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 order was designed to make another civil war impossible, and the map shows how it did so. After his victory at Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun in 1603, a hereditary general ruling behind a powerless emperor, much like a strongman behind a figurehead king, and he redistributed the land. His own house and the fudai lords, families who had served the Tokugawa before 1600 like a ruler’s trusted inner circle, took the strategic centre around Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, all in charcoal. The lords who had fought him or joined him late, the tozama or “outer” lords such as the Shimazu of Satsuma and the Mōri of Chōshū, kept large domains on the edges, in grey-tan, but were shut out of national office. Alternate attendance, the rule from 1635 that each lord live every other year in Edo, the shogun’s capital and today’s Tokyo, then tied the lords to the centre, because the processions and a permanent mansion swallowed much of each domain’s income. The result was 250 years without civil war, bought by watching the lords and leaving the government of most Japanese to them.

Peace brought growth, and the growth slowly strained the order that produced it. The population reached about 30 million, and a national market grew along the processions’ roads and shipping routes. Osaka’s Dōjima rice exchange, licensed in 1730, traded promises of rice not yet harvested, much as a futures market does. Society’s official ranking placed the samurai, hereditary warriors who also staffed every office like a closed caste of soldier-officials, about 6% of the people, first and merchants last. Because samurai were paid fixed salaries in rice, they borrowed from merchants whenever rice prices fell, and many domains sank into debt. In the Tenmei famine of the 1780s, which exposed the limits of a divided state, Japan’s population fell by more than 900,000, and in 1837 a former Osaka official, Ōshio Heihachirō, led a rising that burned a fifth or more of the city. By the 1840s the order was calm at the top and strained underneath, the condition in which an outside shock does the most damage.

Japan’s famous “closure” worked as a filter, and it served the shogunate well until the world changed. Edicts of the 1630s banned Christianity, forbade Japanese to go abroad and restricted European trade to the Dutch, confined to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour. Trade with Korea, the Ryukyu kingdom (today’s Okinawa) and the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, passed through three loyal domains, so the shogunate controlled what entered. Scholars of “Dutch learning” read Dejima’s books on anatomy and artillery, so the news of the Opium War of 1839–42 alarmed them. British steamships had defeated the largest state in Asia, and the Treaty of Nanking gave Britain Hong Kong and opened five Chinese ports. The shogunate softened its order to fire on foreign ships in 1842, yet it built no navy and raised no national tax. Its leaders saw the danger and could not meet it, because their system gave them no means of doing so.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Sekigahara settled who ruled and left the losers in place. Ieyasu won in 1600 but could not destroy every enemy, so he cut their lands and left them armed on the edges of the country. The Mōri of Chōshū lost most of their eight provinces and kept two; the Shimazu of Satsuma kept their whole domain far to the south-west. These outer lords nursed their grievances for 250 years, and their remoteness gave them room to build armies and treasuries the shogunate could not inspect. The settlement that made peace in 1600 also placed the future rebels exactly where they would be hardest to control.

Alternate attendance bought loyalty by draining the lords. From 1635 every daimyo spent alternate years in Edo with a large retinue and kept his wife and heir there permanently. The processions and mansions consumed a large share of domain revenue, so few lords could afford to rebel. The same rule built highways, inns and a national market, and it made Edo one of the largest cities in the world. The system worked as a political brake, yet it pushed the domains into debt to the merchants and left them with little money for defence when the need arrived.

A divided state had no national army or tax. The shogun taxed only his own lands, and each daimyo kept his own samurai and his own rice tax. That arrangement suited a country whose main danger was internal war. Against a foreign navy it was close to useless, because no one could raise money from the whole country or command all its soldiers. When the reformer Mizuno Tadakuni tried to bring the land around Edo and Osaka under direct shogunal control in 1843, the lords and bannermen affected forced him out within months. The shogunate could not even reorganise its own heartland.

Controlled contact gave knowledge without power. Dejima, the Dutch news reports and the scholars of Dutch learning kept Japan’s elite unusually well informed about Western science and Western wars. By the 1840s officials knew how Britain had beaten China and what steam warships could do. Knowledge alone could not build a navy, however, because the money and the soldiers belonged to the domains. The result was a ruling class that understood its danger earlier than most of Asia and still lacked the machinery to act on what it understood.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Caution replaced preparation. After 1842 the shogunate chose to avoid provocation, offering fuel and water to foreign ships, and it rejected a Dutch royal letter of 1844 urging it to open the country on its own terms. Coastal batteries were built in places, but no navy and no national tax followed. When Perry arrived in 1853, the government faced him with the same divided machinery it had in 1842.

An emperor-centred nationalism was already taking shape. Scholars of the Mito school, above all Aizawa Seishisai, argued that Japan needed spiritual unity around the emperor to resist the West, and they coined the slogan of “revering the emperor and expelling the barbarians”. The idea was meant to strengthen the shogunate, yet it placed loyalty to the emperor above loyalty to the shogun. Within twenty years it would be turned against the house it was written to defend.

The rim domains reformed their finances first. While the shogunate’s reforms stalled, the two great outer domains repaired their treasuries in the 1830s and 1840s. Satsuma’s Zusho Hirosato cleared enormous debts partly through a sugar monopoly worked by islanders in Amami and partly through the trade it ran through Ryukyu, and Chōshū’s Murata Seifū rebuilt its finances and trade. Twenty years later these were the domains that could afford Western ships and rifles, which is why the revolution came from the edge of the map.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The case for internal collapse rests on real evidence: domains and samurai sank into debt, peasant protests grew more frequent after 1750, famines killed hundreds of thousands, and Ōshio’s rising showed discontent inside the ruling class itself. Marxist historians in Japan long argued that feudalism was decaying from within. The case for resilience is also strong, because no lord challenged the shogun for 250 years, the economy grew, and the order survived every famine and protest it faced. Most historians, including Marius Jansen and Conrad Totman, now treat the internal strains as the cause of vulnerability and the foreign threat as the trigger. The strains decided how badly the system would handle a shock, and the shock decided when it would have to. The same question returns in this atlas’s second half, where historians argue whether the Soviet system was dying in 1985 or was killed by the attempt to reform it. The transferable lesson is that old orders rarely fall from internal weakness alone, yet internal weakness determines how hard they fall when pressure arrives from outside.

AN INTERESTING FACT

One of the best European descriptions of Tokugawa Japan came from a German doctor working for the Dutch, Engelbert Kaempfer, who travelled with the Dutch mission to Edo in 1691 and 1692. At the shogun Tsunayoshi’s court he and his Dutch colleagues were ordered to walk, dance, jump, sing, play the drunkard and speak broken Japanese while the shogun and his ladies watched from behind a lattice; Kaempfer added a German love song to his dance. His posthumous History of Japan (1727) remained Europe’s fullest account of the country for more than a century, and it showed readers a ruler who could make foreign envoys perform for him at will.

CHAPTER 2 · 1853–1858 · 1859

The Black Ships

Perry’s squadron forced the shogunate, the shogun’s military government in Edo, today’s Tokyo, into decisions that exposed how its power worked, although its guns never fired in anger. The United States wanted coal for steamships crossing the Pacific to China, safety for American whalers in Japanese waters, and trade, and Perry refused to go to Nagasaki, where foreigners were supposed to be received. A month later a Russian squadron under Admiral Putyatin reached Nagasaki, the arrow from the west, so the shogunate faced two powers at once. The senior councillor Abe Masahiro then did something no shogunal government had done: he sent the American letter to the daimyo, the 260-odd lords who ran their own domains much as governors run semi-independent states, and to the emperor’s court in Kyoto, and asked for their opinions. Most lords advised refusal or delay, and none could offer a fleet, so in 1854 the shogunate signed at Kanagawa, opening Shimoda and Hakodate for supplies. By asking for advice, the shogunate admitted that it could no longer decide foreign policy alone.

The commercial treaty of 1858 turned contact into an economic shock. Townsend Harris, the American consul at Shimoda since 1856, used Britain’s new war against China as a warning that a fleet might demand harsher terms. The treaty opened Kanagawa, which became the port of Yokohama, along with Nagasaki and Hakodate in 1859, and it fixed Japan’s tariffs, its taxes on imports, at low rates that the foreign powers had to approve before they could change. Traders soon found that gold was cheap in Japan, where an ounce bought about five of silver against about fifteen abroad, so gold drained away until the shogunate debased its coins in 1860, minting them with less gold to stop the drain. Exports of raw silk and tea boomed, and prices rose faster than wages or the fixed rice salaries of the samurai, the hereditary warrior-officials. Opening the ports made some merchants and silk farmers rich, and it made the cost of living a political grievance for almost everyone else.

The political crisis came from inside Edo Castle, where a quarrel over the succession merged with the quarrel over the treaty, and Russia’s advance in the north made it urgent. The sickly shogun Iesada had no heir, and reforming lords such as Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma backed the able Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, while conservative officials preferred a boy from the Kii branch of the Tokugawa family. In 1858 the minister Hotta Masayoshi came back from Kyoto with the emperor’s refusal to approve the Harris treaty. Because Russia had just taken the north bank of the Amur from China by the Treaty of Aigun, turning the land above the river from tan to blue, the treaty party argued that delay would only invite harsher terms. Ii Naosuke, newly appointed as tairō, a chief minister with emergency powers, had it signed anyway, installed the boy shogun Iemochi and purged his critics. Within five years of Perry’s arrival the shogunate had shown that it could neither keep foreigners out nor command the consent of the lords it ruled.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Steam and the Pacific brought America to Japan. The United States had gained California in 1848 and wanted a steamship route to China, which needed coaling stations on the way. American whaling fleets worked the waters off Japan, and sailors wrecked there were sometimes imprisoned. These interests made Japan a stop on a commercial highway for the first time. Perry’s mission was a product of the steam age: his two steamers could ignore the winds that had kept sailing ships at the mercy of Japan’s coast for centuries.

