1
The Neva River cut through the center of St. Petersburg, a mighty artery of
ice. On its surface flowed a temporary electric tramway as well as horse-
drawn sleighs. The sleigh drivers, bound in sheepskin, their beards white with
icicles from their breath, followed paths outlined with pine branches. Police
patrols scanned the river for thin spots, marking these with red flags, but in
most areas, the ice was now thick enough for workers to cut out piano- sized
blocks that would be stored for the hot summer months. Skating rinks dotted
the river, enjoyed by those fortunate enough to have leisure time. Below the
frozen surface, the water surged inexorably toward the Gulf of Finland, but
that was a distant thought to the people of St. Petersburg who had gathered
on the Neva and its banks to celebrate the Blessing of the Waters. It was
January 6, 1905.
Nicholas II began the day's ceremonies with an inspection of the
troops in one of the many grand vaulted halls of the Winter Palace. In his
dark blue, gold-studded uniform of the famed Preobrazhensky Guards
Regiment, he walked smartly along the lines of men, stopping now and again
with the greeting, "Good morning, my children," to which came the swift
reply, "Good health to Your Majesty." A slight man, five foot, seven inches
tall, the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias was known for his tender
smile and remorseful blue eyes. At thirty-six years of age, he radiated little of
the authority of his father, Alexander III, in whose shadow he perpetually fell.
Although Nicholas was weighed down with concern over Russia's war with
Japan, now almost a year old, he could expect the day's ceremonies, a
blend of religious observance and military pageantry, to lift his spirits.
After the inspection, he proceeded through the 1,054-room
baroque palace, a quarter-mile-long monument to the immense, and
outrageously concentrated, wealth of the nation. The route through the vast,
richly adorned chambers was crowded with people hoping for a glance or a
nod from the tsar: Imperial Guards in white gala uniforms with gold and silver
helmets crested with the double-headed Russian eagle, Cossacks in long
blue robes holding drawn sabers, senators in bright scarlet coats, diplomats
and dignitaries in their finest regalia, admirals and generals nearly toppling
over with medals, and ladies of the court in flowing dresses of pale green and
pink.
Nicholas escorted his mother, the dowager empress, by the arm.
His uncle, Grand Duke Alexis, accompanied Tsarina Alexandra, followed by
the rest of the royal family. The empresses and grand duchesses wore velvet
robes and glittered with diamonds, pearls, and other precious stones. Led by
the imperial court's grand marshal, who walked backward and carried a
golden staff, they marched from hall to hall, accompanied by the national
hymn. Finally, they passed through the 1812 Military Gallery, a long corridor
with 332 portraits of Russian officers who fought against Napoleon, and into
the palace cathedral. Icons of the patron saints of the imperial family lined
the gilded chamber, and the brilliant morning sun shined through the circular
windows of the cupola.
In a robe laden with gold and silver, the metropolitan of St.
Petersburg, the head of the city's Russian Orthodox Church, began the mass
at noon. Nicholas bowed his head and prayed; a heavy incense of cloves and
rose oil saturated the air. Surrounded by so many symbols of his power, and
the people invested in its continuance, Nicholas might have believed his
prayer to God of January 1, that "in the coming year He will give Russia a
victorious end of the war, a firm peace and quiet life without disturbances,"
would soon be answered favorably. After all, the previous year, God had
finally blessed him with a son, Alexis.
But centuries of history had shown that the people of Russia, not
God, had fulfilled most of the tsar's wishes. The city of St. Petersburg, for
instance, raised to give Peter the Great his foolhardy "paradise," came at the
cost of the lives of tens of thousands of serfs who drowned or died of cholera
while digging the foundations of its first buildings in low marshland prone to
serious floods.
In his private life, Nicholas liked to play the part of a common
Russian, dressing in a peasant blouse, eating borscht, and taking up modest
rooms within his grand palaces, but he understood little of peasant lives.
