanded into China in the 1930s. Russia’s restored “vertical of power” narrowed elections, media and courts in the decades after 2000. Both states survived, while limits on democracy offered opportunities for later leaders to exploit.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

To what extent did the Meiji transition succeed where the post-Soviet transition failed?

By their leaders’ chosen goals, the Meiji reformers succeeded more clearly: within forty years Japan ended the unequal treaties, built industry, schools and a constitution, and defeated two great powers. By 2000 Russia had lost an empire, output had fallen about 40%, and millions of excess deaths had occurred. But the comparison changes when we ask what people gained and lost. Russia created a market economy and private property, held competitive elections for a decade and grew quickly after 1999. Japan’s achievements rested on authoritarian institutions, cheap labor and colonial conquest, and its state slid into militarism. Carol Gluck and Stephen Kotkin warn against judging transitions only by their end points. A strong answer names its criteria, compares leadership, sequencing and the international setting, and gives weight to the people, minorities and neighbors who bore the costs.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In June 1996 Putin lost his job as deputy mayor of St Petersburg when his patron, the reformist mayor Anatoly Sobchak, lost re-election. He moved to the Kremlin property department, which managed presidential buildings and resorts. In July 1998 he became head of the FSB security service; in August 1999 he became prime minister, and on 31 December acting president. Less than four years separated unemployment from the presidency, one of the fastest rises of any modern head of state. He had never stood in an election before March 2000.