A government without a navy could only delay. The divided state described in chapter 1 had no fleet, no national army and no means to pay for either quickly. Abe’s officials built batteries on artificial islands in Edo Bay after 1853, but they knew that Chinese forts had been destroyed by ships like Perry’s. Refusal meant war and war meant defeat, so the only open question was how much to concede and how to explain it. The shogunate’s weakness turned diplomacy into a choice between humiliations.

Consultation widened the circle of decision-makers. By asking the daimyo and the court for advice in 1853, Abe hoped to share responsibility for an unpopular decision. Instead he taught the outer lords and the court that they had a legitimate voice in national policy, which they had been denied since 1600. Once the court was asked, its refusal in 1858 carried weight. A consultation meant to strengthen the government created the alternative authority that would replace it.

A succession quarrel turned diplomacy into a feud. The question of who would succeed the heirless shogun Iesada split the elite in 1857–58. Reforming lords, including Satsuma’s Shimazu Nariakira and Mito’s Tokugawa Nariaki, backed Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu; the conservative officials around Ii Naosuke backed a twelve-year-old from the Kii branch. Because the same men disagreed about the treaty, foreign policy and the succession became one fight, and Ii’s victory on both turned his rivals into enemies of the shogunate itself.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Terror entered politics. Ii’s assassination opened a decade in which young samurai calling themselves “men of high purpose” (shishi) murdered officials and foreigners in the emperor’s name. Political violence became a way to force decisions on governments that could not keep order. The movement drew many of its members from Chōshū, Tosa and Satsuma, the domains that would lead the next stage.

Kyoto became a second capital. After 1858 lords and activists flocked to Kyoto, and the court, powerless for two and a half centuries, became a centre of decision. The shogunate itself tried to repair its standing by marrying the emperor’s sister to the young shogun in 1862. Every policy now needed two approvals, and the emperor’s approval carried the moral weight.

Open ports remade prices and livelihoods. Yokohama grew from a fishing village into Japan’s main trading port, and raw silk became the country’s largest export. Silk-raising districts prospered while urban workers and samurai lost to inflation. The trade also gave Japanese merchants and officials their first close look at Western commerce, knowledge that the Meiji state would later use to build industry.

Russia’s advance redrew the north. By the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking in 1860, Russia took from China the lands north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri, and founded Vladivostok, whose name means “ruler of the East”. In 1861 a Russian warship occupied part of Tsushima for six months. Fear of Russia would shape 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 economic case is substantial: fixed tariffs denied the government customs revenue and protection for new industries until 1911, the gold drain and export boom drove inflation, and extraterritoriality placed foreigners beyond Japanese law. Yet the economic losses were manageable compared with China’s, and trade also brought new wealth to silk districts and merchants. The political consequences were larger and faster. Signing without the emperor’s approval made the shogunate look disloyal, the purge that followed made enemies of the most capable lords, and within ten years the shogunate was gone. Historians such as W. G. Beasley therefore see the treaties above all as a political catalyst, whose economic harm was real yet manageable. The economic terms framed Meiji Japan’s long campaign for equality, while the political crisis decided who would wage it. The lesson that transfers is that a government’s concessions to outside pressure can do their greatest damage to the belief that it has the right to rule.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Among Perry’s gifts in 1854 was a working miniature steam railway, with an engine, a carriage and a circle of track laid out near Yokohama. The carriage was built for children, so the Japanese officials who tried it rode clinging to its roof, robes flying, at about twenty miles an hour, a scene recorded in Perry’s official narrative. The Americans also strung a telegraph line about a mile long. The Japanese side answered with silks, lacquer and a display by sumo wrestlers who carried heavy rice bales with ease, a reminder that both delegations were staging power for the other.

CHAPTER 3 · 1858–1869 · 1868

The Fall of the Shogunate

Terror and the emperor’s name gave the opposition its power after 1860. The young activists known as shishi, “men of high purpose”, were mostly samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class, from Chōshū, Tosa and Satsuma, outer domains whose lords ran them almost like independent states, and much like the student radicals of later revolutions they assassinated officials they called traitors and foreigners they called barbarians. Because whoever controlled the powerless court could issue orders in the emperor’s name, Chōshū’s leaders took over the court’s politics in Kyoto and pushed the emperor to order the expulsion of foreigners by 25 June 1863. Chōshū obeyed by firing on ships in the strait at Shimonoseki, while Satsuma faced Britain over the killing of a British merchant at Namamugi. The Western powers punished them swiftly. A British squadron burned much of Kagoshima in August 1863, and in September 1864 an allied Western fleet silenced Chōshū’s batteries in two days. Expulsion had been tested against the most powerful navies in the world, and the domains most committed to it were the first to learn that it could not work.

Defeat converted the radicals into modernisers, and Chōshū shows how the conversion happened. Its leaders had already formed the Kiheitai, a militia that trained samurai, farmers and townsmen together with modern rifles, much as a modern army recruits on ability whatever a soldier’s birth. When conservatives briefly seized the domain after its defeats, Takasugi Shinsaku used these mixed-class units to retake it in early 1865. Satsuma, led by Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi, was buying British ships and arms through Nagasaki, and in March 1866 the Tosa activist Sakamoto Ryōma brokered a secret alliance between the two former enemies. That summer the shogunate sent a huge but divided army against Chōshū and lost on every front, and the arrow across the strait shows Chōshū carrying the war into the domain of a lord loyal to the shogun at Kokura. A shogun who could not defeat a single domain could no longer claim to protect the whole country.

The shogunate’s last leader tried to save it by giving up its title. Tokugawa Yoshinobu, shogun from early 1867, reformed his army with French advisers and in November 1867 returned his governing powers to the new boy emperor, Mutsuhito, hoping to lead a council of lords. Satsuma and Chōshū decided to strike first. Their palace coup of 3 January 1868 stripped him of land and office, and at Toba–Fushimi about 5,000 of their troops under the imperial banner defeated a shogunal force roughly three times larger. Saigō and the shogun’s negotiator Katsu Kaishū then arranged the peaceful surrender of Edo in May. The north fought on in an alliance of more than thirty domains until Aizu fell in November, and the last holdouts at Goryōkaku in Hakodate surrendered in June 1869. Between about 4,000 and 8,000 people died in the whole Boshin War, named after the year it began, few for a revolution, because most domains chose to join the winning side once the emperor’s banner appeared against the shogun.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The emperor gave the opposition a higher loyalty. Once the court had refused the 1858 treaty, the shogun could be cast as disobedient to the emperor, and loyalty to the throne became a reason to defy him. The Mito school’s ideas about national unity around the emperor, written to strengthen the shogunate, became the activists’ creed. Because the emperor had no army of his own, whoever controlled the court could speak in his name, and this made Kyoto the prize of the 1860s.

Defeat turned the expellers into modernisers. Satsuma and Chōshū were the domains most committed to expelling foreigners, and in 1863–64 they were the ones Western navies punished. The bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki showed their leaders that coastal guns and samurai swords could not stop steam warships. They kept the goal of a strong, independent Japan and changed the method, buying ships and rifles and sending students secretly to Britain. Defeat made them the most realistic actors in Japanese politics.

Chōshū recruited beyond the samurai. The Kiheitai and similar units, founded in 1863, enlisted farmers, merchants and townsmen alongside samurai and trained them in Western drill. This gave Chōshū an army larger and more motivated than its samurai alone could provide, and it allowed the reformers to win the domain’s own civil war in 1865. In 1866 these soldiers defeated a far larger shogunal army. A domain that broke the rule of birth in its army found it could beat a government that still respected that rule.

The shogunate’s late reforms alarmed its rivals. The shogunate’s own late reforms hastened its fall, because they convinced Satsuma and Chōshū that time was running against them. Under Yoshinobu it began modernising quickly, with French officers training its troops and plans for a stronger central administration, so a reformed shogunate might soon be too strong to overthrow. Yoshinobu’s return of power in November 1867 was meant to keep him at the head of a new council of lords, and his rivals’ coup of January 1868 was designed to stop exactly that.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Edo surrendered and was renamed Tokyo. The negotiated handover of Edo Castle in May 1868 saved a city of about a million from a siege. In September the city was renamed Tokyo, “eastern capital”, and the young emperor moved there the following year. The new government thus took over the shogunate’s capital, its administrators and its archives intact, which made it far easier to govern the country from the old centre.

The victors ruled through domain cliques. Leadership of the new government came overwhelmingly from Satsuma and Chōshū, with Tosa and Hizen as junior partners. Men such as Ōkubo, Kido, Saigō, Itō and Yamagata would dominate politics for decades, a pattern critics called “clique government”. This small, tested group gave the new state a coherent leadership, and it also bred resentment among everyone outside it.