Another St. Petersburg existed beyond the towering gold cupolas, elegant
mansions, and richly maintained government and military buildings that lined
the Neva's granite quays. In this St. Petersburg, as in other Russian cities,
workers trudged through dirty snow to labor at factories, where fourteen-hour
days yielded only meager wages. Their bosses treated them no better than
slaves, and the workers lived in windowless bunkhouses, up to eleven to a
room, with wooden benches for beds, rags for pillows, and walls covered with
soot from kerosene lamps. They wanted better pay and living conditions —
and they had recently grown willing to strike for them.
Across the breadth of the Russian Empire — one-sixth of the
world's landmass at that time, stretching from the Gulf of Finland east across
Siberia to the warm Pacific waters, from the icebound Arctic in the north
down to the Black Sea and the borders of the Ottoman Empire — lived the
tsar's 135 million subjects, the majority of whom were peasants who worked
the land and never left their villages, except perhaps to serve as cannon
fodder for their tsar's wars. None of these people would ever see the good
Tsar Batyushka (Father-Tsar) that folktales and tradition held him to be, this
individual selected by God himself to care for them. All they knew, however,
was that many of their sons led off to war never returned, that the land they
tilled barely kept them from starving even in the best of years, and that the
tsar never appeared to hear their pleas for help.
At 12:45 p.m., the metropolitan finished the mass and the great
doors to the cathedral swung open. Nicholas joined another procession, this
one led by chanting clergy down the white Carrara marble staircase and
outside to the Neva for the Blessing of the Waters. Bareheaded and
cloakless, as tradition dictated, Nicholas was struck by the cold like a slap
across the face.
As he walked down crimson carpet to the open-air pavilion on the
Neva, specially erected for the ceremony with a blue, star-encrusted dome
topped with a cross, he could only see devoted throngs around him. They
lined the quays, the palace bridge, the steps of the stock exchange, and the
river itself. Soldiers kept them at a proper distance. From the windows of the
cherry-red Winter Palace, members of his court pressed their noses to the
glass, watching with quiet reverence.
A hole had been cut into the ice underneath the pavilion. The
flowing water underneath, warmer than the air outside, caused steam to rise
from the opening. The ceremony began. Nicholas kissed the hand of the
metropolitan and the Holy Book. A choir sang solemn liturgical hymns, and
then the metropolitan carried a large gold cross, linked to a chain, to the hole
in the ice. After he blessed the Neva by dipping the cross three times into the
water, he gave his benediction. Then, across the river, a cannon from the
Fortress of Peter and Paul thundered in salute. Its report rattled the Winter
Palace's windows. Blue smoke drifted across the river. Simultaneously,
church bells rang throughout the city.
Then from across the river, quickly, came another flash of light
and a boom. This time the cannon's report was distinctly different, "more
rolling and peculiarly warlike," as one witness described it. Panes of glass
shattered in the upper windows of the Winter Palace. Someone had loaded a
cannon with live rounds instead of blanks. Nicholas crossed himself, believing
someone was trying to kill him, but he did not move for cover. Not even a
step.
Nicholas was morbidly unafraid of dying. His younger sister Olga
once commented that he was resigned to losing his life on the throne. Murder
had been the fate of his grandfather and almost half of the other tsars since
Ivan the Terrible ruled Russia. After all, Nicholas was born on May 6, making
his patron saint Job, who suffered horrible trials by God's hand. Nicholas
believed in the significance of such things.
The cannon fire stopped. A policeman at the pavilion's edge had
fallen; blood stained the snow by his head. Shrapnel had cut a nearby banner
in two. In the palace's Nicholas Hall, ladies and their escorts trembled;
several were seriously wounded, many covered in shards of glass. Admiral
Fyodor Avelan, minister of the navy, bled from a cut in his face. Yet while
shouts of alarm rang throughout the palace and guards scrambled to see
what had happened, the tsar completed the ceremony, received his blessing
with the sanctified water, and only then returned to the palace. His entourage
and the palace court waited for some reaction: anger, a tremble of fear, a hint
of gladness that he had survived — anything. He offered none. Eyes
downcast, he walked back inside the palace, not stopping or even turning to
inspect the damage.
The guard around the palace was doubled, the police hurried to
the fortress to investigate, but otherwise the event was soon put out of mind.
