The Georgia Effect

While the plight of the average Frenchman left them with the perception that their national leadership had abandoned them to a degree, the exact opposite was true across the continent where Boulanger’s main ally, Czar Nicholas II was unwisely trying to give the impression that he was everywhere. From one end of the empire to the other there was hardly a street corner that did not have a poster of his face plastered on a building wall. If Nicholas had only known what people were saying about these posters he might have had them all removed. Many of the posters had been up since the start of the war and nobody had thought to replace them. They were faded, worn, and peeling at the edges and a good number of people thought them a perfect metaphor for the state of their empire.

Of course, much criticism that has been heaped on Nicholas is not so much unfair as it is, missing the point. Nicholas was not an evil man that wished to make people suffer and, if what the evidence suggests is true, he would not have known how to do so had that been his goal. Nicholas was very disconnected and not just from his empire. He seems to have had a very skewed picture reality in general. The simple fact was that his army was winning, he knew it, and assumed all was well as long as this remained the case. He only dealt with his internal problems when they blew up in his face and the very first incident of this was in Georgia.

While Nicholas was aware of the fact that he had bandit problems in much of his empire, up till now he had treated them as minor affairs, best suited for local police. This is perhaps the reason why, in a place like Georgia, it got out of hand. The local population had no love for the police and found themselves far more sympathetic to the bandits. After all, as one man reasoned, “the bandits only rob me occasionally while the police do it on a daily basis.” The validity of this observation is debatable but, what is not is that people did deal with the police far more than the bandits who were now calling themselves rebels. The Tiflis Governorate had been hated before the war and their enforcement of domestic war policies was even more so.

None of the success of the rebels would have been possible had it not been for their leader, Joseph Jughashvili, who was now being called in the newspapers, “Tiflis Joe.” His nick name was a good example of exactly how effective Joe was. It also demonstrates exactly what kind of war he was fighting. All sources point to the fact that it was Joe who personally coined the nickname and that he put a great deal of thought in it. The name suggested and conjured up images of someone sitting on a throne in Tiflis when, in fact, Joe could not go anywhere near there without being arrested. The people inside of Georgia knew the truth but, elsewhere, in places where it really mattered, they did not.

There is also another aspect of the name that is even far more important. Jughashvili had to do more than invent his persona, he had to get it into the papers and the fact that he did is far more substantial. Russia’s official press was state run but, that did not mean they could ignore things that began showing up in foreign newspapers or, in unofficial handbills which were very common in Russia at the time. Once the name and story were out there, the state run papers had to deal with it and they botched the job horribly. Their articles seemed to be more aimed at appeasing their emperor than reporting information. They never seemed to catch on that the horrible things they said about “Tiflis Joe” was only making him more popular with the population at large and, more important, not just in Georgia.

The real problem was that Nicholas was now believing the lies of his own propaganda machine that was, at best, incompetent to begin with. He felt he had to deal with this “rebellion in Georgia” even if his own advisors tried to explain that this was a minor affair. His cabinet did have a point in that the collective actions of the bandits were militarily negligible. In fact, the single biggest action taken by Jughashvili was robbing a train in the Caucus mountains. Their haul had been the equivalent in today’s value of a little over five hundred dollars, most of which came out of the pockets of passengers.

Still, Nicholas had a point and, for once, one can argue here that he was actually right. What is crucial to remember here is that the situation in Alaska had to be on his mind. The battle of Forty North appeared to be concrete proof that St Petersburg had lost control of Russia’s North American colony. Now Georgia was up in arms and there were reports of incidents flooding in from all over the empire. Nicholas felt that it was time to deal with these traitors. The significance of their actions were not as relevant as the fact that everyone knew these things were happening. Given that logic, reasoned Nicholas, people had to see their emperor acting in the name of law and order.

One has to wonder why Nicholas felt comfortable enough to open up another front on his own nation and particularly when the military was already stretched too thin. The answer to this question was simple enough because, at the time, Russia was un-disputably winning the war. While things were not going as well as hoped in the Balkans, the situation was still under control. While there had been no decisive victories in the far east, it was clear the Japanese had been soundly halted. The most important of fronts, at least to Russia, was Poland and here, there was no question about who currently had the upper hand.

Field Marshall Waldersee had been caught preparing to launch an offensive of his own and, as a result, his troops were not prepared to defend the ground they held. The Russians caught them by surprise and two months later, it looked as if Prussia was about to fall. After that, the road to Berlin would be wide open and Nicholas could see that light at the end of the tunnel. When looking at it in his shoes, it’s understandable why he thought this was a good time to begin putting the empire back together.

So it was that, the army was told in no uncertain terms, they would maintain order in the empire. What Nicholas did not understand, when he issued his decree, was exactly what kind operation he had just told his general staff to perform. Soldiers are generally not the most political of animals but, in the case of the Russians, this was not entirely true. They understood enough to realize that they could not do civil pacification missions with the kinds of conscripts their army was primarily composed of at this point. If a man is ordered to shoot at his neighbors, more times than not, he will throw down his gun and flee or, worse yet, join his neighbors.

This meant using what was left of Russia’s professional peace time army. Currently those men were in Poland and driving on Konigsberg. This was the reason the generals argued against these orders but, Nicholas would hear nothing of it. That’s why the Russian General Staff appointed a cavalry general, a man by the name of Alexander Samsonov, to command the pacification operation. They gave him some troops and then washed their hands of it. This would prove to be not just one mistake but, many.