The domains survived the war that ended the shogunate. The restoration removed the shogun and left more than 260 domains in place, including those of the victors. The new government ruled directly only the confiscated shogunal lands, the red patches on the map, and it had to bargain with the lords for soldiers and revenue. Its leaders soon concluded that Japan could not become a strong state while the domains existed, which set up the second, more radical revolution of 1871.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Ideas mattered because they supplied legitimacy: the cult of the emperor allowed a few domains to present a seizure of power as loyalty, and it made other lords reluctant to fight the imperial banner. Guns and organisation decided the battles of 1866 and 1868, where Chōshū’s mixed-class infantry and Satsuma’s modern equipment beat larger forces. The shogunate’s mistakes opened the door, from Ii’s treaty without imperial approval to the failed expedition of 1866. Historians weight these differently: Marxists stressed social forces, Beasley the ambitions of lower samurai, Totman the shogunate’s own reforms and errors. A strong answer argues that ideas made the challenge legitimate, the shogunate’s weakness made it possible, and military organisation made it succeed, and that without any one of the three the outcome would have been different. The transferable insight is that old regimes usually fall when a rival can claim a higher legitimacy and also field a force willing to act on the claim.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The last shogunal holdouts in Hakodate set up what they called the Republic of Ezo, and in January 1869 its officers voted to choose their leaders, electing the naval commander Enomoto Takeaki as president. The vote is often described as the first election held in Japan. Among Enomoto’s advisers was a French artillery officer, Jules Brunet, who had resigned from the French military mission to stay with his Japanese students. After the surrender Enomoto was imprisoned, pardoned in 1872, and went on to serve the Meiji government as envoy to Russia and as a cabinet minister.

CHAPTER 4 · 1868–1877 · 1877

Dismantling the Old Order

The new government promised participation in principle and built central authority in practice. The Charter Oath, a five-article statement of aims sworn by the fifteen-year-old emperor in April 1868, worked like a manifesto written by former samurai, the hereditary warrior class. It pledged that assemblies would be convened and “all matters decided by public discussion”, that the “base customs of the past” would be broken and that knowledge would be sought throughout the world. Its vague promise of assemblies reassured the lords, while its last articles licensed sweeping change. In 1869 the lords, led by Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen, handed their land and population registers to the emperor. The daimyo, the hereditary lords of the domains, stayed on as appointed governors of their old lands with a tenth of the domain’s revenue as household income, much as a nationalised company might keep its former owners on salary. These steps looked like a formality and established the principle that every acre and every person in Japan belonged to the state.

The abolition of the domains in August 1871 turned that principle into fact, and it succeeded because it was both a buyout and a show of force. Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and Saigō Takamori had assembled an imperial guard of about 10,000 men from their three domains, and on 29 August the emperor summoned the former lords in Tokyo and announced that their 261 domains were abolished. More than 300 prefectures replaced them, merged into 72 by the end of the year, each run by a governor from outside, like a regional official appointed by a modern ministry. The government took on the domains’ debts, kept paying samurai stipends for the moment and turned the old lords into wealthy, titled residents of the capital. Many domains were close to bankruptcy, so their lords lost responsibilities they could no longer afford. On the map the patchwork turns a single red in this one step, the real revolution of the period.

The government then remade its subjects one obligation at a time, and each step had a price. Conscription, compulsory military service much like a modern draft, began in January 1873, and since heads of households and those who could pay were exempt, the burden fell on poor farmers’ younger sons. The land-tax reform of July 1873 replaced rice levies with a cash tax of 3% of assessed land value and gave owners title deeds, which secured revenue and made land a saleable commodity. Riots against both measures followed, and protests in 1876 forced a cut to 2.5% in 1877. The samurai lost their stipends, the hereditary rice salaries the domains had paid them, 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, and in 1877 Saigō’s army besieged Kumamoto. Meanwhile an expedition to Taiwan in 1874 and the arrow to Ganghwa Island in 1876 show the new state already using force abroad. The rebellion was crushed by September, ending any chance that the samurai could fight their way back to power.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The domains kept the new state weak. After 1868 the new government still depended on the domains for soldiers and revenue, ruling directly only the confiscated shogunal lands. Its leaders, many of whom had travelled abroad or read Western works, could see that the nation-states threatening Japan raised national taxes and national armies. As long as more than 260 lords kept their own samurai and rice taxes, the government could not build either. The logic of the restoration pointed to abolition from the start.

The unequal treaties made centralisation urgent. The treaties of 1858 could be revised from 1872, and Japan’s leaders believed that the Western powers would only accept Japan as an equal once it had modern laws, courts and armed forces. That required a single government that could legislate for the whole country. Foreign pressure thus provided both a motive for centralisation and a patriotic argument that even reluctant lords found hard to oppose.

Many domains were bankrupt. Decades of borrowing, the costs of alternate attendance and the military expenses of the 1860s had left many domains deeply in debt to Osaka merchants and issuing paper money of doubtful value. When the government offered to assume these obligations and guarantee the lords an income, abolition became a rescue as much as a confiscation. The fiscal weakness of the old order made its peaceful dissolution possible.

The state needed a fixed money income. Under the domains, taxes were collected in rice at rates that varied from place to place and year to year, so no central government could budget. The new leaders needed predictable cash to pay for an army, schools, railways and the samurai stipends they had inherited, which consumed roughly a third of government spending in the early 1870s. A national land tax in money, set on assessed value, was the answer, and it could only be imposed once the domains were gone.

WHAT IT CHANGED

One army, one tax, one school system. With the domains gone, the government issued the Education Ordinance of 1872, which aimed at compulsory primary schooling for boys and girls, followed by conscription and the land tax in 1873. These measures built a direct link between the state and every household for the first time. They also created a large, literate and obedient conscript population that the Meiji state would mobilise for industry and war.

Opposition moved from swords to petitions. The defeat of 1877 ended armed resistance by the samurai. Former samurai such as Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa had already petitioned in 1874 for an elected assembly, and after Saigō’s death the Freedom and People’s Rights movement grew into a national campaign of newspapers, speeches and political societies. The government’s critics now demanded a share of power through a constitution.

Japan began to push outward. In the same years the government sent an expedition to southern Taiwan in 1874, fixed its northern border with Russia in 1875 by exchanging its claim to Sakhalin for all the Kurils, and in 1876 forced Korea to open its ports. The red dot at Busan on the map is Japan’s first settlement imposed on a neighbour. Japan was already treating Korea as the West 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 bought out the most powerful losers: the lords received debt relief, titles and incomes, and the samurai kept their stipends long enough for the change to settle. They used the emperor’s authority to make resistance look disloyal, they acted quickly and in unity, and a credible army stood behind each step. Many domains were also bankrupt, so abolition relieved more than it robbed. Yet the revolution was far from costless. Thousands died in the samurai revolts and perhaps 12,000 or more in the Satsuma Rebellion alone, and peasants paid in riots, conscription and taxes that historians such as Stephen Vlastos have documented. A strong answer weighs these costs against the speed and scale of the change, and it notes that the costs fell on those who could not bargain. The transferable lesson is that transitions go most smoothly when the powerful are compensated, and that the price is usually shifted onto those without that bargaining power.

AN INTERESTING FACT

No confirmed photograph of Saigō Takamori exists, so his famous image was drawn after his death from his relatives’ features. He was pardoned in 1889, twelve years after dying as a rebel, and in 1898 a bronze statue was unveiled in Tokyo’s Ueno Park showing him in a plain cotton kimono, walking his dog. At the unveiling his widow, Itoko, is reported to have protested that her husband had never looked like that in public. The rebel of 1877 had become a national hero, honoured by the state he had fought.

CHAPTER 5 · 1877–1894 · 1889

Building the Meiji State

Japan’s builders were a small, stable group who learned systematically from abroad, and that combination explains much of their success. The Iwakura Mission of 1871–73 took about half the government’s leaders, including Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and the young Itō Hirobumi, on a tour of America and Europe. It failed to revise the treaties and returned convinced that Japan needed factories, schools and laws before it could demand equality. The government employed foreign experts, sent students abroad and copied selectively: a navy on British lines, an army on French and later German lines, and schools on American and French models. After Ōkubo was assassinated in 1878, power passed to a circle later called the genrō, the elder statesmen, an unelected inner council something like a permanent board of senior partners, among them Itō, Yamagata Aritomo and Matsukata. They took turns as prime minister for thirty years, which gave the state a continuity of purpose that few governments in transition enjoy.

The state led the economy at first and then handed it to private owners, and the costs of that strategy fell on farmers and young women. Railways, telegraphs and model factories such as Tomioka were built with public money. Inflation after the war of 1877 forced a change of course. From 1881 Matsukata pursued deflation, cutting spending, raising taxes, founding the Bank of Japan in 1882 as a central bank and withdrawing paper money, so rice prices roughly halved in some regions between 1880 and 1884. Indebted farmers lost their land, and in November 1884 thousands of silk farmers in Chichibu rose in arms. The government then sold most of its enterprises, often below cost, to houses such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi, the future zaibatsu, conglomerates that combined banks, mines and trade much like a modern holding company, while private cotton mills, staffed mainly by teenage girls on contracts arranged by their families, drove the industrial boom of the late 1880s. Pollution from the Ashio copper mine poisoned the farms along the Watarase River. Growth was real, and it was paid for largely by people with no vote.

