DBWI: Would Russia have been better off if it had lost the Japanese War?

I feel that this topic doesn't get nearly enough attention for all its AH potential (OOC: true for OTL, too).

In the 1904-1905 war, Russia won a phyrric victory over the infant Japanese Empire in China.

However, if you look at the general trend for the next couple of decades, it doesn't look like this rather momentous victory actually helped.

If anything, the war simply invigorated Japanese morale but bloated Russia with problems. For example, the Russian Navy never recovered, and nearly a tenth of the Russian population died in the occupation of Korea and Manchuria until the War of Ten Nations.

I'm knowledgable about history in the area in this time period, but I'm not sure what the effects of a Russian victory in 1904-1905 would be.
 
Perhaps worst of all, it dealt a deep blow to the Japanese ideas of elan. The Japanese would look abroad for another means of fighting, and develop their own naval-based version of Blitzkrieg. When the Revolution killed the Czar, Japan would move into Siberia, Sakhalin and Manchuria all over again. Now Japan would be ready for a rematch, and it would not be keen to yield Siberia in the first place. It sucks to be the Soviets.
 
I think that regardless of the outcome, Russia would have disintegrated in some shape or form sooner or later, either from the extreme left or right. Even in 'victory', the weakness of the Russians was made to bear upon the world, considering the only reason they won was because of their human wave tactics, outnumbering them on an average of four to one, and even then the Japanese with their limited resources gave them a run for their money. This indeed was a classical sense of a Phyrric victory that ended up leading to the disintegration of Russia.
 
I feel that this topic doesn't get nearly enough attention for all its AH potential (OOC: true for OTL, too).

In the 1904-1905 war, Russia won a phyrric victory over the infant Japanese Empire in China.

However, if you look at the general trend for the next couple of decades, it doesn't look like this rather momentous victory actually helped.

If anything, the war simply invigorated Japanese morale but bloated Russia with problems. For example, the Russian Navy never recovered, and nearly a tenth of the Russian population died in the occupation of Korea and Manchuria until the War of Ten Nations.

I'm knowledgable about history in the area in this time period, but I'm not sure what the effects of a Russian victory in 1904-1905 would be.

(OOC: Points at his timeline "An Alternative Great War")

I think even if the Japanese had won the war, the blatant racism of the Americans in organising the peace would probably create more tension than they solve by not giving them a proper settlement (or maybe I'm just a cynic). Anyway, would the Russians undergo a revolution in the presence of a loss? Would the Japanese become more aggressive?
 
IIf anything, the war simply invigorated Japanese morale but bloated Russia with problems. For example, the Russian Navy never recovered, and nearly a tenth of the Russian population died in the occupation of Korea and Manchuria until the War of Ten Nations.

The latter probably would not have happened; if Russia had been defeated by a non-Power like Japan in 1905, at a minimum they would probably not have invaded Tibet in 1911.
 

~The Doctor~

If anything, the war simply invigorated Japanese morale but bloated Russia with problems. For example, the Russian Navy never recovered, and nearly a tenth of the Russian population died in the occupation of Korea and Manchuria until the War of Ten Nations.

Where the hell did you get that figure from?! Chiang Kai Shek? Western as well as Russian and Japanese estimates but the numbers at just over a million.

Anyway, a victory for the Japanese would have just made them more cocky, and hell, they were bad enough during the Great War. Occupying and later annexing the DEI while they were busy getting thrashed in Europe? Ballsy.

I was reading a book on the IJN a month or so ago, and apparently until the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 they were getting closer and closer to the Germans, and gearing the navy to fight the US. It was the joint German-Soviet invasion of the USSR that kicked them back into the Allies' sphere of influence.

Could we potentially see a war between the US and Japan ITTL? There was a lot of enmity for the Americans, especially with the Philippines lying between the East Indies and Home Islands. The IJN was ahead of its time, but what do you think its chances would have been against the USN?
 
One thing that should be considered is that with the instability of Japanese government created by the Russian occupation, the country has gone through a series of military dictators, who have continued the country's slide into political and military obsolesence since 1948. You have the Shizuichi Tanaka in 1948, Yukio Mishima in 1970, Akio Morita in 1989, and most recentlyShoko Asahara in 1996. In all of these incidents, Japan apparently inherited Russia's desire for a political strongman, sparking a series of authoritarian dictators....
 
If anything, the war simply invigorated Japanese morale but bloated Russia with problems. For example, the Russian Navy never recovered, and nearly a tenth of the Russian population died in the occupation of Korea and Manchuria until the War of Ten Nations.

That was indeed very curious; how could the Manchus kill twenty million occupation soldiers? That's... about twice the casualties of the Great War. No matter Russia disintegrated, with its entire eligible population dead. And of course, then they couldn't rebuild their fleets, with no workers available for the naval yards. The Japanese, who only suffered 200,000 casualties total, could easily dismantle the Tsar's Empire in their war of revenge twenty years later, turning most of Asia and a good slice of Europe into their puppet. And that was even before they built the atomic bomb in the mid-'20s...

(OOC: :rolleyes:)
 
That was indeed very curious; how could the Manchus kill twenty million occupation soldiers? That's... about twice the casualties of the Great War. No matter Russia disintegrated, with its entire eligible population dead. And of course, then they couldn't rebuild their fleets, with no workers available for the naval yards. The Japanese, who only suffered 200,000 casualties total, could easily dismantle the Tsar's Empire in their war of revenge twenty years later, turning most of Asia and a good slice of Europe into their puppet. And that was even before they built the atomic bomb in the mid-'20s...

(OOC: :rolleyes:)

OOC: As in normal board discussions, members do not always get all their facts straight. I did that diliberately as a exageration.
 
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