A state banquet was held while the pavilion, now embedded with shrapnel,
was disassembled. The hole in the ice soon closed in the cold. The
investigation never discovered whether the Imperial Guard loaded live rounds
by accident in a cannon directed at the pavilion where the Romanov family
was clustered.
At 4 p.m., Nicholas left the Winter Palace in his carriage, heading
to his retreat at Tsarskoye Selo, a half-hour's drive outside St. Petersburg.
The day's event represented a bad omen for the coming year. A tide of
discontent was rising among his people, and the Russo-Japanese War was
going badly: with the surrender of Port Arthur, a strategic Russian naval base
on the Yellow Sea, in December, and with the loss of numerous battles in the
Far East, Nicholas needed a military success to calm the people and restore
Russia's chances for victory over Japan.
His hope for such a success rested in a squadron of Russian
ships, led by Zinovy Petrovich Rozhestvensky, traveling eighteen thousand
miles around the globe to crush the Japanese navy.

That same day, Admiral Rozhestvensky and the nearly ten thousand men
under his command were waiting, quite literally, in Hellville, a town set on the
island Nossi-Bé, off the coast of Madagascar. His Second Pacific Squadron,
a motley collection of eight battleships, seven armored cruisers, nine torpedo-
boat destroyers, and a number of auxiliaries (tugboats, transports, a water-
condensing vessel, a hospital ship, and a floating repair shop), stood in the
harbor.
Rozhestvensky's orders from St. Petersburg were to remain at
anchor in Hellville and await reinforcements in the form of the Third Pacific
Squadron. The First Pacific, the squadron that Rozhestvensky had been sent
to connect with in the first place, had been lost when Port Arthur fell. On
hearing the news, two weeks before, that he was to stay in Hellville, the
admiral told his chief of staff to cable the Naval Ministry: "Tell them I wish to
be relieved of my command," he ordered. Then he shut his cabin door, bolting
it for good measure, and proceeded to have a mental breakdown.
By most accounts, the fifty-five-year-old Admiral Rozhestvensky
was one of the Russian navy's brightest lights. At his squadron's review
before departure from Revel in September 1904, standing by the side of
Nicholas II, he certainly looked the part. As one attendant described
him, "His broad shoulders were decorated with epaulets bearing monograms
and black eagles. Medals and stars glittered on his chest. . . . His stalwart
figure dominated not only the tsar but all the members of his suite and his
piercing black eyes seem to indicate a dauntless will. . . .He stood straight
as a ramrod, looking so resolutely at Nicholas that it seemed as if nothing
could stop him." Rozhestvensky had excelled at the Naval Academy, he had
shown his mettle during combat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and,
despite a reputation for bluntness and a fast, sometimes cruel temper, he
had climbed the naval ranks with his penchant for discipline and exactness,
as well as his clever hand at court politics.
When he accepted the command of the Second Pacific Squadron,
a position that would require him to travel from the Baltic to the Far East
along a route without Russian bases and at imminent risk of attack, to take
on the superior Japanese fleet in its own waters, he was falling on his own
sword — and he knew it. "We're now doing what needs to be done, defending
the honor of the flag," he said publicly before he departed. He understood well
that this squadron would either never reach its destination, or, if it did, would
likely face a massacre. Nonetheless, Nicholas was determined they should
go.
The tsar's execution of the war with Japan was as haphazard as
the reasons for its occurrence in the first place — ostensibly, asserting
territorial control in Korea and Manchuria. Nicholas had been led into the
easily avoidable conflict by his ministers: some were flattering his ambitions
of expanding the empire, others were mindful of their commercial interests in
the Far East, and a few thought a "little victorious war" would hold back a
revolution. These ministers found a welcome listener in Nicholas. In 1890, as
a young tsarevich on a grand tour of the East, he narrowly survived an
attempted assassination in Otsu, Japan, when an assailant leapt out of a
crowd with a sword, slashing Nicholas in the forehead; the assassin's
second thrust was parried, but Nicholas was left with a permanent scar. The
incident fostered a deep-seated loathing of the Japanese people, whom he
dismissed as "monkeys." His bellicose cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, also
goaded him toward war; a telegram sent to the tsar from the kaiser's yacht
reveals his attitude: "The Admiral of the Atlantic greets the Admiral of the
Pacific."