The constitution channelled demands for participation into a design that kept power with the emperor’s advisers. Former samurai, members of the abolished warrior class, such as Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa built a movement for an elected assembly from 1874 through newspapers, lectures and parties. In 1881 the government expelled its most liberal member, Ōkuma Shigenobu, and promised a constitution by 1890, then expelled hundreds of activists from Tokyo in 1887. Itō created a cabinet in 1885 and wrote the constitution with German advisers. The emperor was declared “sacred and inviolable”, the army reported to him directly, and the lower house of the Diet, the new parliament, was elected by men over 25 paying at least 15 yen in direct tax. Yet the Diet could reject the government’s budget, which forced the genrō to bargain with elected politicians through the 1890s. On the map, the same years show the state’s reach widening, from Shuri Castle in annexed Ryukyu, today’s Okinawa, to Sapporo, capital of a Hokkaido taken from its native Ainu.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Iwakura Mission taught that strength must come first. The mission set out in 1871 to begin revising the unequal treaties and was told politely that Japan’s laws and institutions were not yet acceptable to the Western powers. Its members saw factories in Manchester, railways in America and Bismarck’s Germany, and they returned believing that a strong economy and army had to come before equality. That conviction set the order of the reforms that followed.

Inflation forced financial discipline. The government paid for the Satsuma Rebellion largely by printing paper money, and by 1880 prices were rising fast and the currency was losing credibility. Matsukata Masayoshi, finance minister from 1881, chose deflation: higher taxes, lower spending, a central bank and convertible notes. The policy stabilised the yen and the budget, and it pushed many farmers into debt and tenancy, which is why Chichibu’s silk farmers rose in 1884.

A popular movement demanded a voice. Former samurai, rich farmers and urban journalists built the Freedom and People’s Rights movement after 1874, holding meetings and drafting dozens of private constitutions. By 1880 petitions for an assembly were arriving in Tokyo from every region. The movement could not take power, yet it made a constitution unavoidable, and the oligarchs chose to write one themselves before their critics could write it for them.

Treaty revision required a legal order the West would accept. Western governments refused to give up extraterritoriality until Japan had codes of law and courts that met their standards. A written constitution, a cabinet, a criminal code and a civil code were therefore instruments of foreign policy as well as domestic ones. Each institution the oligarchs built also served as evidence in Japan’s case for equality.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Treaty revision became possible. In July 1894 Britain signed a treaty agreeing to end extraterritoriality from 1899, and the other powers followed. The new constitution, cabinet system and legal codes had given the West the institutional evidence it demanded. Full control of tariffs followed in 1911, completing the escape from the unequal treaties that had begun with Perry’s ships.

Parties won a foothold in the state. From the first Diet in 1890 the elected lower house fought the cabinet over the budget, and the oligarchs found they could not govern without some cooperation from the parties. The franchise widened in 1900 and again in 1919, and in 1925 all adult men gained the vote. The limited parliament of 1890 became the seed of the party governments of the 1920s.

A state ideology entered every classroom. The Rescript on Education of 1890 was read aloud in schools on national holidays, and pupils bowed before the emperor’s portrait. In 1891 the Christian teacher Uchimura Kanzō was forced from his post after hesitating to bow deeply enough before the Rescript. The ideology of loyalty to the emperor, taught to a literate conscript nation, would be mobilised in the wars that followed.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The case that it prevented democracy is strong: it was granted from above without any assembly’s approval, it made the emperor sovereign and ministers answerable to him, it gave the vote to about 1% of the population, and its clause on supreme command let the army escape civilian control in the 1930s. Yet the case that it advanced democracy is also real. The control that the Diet, Japan’s new parliament, held over new budgets gave elected politicians leverage, the oligarchs had to bargain with parties within a decade, and the electorate grew until all men could vote in 1925. Historians such as Carol Gluck show that the same document supported both an ideology of obedience and a lively public politics. A good answer argues that the constitution was designed to contain participation and that, once participation had legal channels, it grew beyond its designers’ intentions. The lesson that transfers is that institutions created to limit change can become the means by which later generations demand more of it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

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

CHAPTER 6 · 1894–1912 · 1910

A Great Power

Korea was the strategic centre of Japan’s foreign policy, and the war of 1894–95 decided who would dominate it. Japanese leaders saw the peninsula as a dagger pointed at Japan, in a phrase later attributed to the Prussian adviser Jakob Meckel. When a peasant rebellion led by the Donghak religious movement made Korea ask China for troops in 1894, Japan sent a larger force, seized the royal palace in Seoul and declared war on Qing China in August. It won at Pyongyang and off the Yalu in September, and in November its troops took Port Arthur and massacred prisoners and many civilians, marked on the map. The Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895 gave Japan Taiwan, the Pescadores and Liaodong, ended China’s claim over Korea and imposed an indemnity, a forced payment like war reparations, of 200 million taels of silver. Within a week Russia, Germany and France made Japan return Liaodong. Japan had learned the rules of imperialism, the scramble among strong states for colonies, and those rules favoured the larger fleet.

The war with Russia, fought over the prize Japan had been made to surrender, showed how far the Meiji state had come. Taiwan was conquered against five months of resistance in 1895, and Japanese agents murdered Korea’s Queen Min that October. After the Boxer rising of 1900, an anti-foreign revolt in northern China, Russian troops occupied Manchuria while Russian railways crept towards Korea, so Japan allied with Britain in 1902 and attacked Port Arthur in February 1904. The siege of Port Arthur cost General Nogi’s army nearly 60,000 killed and wounded; at Mukden in March 1905, the arrow north of the peninsula, Japan won the war’s largest land battle; and at Tsushima in May Admiral Tōgō destroyed the Russian Baltic fleet. The peace signed at Portsmouth gave Japan southern Sakhalin, the Kwantung lease and the South Manchuria Railway, but no indemnity, so Tokyo crowds rioted in Hibiya. A non-Western state had beaten a European great power, at the price of some 80,000 to 90,000 Japanese dead and heavy foreign debt.

Korea paid the heaviest price for Japan’s rise, and its resistance shows that annexation was imposed on a people who fought it. In November 1905 Japan forced Korea’s ministers to accept a protectorate, under which a stronger state runs a weaker one’s foreign policy, and Itō Hirobumi became resident-general, in effect Korea’s governor. Because Emperor Gojong sent envoys to protest at the Hague peace conference in 1907, Japan made him abdicate and disbanded the Korean army. Soldiers, peasants and scholars then fought as “righteous armies”, and Japanese records count more than 17,000 Korean fighters killed by 1911, many in the 1909 sweep through Jeolla province marked on the map. Tokyo had decided on annexation in July 1909, and when the nationalist An Jung-geun shot Itō dead at Harbin that October, the killing gave Japan a pretext to move faster. In August 1910 Japan annexed Korea, which it ruled as the colony of Chōsen until 1945. The state that had escaped unequal treaties at home now ruled two colonies by force.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Korea sat between three empires. Korea’s kingdom was weak, divided at court and traditionally a tributary of China, while Russia expanded towards it from the north. Japanese strategists believed that whoever controlled Korea could threaten Japan, and since the Treaty of Ganghwa in 1876 Japanese merchants and officials had been building influence there. The peninsula turned rivalry among China, Russia and Japan into two wars within ten years.

A modern state earned treaty revision. The constitution, cabinet and legal codes of the 1880s gave Britain the institutional reasons it had demanded, and on 16 July 1894 it agreed to end extraterritoriality from 1899. The treaty was signed days before war with China began. The foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu, who negotiated it, saw it as proof that reform at home bought respect abroad. Equality with the West and expansion in Asia advanced together, each strengthening the other.

The Triple Intervention taught that only power counted. In April 1895 Russia, Germany and France advised Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula, and Japan, unable to fight all three, complied for an extra indemnity. In 1898 Russia leased the same peninsula’s tip, including Port Arthur, for itself. The episode convinced Japanese leaders and public alike that international law protected the strong, and it built support for rearmament and for an alliance that could match Russia.

Russia’s railways and Britain’s alliance set the timing. Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway and its branch across Manchuria to Port Arthur threatened to bring Russian armies to Korea’s border within a few years. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of January 1902 guaranteed that no third power would join Russia against Japan. Japanese leaders concluded that they had a narrow window to fight before the railway was finished, and in February 1904 they struck first.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Japan joined the great powers. By 1911, when Japan regained full control of its tariffs, every clause of the treaties of 1858 had been undone, and the alliance with Britain was renewed. Japan now negotiated with Western powers as an equal and held colonies like them. The goal set in 1868, a nation “standing with the nations of the world”, had been met within a lifetime.

Korea and Taiwan under colonial rule until 1945. Taiwan was governed from 1895 and Korea from 1910 by governors-general who were usually generals or admirals. Colonial rule brought railways, ports and schools built to serve Japan, and it brought land surveys that transferred land to the state and to Japanese owners, police control and the suppression of resistance. Both colonies were held until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

An expensive empire and a restless public. War debts, special taxes and a large standing army became permanent features of the budget. The Hibiya riots showed a public that wanted both empire and a say in politics, and urban protests helped bring down cabinets in 1913 and 1918. The Meiji state’s greatest success thus created the pressures that its successors would struggle to control.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Measured against its founders’ goals, the transition succeeded: Japan had kept its independence, ended the unequal treaties, built industry, railways and schools, created a constitution and defeated China and Russia. Modernisation theorists of the 1960s, such as Edwin Reischauer, presented it as the model of a peaceful, well-managed transformation. Later historians, including John Dower and Carol Gluck, stressed who paid: 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 back to choices made in this period. A strong answer separates the success of the state from the experience of the people it ruled and conquered, and it judges each against evidence. The transferable insight is that a transition can succeed brilliantly at making a state strong while shifting much of its cost onto people who had no voice in it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, the victor of Tsushima, had trained as a young officer in Britain in the 1870s, aboard the training ship HMS Worcester. Before the battle he hoisted a signal that echoed Nelson’s at Trafalgar, telling his crews that the empire’s fate depended on the day and every man must do his utmost. His flagship, the battleship Mikasa, was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in England and launched in 1900. Weeks after the war she sank at her moorings after a magazine explosion that killed hundreds of her crew, was raised and repaired, was later turned into a memorial ship, and is still preserved in concrete at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, as one of the last surviving battleships of her era.

CHAPTER 7 · 1964–1985 · 1980

The Stagnant Superpower

The Brezhnev system offered stability in exchange for obedience, and for many Soviet citizens the exchange seemed fair. Power ran through the party and its nomenklatura, the list of important posts that could be filled only with party approval, much as if one organisation appointed every manager, editor and general in a country. Brezhnev promised these officials “stability of cadres”, meaning that they would no longer be reshuffled or purged, and by 1980 the average age of the Politburo, the party’s ruling committee, in effect the cabinet, was about seventy. Ordinary people received guaranteed work, subsidised housing and food, free healthcare and education, and a slow rise in living standards. A reform of 1965 associated with the prime minister Aleksei Kosygin gave factories more freedom, and it was quietly dropped after Warsaw Pact armies, the arrow into Czechoslovakia, crushed reform in Prague in 1968. On the map the Union is one red block, ringed by the grey-tan Soviet bloc, the communist states of Eastern Europe bound to Moscow by that military alliance. Stability became the system’s main product, bought by postponing every difficult decision.

The economy slowed because the method that had built it stopped working. Soviet growth had been “extensive”, coming from more labour, capital and land, much as a farm grows by ploughing new fields instead of farming its old ones better. By the 1970s the labour force was growing slowly, new oil and minerals lay in distant Siberia and cost more to extract, and old factories were wearing out. Planners judged firms by gross output, so a nail factory measured in tonnes made heavy nails, and loss-making enterprises were always rescued by the state. Agriculture remained so weak that after 1972 the Soviet Union became a regular buyer of Western grain, importing about 55 million tonnes in 1984–85. Prestige projects such as the BAM, a second Siberian railway, absorbed vast resources, while irrigation for cotton drained the Aral Sea. A system skilled at mobilising effort for great projects proved poor at the patient improvement that a mature economy needs.

Oil and the arms race shaped the choices of the 1970s, and Afghanistan showed how those choices were made. Output from Samotlor and other West Siberian fields made the Soviet Union the world’s largest oil producer, and the arrow running west shows exports flowing to Eastern Europe and to Western buyers paying hard currency, money such as dollars usable anywhere. When world prices quadrupled in 1973–74 and doubled again in 1979, this income paid for grain, machinery and the arms race, so the leaders felt no need to reform. Defence absorbed perhaps 15–17% of national output by Western estimates. In December 1979 a few ageing leaders sent the 40th Army into Afghanistan to replace a communist ruler they distrusted, beginning a nine-year war in which about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and between half a million and 2 million Afghans died. When Brezhnev died in 1982 and his two elderly successors died within three years, the system had become a gerontocracy, a state run by old men, facing problems it had spent two decades postponing.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Khrushchev’s campaigns made stability attractive. Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, reorganised the party twice, launched the Virgin Lands campaign and taken the world to the brink over Cuba in 1962. Party officials, tired of constant reorganisation and threatened by his plan to rotate them out of office, removed him in October 1964. The new collective leadership defined itself against his restlessness, which made predictability and security for officials the central values of the next eighteen years.

Extensive growth ran out of inputs. Soviet industrialisation since the 1930s had worked by moving peasants into factories and pouring investment into heavy industry. By the 1970s birth rates in the Slavic republics had fallen, the cheapest resources in European Russia had been used up, and new oil and gas lay thousands of kilometres east in harsh climates. Each additional rouble of investment produced less growth than before. Without new sources of productivity, a slowdown was built into the system.

Prague 1968 made reform look dangerous. When Czechoslovakia’s communist leader Alexander Dubček relaxed censorship and promised “socialism with a human face” in 1968, Soviet leaders feared that reform would spread and that Czechoslovakia might leave the bloc. In August Warsaw Pact armies invaded, and Brezhnev declared that socialist states had the right to intervene where socialism was threatened. Inside the Soviet Union the lesson was that economic reform could lead to political reform, so the Kosygin reforms faded.

Oil windfalls postponed hard choices. The fields of West Siberia came on stream just as world oil prices soared in 1973–74 and again in 1979. Hard-currency earnings from oil and gas rose many times over, paying for imported grain, Western machinery and the arms race. Yegor Gaidar later argued that this income allowed the leadership to avoid reform for a decade, and that it tied the state’s solvency to a price set in world markets that Moscow could not control.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A generation of reformers waited. Younger officials who had watched the Prague Spring crushed, among them Mikhail Gorbachev, rose through the party in the 1970s and talked privately about change. Gorbachev joined the Politburo in 1980 as its youngest member and served under Andropov, whose brief reign in 1982–84 attacked corruption and indiscipline. When the old leaders died in quick succession, these men inherited the problems they had watched accumulate.

Dependence on oil set a trap. By the early 1980s oil and gas provided the majority of Soviet hard-currency earnings. When world prices fell by more than half in 1985–86, the budget lost a major source of income just as Gorbachev was launching expensive plans to accelerate growth. The windfall of the 1970s had become a vulnerability.

The bloc became a burden. Moscow sold oil to its East European allies below world prices and propped up their economies, which cost billions in lost hard currency, money that could buy goods on world markets. In Poland the Solidarity trade union, founded in 1980, showed that workers could organise against a communist state, and only martial law, rule by the army with ordinary rights suspended, contained it in December 1981. By 1985 Eastern Europe cost Moscow money it no longer had for a loyalty it could no longer count on, which made Gorbachev’s later refusal to defend it by force easier to choose.

Afghanistan’s war outlived the decision. The war drained money, killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers, damaged the army’s morale and isolated the Soviet Union in the Muslim world and at the United Nations. Its veterans, the afgantsy, came home 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 case for doom rests on structural evidence: growth near zero by some estimates, dependence on oil prices and grain imports, a costly empire and an ageing elite unable to innovate. Yegor Gaidar argued that the collapse of oil prices made a crisis unavoidable. The case against doom is also serious. Stephen Kotkin and others note that the Soviet Union in 1985 faced no revolt, no war it was losing on its own territory and no bankruptcy, and that a poorly performing system can survive for decades, as North Korea’s has. China after 1978 showed one alternative, opening agriculture and small business to markets while keeping the party’s monopoly of power. A strong answer distinguishes decline from collapse: the Soviet system was declining, but collapse required a trigger and a set of choices, which the next chapters examine. The transferable insight is that weak performance makes reform necessary, and the way reform is carried out decides whether a system survives it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In the summer of 1972 Soviet buyers quietly bought roughly a quarter of the American wheat crop at subsidised prices before United States officials grasped how much they had sold. American bread prices rose, and the episode became known in the American press as the “Great Grain Robbery”, the title of a book about it published in 1975. Before 1914 the Russian Empire had been one of the world’s largest grain exporters. Six decades later its Soviet successor, with some of the richest farmland on earth, had become dependent on the harvests of its Cold War rival.

CHAPTER 8 · 1985–1989 · 1988

Gorbachev’s Gamble

Gorbachev’s early reforms tried to make the old system run faster, and they collided with an economic shock. As general secretary, the party’s leader and so the country’s, he promised “acceleration” through investment in machine-building and tighter discipline, and in May 1985 he launched a campaign against drinking that cut vodka production and raised prices. Alcohol taxes had been one of the budget’s largest sources of income, and the campaign removed tens of billions of roubles over three years while moonshine replaced state vodka. At the same moment world oil prices fell from about 27 dollars a barrel in 1985 to around 14 in 1986, cutting the export earnings on which grain imports depended. The government covered the gap by printing money, and by 1989 the budget deficit, the gap between spending and revenue, reached about a tenth of national output by Western estimates. In December 1986 the replacement of Kazakhstan’s Kazakh party chief by a Russian outsider brought students onto the streets of Alma-Ata. A reformer who needed money and calm began his work with neither.

Chernobyl turned glasnost, “openness” about the system’s failures, from a slogan into a policy, because it showed how secrecy could endanger the state itself. Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl exploded on 26 April 1986; the town of Pripyat was evacuated the next day, but the world learned of the accident only when Swedish monitors detected radiation, carried north-west by the wind along the path of the arrow on the map. Thirty-one people died within months, more than 100,000 were evacuated that year, and estimates of later cancer deaths range from about 4,000 to tens of thousands. Gorbachev concluded that a system unable to tell the truth to itself could not be reformed, and from 1987 censorship loosened quickly. Newspapers exposed corruption, banned books were published, and the press reopened Stalin’s crimes. Openness was meant to mobilise public support for reform, and it also showed millions of people how badly the system had served them.

Perestroika, the “restructuring” of the economy, loosened the plan without creating a market, and political reform then removed the party’s power to command. The Law on State Enterprise, passed in 1987 and in force from 1988, let firms keep profits, set wages and sell output beyond state orders, and a law of 1988 allowed cooperatives, small businesses owned by their members, private firms in all but name. Because prices remained fixed, extra wages chased the same goods, shops emptied and regions began hoarding supplies. In 1988 Gorbachev turned to politics to break resistance in the party apparatus, the full-time officials who ran the party, and in March 1989 voters chose among rival candidates for a new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, for the first time since 1917. In Leningrad the regional party chief lost although no one stood against him, and in Moscow the dismissed reformer Boris Yeltsin won almost 90% of the vote. In July 1989 miners in the Kuzbass, the Donbas and Vorkuta struck over soap, food and pay. The party could no longer rule by command, and nothing had yet taken its place.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A generational change at the top. Between November 1982 and March 1985 three general secretaries died in office, and the old guard finally gave way to a younger man who had risen through regional party work in Stavropol and agriculture. Gorbachev and his allies, including Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, had seen the West and believed the system could be renewed. The decline described in chapter 7 had created the demand for reform; the deaths of the old leaders created the opportunity.