When war broke out after a surprise Japanese naval attack at Port
Arthur on January 26, 1904, the Russians rallied around the tsar in a fit of
patriotism. "We will only need to throw our caps at the enemy to make him
run away" was a common expression in the streets. But soon disaster
followed disaster on the battlefield. The military campaign was underfunded,
ill equipped, and poorly led. Russian generals fought a nineteenth-century
campaign, bayonet charges included, against a well-positioned enemy armed
with artillery. "Lambs brought to the slaughter," said one observer of the
Russian soldiers. For his part, Nicholas sent icons to his troops to boost
morale. They would have preferred more modern arms and perhaps fewer
officers feuding with one another or drinking champagne on the eve of battle.
Rozhestvensky knew that his mission was just another in a long
series of mistakes by the Russian high command, but if there had to be a
squadron, he believed he was the best man to lead it. He was not the only
one to suffer from this burden. Few of the sailors aboard the armada had any
clear understanding of why they were being sent to fight the Japanese. They
had been drafted into the navy from peasant farms or derelict warrens in the
cities' slums. Many could not read, and they viewed these battleships
as "iron monsters."On the first half of their journey from Libau, down the
western coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope, to Madagascar,
they endured hardships beyond imagination. In the best of circumstances,
the Russian navy was cruel to the lower ranks — sailors faced abusive
officers, tasteless food, cramped quarters, and back-numbing work — but
this journey descended to a different ring of hell altogether.
Forbidden to stop in most ports because assisting the Russians
would violate a country's neutrality, Rozhestvensky made sure the squadron
took on as much coal as possible from German merchant colliers that met
the ships along the way. Coaling at sea was dangerous in its own right, but
living with it stacked on the decks and in cabins, corridors, bathrooms,
workshops — everywhere — while steaming through the suffocating, 120-
degree tropics, was daily torture. Coal dust stung the eyes and choked the
lungs. Men collapsed from heat stroke or simply went mad from the daily
strain. Other horrors included the ravenous shipboard rats, the dysentery, the
decks so hot that they blistered bare feet, and the hurricanes, during which
fortyfoot waves washed sailors overboard, never to been seen again.
Somehow, Rozhestvensky managed to arrive in Madagascar with
most of his crew, though his orders to wait in Hellville destroyed the entire
crew's morale more than the heat and coal dust ever could. Rozhestvensky
was crushed. For several weeks afterward, his officers heard him moaning in
his locked cabin. When he next appeared, he looked twenty years older,
haggard and listless. Some of his staff wondered whether he had experienced
a stroke, since he now dragged his left leg. What they did know for sure, as
January turned into February, then March, was that their fleet was falling
apart.
Each day, black torpedo boats carried out to sea those stricken
dead by malaria, typhoid, or their own hand. After a single cannon shot, the
bodies, sewn in cloth, were let off the side. Those remaining in the harbor
suffered a host of illnesses, as well as rotten food, cloying heat, and torrential
rain. Many had tropical eczema, scratching themselves until they bled and
treating their weeping grazes with kerosene or eau de cologne. At night they
slept naked on mats on the decks. Monkeys, chickens, cows, hares, and
pigs, brought on board by the sailors, overran every ship. Their stench was
overwhelming. Cockroaches and rats swarmed through cabins. Moss and
barnacles grew thick on the ships' hulls, and sharks circled around the fleet,
eager to consume any bad meat thrown overboard.
Discipline collapsed. Men got stupefyingly drunk, gambled, stole
from the local Malagasies, and disobeyed their officers. Signs of mutiny
abounded, yet Rozhestvensky, who was reputed to have punched out a
sailor's teeth for a minor transgression, let them off easy. "How can I
intimidate men ready to follow me to the death by condemning them to be
hanged?" he asked his chief of staff. Order deteriorated further upon receiving
reports of mass strikes throughout Russia and how the tsar allowed the
butchery of his own people, women and children included, when they
marched on the Winter Palace to appeal for a better life. Revolution seemed
imminent. What was more, the newspaper editorials were pessimistic about
the squadron's own mission — writing that the armada was doomed to the
same fate as the one Spain sent against England in 1588.