Falling oil prices and the vodka campaign emptied the budget. The two largest sources of state income besides enterprise profits were alcohol taxes at home and oil and gas sales abroad. Gorbachev’s temperance campaign cut the first, and the collapse of world oil prices in 1985–86 cut the second. With the war in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl clean-up and an investment drive also to be paid for, the government printed money, and the resulting excess of cash over goods undermined every later reform.

Chernobyl discredited secrecy. The accident exposed incompetence and lies at every level, from the plant’s managers to the ministries in Moscow. It persuaded Gorbachev that problems hidden from the leadership could not be fixed, and it gave reformers an argument against the censors. Glasnost became the tool he used to expose opponents of reform, and it soon escaped his control as citizens used it to criticise the party itself.

The apparatus resisted economic reform. Ministries and regional party bosses had built their careers on the plan, and they diluted every measure that threatened their control over resources. By 1988 Gorbachev had concluded that only political competition would force them to change. The 19th Party Conference in June–July 1988 approved contested elections to a new parliament, moving the struggle for reform from the party’s offices to the voting booth.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An elected opposition gained a national stage. Inside the new Congress, 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 abolished the article of the constitution that guaranteed the party’s leading role. Elections to the republics’ parliaments that spring brought nationalist and democratic movements to power in the Baltic states, Russia and elsewhere.

Shortages turned into a crisis of supply. By 1989–90 the state could no longer deliver basic goods, rationing spread, and regions and republics hoarded food and raw materials. The money overhang and empty shops that perestroika left behind became the starting point for the price liberalisation of January 1992. Any successor government would inherit an economy with too much money and too few goods.

National movements found their voice. Glasnost allowed the peoples of the Union to speak about their own grievances. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hatched on the map, voted to leave Azerbaijan, and that year popular fronts formed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Reform from the centre was producing demands for freedom from the centre.

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?

Judged by his own goals, Gorbachev failed: he wanted a reformed, more productive socialism within a renewed Union, and by 1991 the economy was in free fall and the Union had dissolved. His economic measures, from the vodka campaign to the enterprise law, made shortages and deficits worse. Yet historians such as Archie Brown and William Taubman stress that he refused to use mass force to keep power at home or in Eastern Europe, accepted competitive elections and ended the Cold War. The episodes of violence in Tbilisi in 1989 and Vilnius in 1991 show both that force was used and that it was not pursued to the end. A strong answer separates intention from outcome and economics from politics, and weighs what alternative leaders might realistically have done. Many conclude that he was a failed economic reformer and a remarkable political one. The transferable lesson is that a leader’s refusal to use force can decide the character of a transition as much as any policy.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The anti-alcohol campaign was so unpopular that people nicknamed Gorbachev the “mineral secretary” instead of the general secretary. Yet the campaign had a measurable effect on health: deaths from heart disease, accidents and alcohol poisoning fell, and male life expectancy in Russia rose to about 65 years in 1987, its highest level in the whole Soviet period. When the campaign was abandoned and drinking returned, life expectancy began to fall again, and the collapse that followed in the 1990s was partly a delayed bill for the lives the campaign had briefly saved.

CHAPTER 9 · 1989–1991 · 1991

The Union Unravels

Eastern Europe went first, because its regimes had always depended on the threat of Soviet tanks. In 1989 Gorbachev made clear that Moscow would no longer intervene to save its allies, a change his spokesman joked was the “Sinatra doctrine”, letting each country do it “my way”. Poland’s communists lost semi-free elections in June to Solidarity, the independent trade union that had become a national movement, and Hungary opened its border with Austria, so thousands of East Germans crossed to the West along the route of the arrow on the map. Mass protests followed in East Germany, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall opened. Within weeks communist rule ended in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and the bloc states turn tan on the map of December 1989. Germany was reunited in October 1990. Regimes built on the promise of Soviet force fell within months once that promise was withdrawn.

The Union’s own nations followed, and Moscow’s inconsistent use of force radicalised them without stopping them. 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, as the arrows show. In April 1989 troops killed 21 peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi, and in January 1990 Soviet troops entering Baku killed more than a hundred civilians. In the Baltic states, annexed in 1940 under the Nazi–Soviet Pact, whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between Stalin and Hitler, popular fronts, broad movements of reformers and nationalists, won elections, and Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990. When troops seized the television tower in Vilnius in January 1991 and killed fourteen people, crowds defended the parliament and the crackdown stopped. Force was used often enough to turn moderates into separatists and too hesitantly to frighten anyone back into the Union.

Russia’s turn against the Union decided the outcome, and the failed coup of August 1991 sealed it. Boris Yeltsin, elected chairman of Russia’s parliament in 1990 and Russian president with 57% of the vote in June 1991, used the institutions of Russia, the largest of the fifteen national republics that formed the Union, to challenge Gorbachev’s. Russia declared its laws supreme, withheld taxes from the centre and negotiated directly with other republics. On 19 August, the day before a new treaty loosening the Union was to be signed, the heads of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, the army and the interior ministry put Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and declared an emergency. Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the White House, Russia’s parliament building, crowds built barricades, army units refused to attack, and the coup collapsed by 21 August with three civilians dead. Ukraine declared independence on 24 August and confirmed it by referendum on 1 December, and on 8 December Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus met at Belavezha and dissolved the Union, putting in its place a loose Commonwealth of Independent States with no common government. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December, the president of a country that no longer existed.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Glasnost and elections gave nations a voice. Openness allowed Balts, Georgians, Armenians and others to discuss deportations, annexations and the suppression of their languages, and the elections of 1989–90 gave their movements parliaments to control. Grievances that had been unspeakable became the platforms of elected governments. Gorbachev had expected reform to renew loyalty to the Union, and in several republics it produced demands to leave it.

Moscow renounced force in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev had already announced cuts to Soviet forces in Europe at the United Nations in December 1988, and in 1989 he refused to intervene as communist governments fell from Warsaw to Bucharest. The peaceful collapse of the bloc showed nations inside the Union that Moscow might not use force against them either. Each example of restraint abroad made the threat of repression at home less credible.

The economic crisis destroyed the centre’s case. By 1990–91 shortages, rationing and the collapse of supply chains made the claim that the Union delivered prosperity impossible to sustain. Republics hoarded food and fuel, withheld taxes and printed their own coupons and later currencies. Leaving the Union began to look like a way to escape a sinking economy, and the centre lacked the money to buy loyalty.

Russia’s leaders wanted Moscow’s power for themselves. Yeltsin, expelled from the Politburo in 1987, built his comeback on the Russian republic, whose parliament, presidency and treasury he used against the Union government. Russian nationalists and democrats alike argued that Russia subsidised the other republics. When the central state weakened, Russia’s elected leaders had both the motive and the means to replace it with their own.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Fifteen states with inherited borders. The internal borders drawn by Soviet planners became international frontiers overnight, leaving about 25 million ethnic Russians outside Russia and many minorities inside new states that did not want them. Crimea, transferred to Ukraine in 1954, became part of an independent Ukraine. Questions of citizenship, language and military bases would shape relations among the successor states for decades.

Frozen conflicts on the edges. Wars over Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, hatched on the map, began as the Union weakened and continued after it dissolved. Russian troops and arms played a role in most of them. Ceasefires in 1992–94 left breakaway regions outside the control of the states they legally belonged to, conflicts later called “frozen” because they were halted without being solved.

Russia inherited the Union’s seat, weapons and debts. The Russian Federation took over the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council, its embassies and most of its foreign debt, and by 1996 all Soviet nuclear warheads had been moved to Russian territory. Russia also inherited the Soviet economic crisis, now concentrated in a single government that had promised 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 case for the borderlands is clear in the sequence of events: the Baltic popular fronts, the Karabakh crisis and Georgian protests opened the question of secession, Lithuania declared independence first, and Ukraine’s 90% vote made a Union without it impossible. Mark Beissinger shows how these mobilisations built on each other. The case for the centre is equally strong. Russia’s declaration of sovereignty, its withholding of taxes, Yeltsin’s defeat of the coup and his initiative at Belavezha ended the Union, and Central Asian leaders were left with independence they had barely sought. Serhii Plokhy stresses the decisive role of Russia and Ukraine together. A good answer argues that the borderlands made the crisis and the centre decided its outcome, and it explains why Russia’s elite saw more to gain from leaving than from ruling. The transferable insight is that empires often end when their core decides that the costs of holding the periphery are no longer worth paying.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The end of the Soviet Union reached Washington at least as fast as it reached the Soviet president. After signing the agreement that dissolved the Union in a hunting lodge in the Białowieża forest on 8 December 1991, Boris Yeltsin telephoned the American president, George Bush, while the Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich tried to reach Gorbachev. Yeltsin got through first, and Gorbachev was angered to learn that Washington already knew, although Shushkevich later insisted that the two calls were almost simultaneous. Whatever the exact sequence, the leaders of three Soviet republics had ended the Union and told a foreign president as quickly as the man who still nominally governed it.

CHAPTER 10 · 1992–1993 · 1993

Shock Therapy

Shock therapy, the plan to bring in market prices and private ownership in one sharp move as a surgeon prefers one operation to many, was chosen because the alternatives looked worse to the men who had to decide. By late 1991 the Soviet state had spent its reserves of gold and foreign currency, shops were nearly empty, and people held far more money than there were goods to buy at fixed prices. Gaidar, aged 35, and colleagues such as Anatoly Chubais, advised by Western economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, argued that only free prices could bring goods back and that reform had to move before the old bureaucracy could regroup. On 2 January 1992 most prices were freed, although energy and some staples stayed controlled. Goods reappeared at prices most people could barely afford, and inflation reached about 2,500% for the year because the central bank kept lending cheaply to failing enterprises. Prices had been freed without control of the money supply, so stabilisation came only years later.

Privatisation, the transfer of state-owned firms to private owners, moved ownership quickly, and its design handed most of it to insiders. Chubais’s programme gave every citizen a voucher with a face value of 10,000 roubles, about 144 million in all, which could be invested in auctions of shares or sold for cash. To win the support of factory directors, the law let employees and managers buy a controlling stake in their own firms, and most chose that option. Managers then bought up workers’ shares, and a few entrepreneurs bought vouchers cheaply; at Uralmash the businessman Kakha Bendukidze gained control this way. The costs fell on people with fixed incomes: output fell by 14.5% in 1992, wages and pensions arrived months late, and male life expectancy dropped from about 64 years in 1990 to under 58 in 1994. Beyond Russia the arrows show refugees: Russians moving back from Central Asia, Georgians fleeing Abkhazia after Sukhumi fell, Tajiks fleeing south into Afghanistan. Privatisation made reform hard to reverse, and it convinced many Russians that the state’s wealth had been handed to a few.

The struggle over reform became a struggle over the state itself, and it ended with tanks. Russia was still governed under an amended Soviet constitution that gave both the president and the Congress of People’s Deputies, a large Soviet-era parliament able to rewrite the constitution, a claim to supreme authority, so neither side would yield. The Congress forced Gaidar out in December 1992, and on 21 September 1993 Yeltsin dissolved it by a decree that the Constitutional Court ruled illegal. Deputies barricaded themselves inside the White House, and on 3 October their armed supporters attacked the mayor’s office and the Ostankino television centre; the next morning tanks shelled the parliament into surrender. In December a referendum approved a new constitution with 58.4% of the vote, while the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party won the largest share of the votes cast for parties, a sign that hardship had pushed many voters towards nationalism. Russia’s democracy acquired a powerful president at the price of using force to settle its first constitutional crisis.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Soviet economy left too much money and too few goods. Perestroika had left a huge overhang of savings, a budget financed by printing money and an empty network of state shops. Holding prices down only meant longer queues and more rationing, while letting them go meant sudden inflation. Any government in 1992 would have had to choose between these bad options, and Gaidar chose to free prices at once in the belief that delay would only make the shock larger.

Reformers believed speed protected reform. Gaidar, Chubais and their Western advisers feared that communists and the old ministries would block change if it moved slowly, as they had blocked Gorbachev’s. Fast privatisation was meant to create a class of owners with a stake in the new system, making a return to planning impossible. The goal of irreversibility shaped choices that put speed above fairness or careful design.

Two branches claimed the same authority. Russia entered independence with a parliament elected in 1990 under Soviet rules and a president elected in 1991, governed by a constitution that gave both of them supreme powers. As inflation and falling living standards made reform unpopular, the parliament turned against the president’s government. Without agreed rules for resolving the conflict, each side used the powers it had until force decided between them.

The Union’s collapse broke trade and supply. Soviet factories had depended on suppliers spread across fifteen republics, and independence turned these links into foreign trade, often paid in roubles that new states were printing on their own. Until 1993 Russia shared its currency with republics that could create rouble credits, which fed inflation. Output fell as supply chains broke, so part of the decline blamed on shock therapy came from the dissolution of the Union itself.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A new owning class took shape. Privatisation created millions of nominal shareholders and a much smaller group of managers, bankers and traders who gained real control. The bankers who built fortunes in these years, among them Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, would soon lend money to the state in exchange for its best companies. Ownership had changed hands faster than the laws meant to govern it.

A presidency above parliament. The constitution of December 1993 gave the president power to appoint governments, issue decrees and dissolve the Duma. Yeltsin used these powers to govern through the crises of the 1990s, including the decision to go to war in Chechnya, and his successor inherited a constitutional framework already tilted towards a strong executive.

The borderlands were left to Russia’s soldiers. Ceasefires in Transnistria in 1992, South Ossetia in 1992, Abkhazia in 1994 and Karabakh in 1994 left Russian troops as peacekeepers or garrisons in several successor states. Russia’s role in these conflicts gave it lasting influence over its neighbours, and it set precedents for how Moscow would treat breakaway regions inside its own borders.

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?

Critics such as Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski argue that freeing prices and selling assets before building institutions caused hyperinflation, theft and a fall in output deeper than the Great Depression in America. Defenders such as Anders Åslund and Yegor Gaidar reply that the Soviet economy was already collapsing by 1991, with empty shops, no reserves and a budget financed by printing money, and that the breakup of the Union broke supply chains no policy could have saved. Some argue that Russia’s reforms were too timid, since inflation continued because the central bank kept printing money. Comparisons cut both ways: Poland’s rapid reforms worked better, while China’s gradualism worked in a very different society. A strong answer distinguishes the collapse that Russia inherited from the way its costs were distributed, and it asks who decided that distribution. The transferable insight is that markets become fair only when the institutions that govern them already exist, however fast or slowly the change is made.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The economist who ended Soviet price controls came from the heart of Soviet culture. Yegor Gaidar’s grandfathers were Arkady Gaidar, the author of children’s adventure stories that generations of Soviet pupils read in school, and Pavel Bazhov, whose Ural folk tales became a classic Soviet book and a famous ballet score. His father was a naval officer and Pravda correspondent who had reported from Cuba. Gaidar himself worked as an economics editor of the party’s theoretical journal Kommunist, the ideological voice of the Central Committee, before becoming the architect of Russia’s market reforms at 35.

CHAPTER 11 · 1994–1998 · 1996

A State at War with Itself

Russia’s weakness began with the bargain that held the federation together. During the struggle with Gorbachev, Yeltsin had told the republics inside Russia, homelands of non-Russian peoples, to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow”, and Tatarstan, Sakha and others declared themselves sovereign in 1990, claiming that their laws overrode Moscow’s, the dashed outlines on the maps of 1990–94. Regional leaders kept tax revenue, controlled local police and courts and struck deals with Moscow. Tatarstan, an oil-rich Volga republic whose population was about two-fifths Russian, held a referendum on sovereignty in 1992 and then signed a treaty in February 1994 that left it inside Russia with control over its oil, budget and much of its law. Dozens of regions signed similar deals by 1998. Federal tax collection collapsed, firms paid each other in goods, and the state paid teachers, doctors and soldiers months late. Russia held together by bargaining, and the bargains left the centre short of money and authority.

Chechnya shows what happened when bargaining failed and a weak state chose force. Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, had declared Chechnya independent in November 1991, and Russian troops withdrew in 1992. In December 1994, after a covert attempt to oust him had failed, Yeltsin ordered an invasion. Three columns advanced on Grozny from the north, west and east, and the New Year’s Eve assault ended in disaster for poorly trained conscripts, young men drafted for compulsory service. The army then took the city by artillery and air bombardment that killed tens of thousands of civilians by March 1995. In June 1995 fighters under Shamil Basayev seized a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, taking more than 1,500 hostages; about 130 people died by the official count and about 165 by others. In August 1996 Chechen fighters retook Grozny, and Alexander Lebed signed the Khasavyurt accord, which ended the war and postponed the question of independence. Estimates of the dead run from about 35,000 to 100,000, most of them civilians.

The state that could not win in Chechnya also sold its best assets to the men who financed it. In 1995 the banker Vladimir Potanin proposed that banks lend the government money secured on its shares in major companies, and the very banks that bid then ran the auctions. Potanin’s Oneximbank took Norilsk Nickel for $170.1 million, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Menatep took Yukos for about $309 million. These oligarchs, tycoons with political power, and their television channels then backed Yeltsin against the Communist Gennady Zyuganov in 1996, and he won the run-off with 53.8%. Yet the state still could not tax the economy. It borrowed through short-term bonds, IOUs repayable within months, at ever higher interest rates, wages went unpaid, and in May 1998 miners blocked railways in the rail war. When oil prices fell and investors fled after the Asian financial crisis, the government defaulted on 17 August 1998 and the rouble lost about two-thirds of its value within weeks. Privatised wealth and public poverty had grown side by side, and in 1998 the bill for both arrived together.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The state could not collect its own taxes. Privatisation and inflation had left a state whose revenue depended on large firms that paid late, in goods or not at all. The regions kept much of what they collected, and the new rich moved money abroad. Without revenue the government could not pay its army, its officials or its debts, and every crisis of these years, from the poor performance of conscripts in Grozny to the default of 1998, grew from that gap.

The regions had taken power as the Union fell. In 1990–91 Yeltsin had encouraged the republics inside Russia to claim sovereignty in order to weaken Gorbachev. Afterwards Moscow had to negotiate with regional leaders who controlled resources, police and votes. Bilateral treaties kept most of them inside the federation, and they also turned Russia into a patchwork of special deals, an echo of the domains that Japan’s leaders had abolished in 1871.

Chechnya’s history made compromise harder. The Chechens had resisted Russian conquest in the nineteenth century and suffered the deportation of their entire nation in 1944, from which survivors returned only in 1957. Dudayev’s demand for full independence drew on that memory, and the absence of Russian authority after 1991 allowed weapons and smuggling to flourish. Moscow’s refusal to negotiate seriously with an elected Chechen leader and its belief in a quick victory turned a political problem into a war.

The government needed cash and a re-election. Yeltsin’s government turned to the banks because it needed cash and a re-election at once, with the budget empty and the 1996 election approaching. Under the loans-for-shares scheme, banks lent the treasury money against shares in the best state companies, and when the state did not repay they auctioned the shares, usually to themselves, much like a pawnbroker selling an unredeemed pledge to his own relatives. Once they owned the companies, the bankers had every reason to keep Yeltsin in power. Short-term political survival thus shaped one of the largest transfers of wealth in modern history.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Oligarchs became a power in politics. After 1996 men such as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky used their banks and television channels to influence ministers and elections, and Berezovsky briefly served as deputy head of the Security Council. Their power depended on the Kremlin’s weakness. When a stronger president arrived, he would move against the most political of them first.

An unresolved war and a humiliated army. The Khasavyurt accord left Chechnya effectively independent, ruled by the elected president Aslan Maskhadov, who struggled to control warlords and kidnapping gangs. Many officers regarded the accord as a betrayal, and many Russians blamed Chechens for kidnappings and bombings. Raids from Chechnya into neighbouring Dagestan in 1999 would provide the occasion for a second war.

The default cleared the ground for recovery. The devaluation of 1998 made imported goods expensive and Russian products competitive, and output began to grow in 1999. When oil prices rose again, the state’s revenue recovered quickly. Yeltsin’s successor would govern a country emerging from its deepest crisis, with a budget refilled by oil, and he would take much of the credit for the recovery.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The case that weak institutions produced the oligarchs is strong: courts could not enforce contracts, the tax service could not collect revenue, and a government desperate for money and votes traded assets for loans and support, so the oligarchs were filling a vacuum. The case that they deepened the weakness is also strong. Once they owned media, banks and natural resources, they lobbied for tax exemptions, captured regulators and used their channels to shape elections, which kept the state weak. Writers such as the journalist David Hoffman and the political scientist Daniel Treisman describe a cycle in which each fed the other. A strong answer explains the mechanism of that cycle with evidence, such as loans-for-shares and the 1996 election, and asks why it was broken only by a president who restored central power by curbing the media and the courts as well. The transferable insight is that markets built before the rule of law tend to create owners who prefer to keep the law weak.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 campaign used the slogan “Vote or lose”, aimed at young voters, and in June the 65-year-old president danced on stage at a rock concert in Rostov-on-Don in front of the cameras. Just over two weeks later, between the two rounds of voting, he suffered a serious heart attack. His staff kept it secret, showing old footage and issuing statements in his name, and voters learned the truth only after he had won the run-off. In November he underwent quintuple bypass surgery, performed by the Russian surgeon Renat Akchurin with the American heart surgeon Michael DeBakey advising.

EPILOGUE · 1999–2000 · 2000

Two Transitions Compared

War made Putin, and the way it began still divides historians. Yeltsin appointed Putin, head since 1998 of the FSB, the KGB’s successor as Russia’s security service, on 9 August 1999, two days after fighters led by Shamil Basayev entered Dagestan, the arrows crossing from Chechnya on the map. Between 4 and 16 September bombs destroyed apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing about 300 people. The government blamed Chechen militants, yet when residents found explosives in an apartment basement in Ryazan on 22 September and the men who planted them proved to be FSB officers, the FSB called it a training exercise; no independent inquiry has settled the questions this raised. On 1 October Russian forces entered Chechnya, and after weeks of bombardment took Grozny, which the United Nations later called the most destroyed city on earth. Putin’s promises of victory made him Russia’s most popular politician, and the war delivered him the presidency.

Putin used that mandate to restore the central state that Yeltsin had weakened. Putin’s first decree as acting president gave Yeltsin immunity from prosecution, and the early election helped Putin win in March 2000 with 52.9%. Within months he divided Russia into seven federal districts, super-regions each supervised by a presidential envoy, ordered regional laws brought into line with federal ones, so the special treaties that Tatarstan and other regions had won in the 1990s were wound down. State prosecutors pursued the independent television channel NTV, and the oligarchs, tycoons who had turned wealth into political power, were told to stay out of politics in exchange for keeping their fortunes. The map of 2000 also shows NATO, the Western military alliance led by the United States, taking in its first members from the former Soviet bloc: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in blue, a move Moscow resented. The Russian state was rebuilt largely by narrowing the democracy of the 1990s.

Comparing the two cases shows why transitions succeed or fail and who pays. Both began as revolutions from above, led by members of the old elite: in Japan samurai of Satsuma and Chōshū, hereditary warrior-officials, and in the Soviet Union party reformers. Japan’s leaders faced a foreign threat that united them, so they could abolish the domains, the lords’ semi-independent territories, within three years and spend two decades building revenue, an army, industry and schools before granting a constitution that limited participation. Soviet reformers opened politics first, and because the republics gained elected parliaments before Moscow could offer them a working economy, the centre lost control of them; Russia then freed prices and sold state property before courts, taxes or regulators could govern a market, so the gains flowed to insiders. Japan’s costs fell on peasants, mill girls, the Ainu of Hokkaido and the people of annexed Ryukyu, and then on Taiwanese and Koreans; Russia’s fell on its own citizens’ savings, wages and lives, and on Chechnya and the borderlands. Japan built a strong state and exported much of its cost; Russia lost an empire, built a market and then rebuilt a strong state at the expense of its new freedoms.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Chechnya’s interwar chaos and the Dagestan raid. After the Khasavyurt accord, Chechnya’s elected president Aslan Maskhadov could not control field commanders such as Shamil Basayev, and kidnapping for ransom became an industry. In August 1999 Basayev and Khattab led an armed incursion into Dagestan to support a local Islamist rising. The raid gave Moscow a reason for a new war, and it allowed Russia’s leaders to present the conflict as a defence of the country against terrorism.

Yeltsin needed a successor who would protect him. By 1999 Yeltsin was ill, deeply unpopular and threatened by corruption investigations involving his family and associates. His circle searched for a successor who could win an election and guarantee the outgoing president’s safety. Putin, loyal, disciplined and unknown to the public, fitted that need, and his first decree as acting president granted Yeltsin immunity.

The 1998 crisis discredited the reformers and the oligarchs. The default destroyed savings for the second time in a decade and ended the credibility of the governments that had promised a quick transition to Western prosperity. Many Russians associated democracy and markets with chaos, theft and humiliation. That mood created demand for a leader who promised order, and it made the curbing of the oligarchs and the independent media popular with much of the public.

Oil prices rose again. World oil prices, which had fallen to around ten dollars a barrel in late 1998, roughly tripled by 2000. Revenue flowed back into the budget, wages and pensions were paid on time, and growth returned. As in the 1970s, oil gave Moscow resources that did not depend on reform, and this time the windfall helped finance the reconstruction of central power.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The centre reclaimed the regions. Putin’s federal districts, super-regions each supervised by a presidential envoy, his control over the upper house of parliament and his demand that regional laws match federal ones ended the bargaining federalism of the 1990s, in which each region negotiated its own deal with Moscow, and from 2005 governors were appointed instead of elected. The change echoed, in a softer form, Japan’s abolition of its domains in 1871. In both cases a weak centre became strong by taking power from the regions, though the Kremlin was reclaiming powers lost in 1990–91 while Japan’s new government seized powers no Japanese centre had ever held.

The war in Chechnya became a long insurgency. After Grozny fell, fighting continued in the mountains for years, accompanied by terrorist attacks inside Russia, and Moscow governed Chechnya through a loyal Chechen leadership under Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan. The counter-terrorist operation was officially ended only in 2009. Human rights groups documented disappearances and killings on a large scale throughout.

Two transitions, two strong states. Meiji Japan’s emperor-centred constitution and powerful military later allowed the army to escape civilian control, and Japan’s empire expanded into China in the 1930s. Russia’s restored “vertical of power” narrowed elections, media and courts in the decades after 2000. Both transitions created states strong enough to survive, and both left limits on democracy that later leaders could exploit.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

By the measures its leaders chose, Meiji Japan succeeded more clearly: within forty years it ended the unequal treaties, built industry, schools and a constitution, and defeated two great powers. Russia in 2000 had lost an empire, seen output fall by about 40% and suffered millions of excess deaths. Yet the comparison needs to be made with care. Russia did create a market economy, private property and a decade of competitive elections, and it grew quickly after 1999, while Japan’s success rested on authoritarian institutions, cheap labour and colonial conquest, and its state slid into militarism. Criteria matter: success for a state differs from success for its people, its minorities or its neighbours. Historians such as Carol Gluck and Stephen Kotkin warn against judging transitions only by their end points. A strong answer compares leadership, sequencing, the international setting and the distribution of costs, and reaches a judgement that names its criteria. The transferable insight is that a transition’s success depends on who is asked, and the answer of those who paid deserves equal weight.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Vladimir Putin’s rise was among the fastest of any modern head of state. In June 1996 he lost his job as deputy mayor of St Petersburg when his patron, the reformist mayor Anatoly Sobchak, was defeated for re-election. He moved to a post managing Kremlin property, the department that ran the presidency’s buildings and resorts, became head of the FSB security service in July 1998, prime minister in August 1999 and acting president on 31 December 1999. Less than four years separated unemployment from the presidency, and he had never stood in an election before March 2000.