Finally, on March 4, Rozhestvensky, who through sheer force of
will had taken back command of his ravaged fleet, decided that he had had
enough. He could no longer stand waiting for a fleet of ancient "self-sinkers" —
as he called the Third Pacific — that would likely prove a hindrance in a sea
fight. Defying his orders, the admiral left Hellville to steam across the vast
Indian Ocean. Unbeknownst to him, that day, thousands of Russian infantry
troops died in a rout south of the Manchurian city of Mukden. The battle,
where over half a million men confronted one another, was the largest of the
Russo-Japanese War, and of modern history. The Russians sacrificed ninety
thousand men at Mukden.
Proceeding at a sluggish six knots, experiencing engine
breakdowns and other severe mechanical problems such as one battleship's
loss of steering, the squadron made its way across the ocean. Lost to
Japanese scouts and the Russian high command for three weeks, the
squadron finally appeared off Singapore's coast in four columns; several days
later, it anchored in Camranh Bay off French Indochina. On direct orders, this
time from Nicholas himself, Rozhestvensky waited again for the Third Pacific.
A month later, the squadron arrived. Before dawn on May 14, the combined
fleet set out for the naval base in Vladivostok, where Rozhestvensky hoped to
service his battleships and restore his sailors' spirits before facing the
Japanese fleet. The squadron charted a course through the Korea Strait, the
narrow waters between the Japanese coast and Tsushima Island.
Rozhestvensky prayed they would elude their enemy in the mist and fog, but
his fortune, now in the hands of famed Japanese admiral Togo, would not
accommodate his wishes.

"Enemy squadron square 203 . . . apparently bearing eastern
passage." The 4:45 a.m. message from a Japanese scout came as welcome
news aboard Mikasa, the Japanese fleet's flagship. Admiral Togo Heihachiro,
who was five foot, three inches tall and weighed a scant 130 pounds, had
been waiting for the appearance of the Russians for months. At last, this hero
of the Japanese navy, responsible already for several brilliant triumphs over
the Russians, could finish off his enemy in one decisive battle. His Zeiss
binoculars around his neck, his black uniform buttoned tight under his chin,
and his beloved sword in a gold scabbard on his left hip, he calmly began to
give orders to his officers on the bridge. Sprays of saltwater splashed over the
decks as his fleet moved southeast from its base. A lone sailor sang, "And
raging storms dispel the morning dew. . . . So shall the triumph by our vessel
won . . . Scatter the Russian ships and all their crew."
By late morning, back on the Suvorov, Rozhestvensky watched
four Japanese cruisers shadow his fleet's movements like wolves scouting
their prey. There would be no slipping through to Vladivostok. Radio
intercepts indicated that Togo was on his way. The night before, the mood
throughout the Russian fleet had been one of nervous expectation. Sailors
slept by their guns or looked out over the railings into the black sea; in the
shadows cast by the moon they perceived torpedo boats that never
materialized, and they shared their fears. "She'll never get over it if I get
killed," said one. "Brrr! It's horrible on the bottom," said another.
Rozhestvensky had managed a couple of hours of sleep in an armchair on
the forward bridge but had been hunched over his charts from an early hour.
Despite the approaching battle, he ordered every ship to pay their respects to
the anniversary of the tsar's coronation. Priests moved quickly through the
prayers. Tots of vodka were raised: "To the health of His Majesty the Emperor
and Her Majesty the Empress! To Russia!"
Before the ceremony's end, action stations were called throughout
the fleet. After crossing themselves, sailors hurried to their posts to await the
battle. The morning mist cleared, and Tsushima's cliffs towered above them
to the west.
At 1:19 p.m., the admirals of the two fleets spotted black smoke
on the horizon and, minutes later, each other's fleets. At ten miles' distance,
the Japanese were a streak of uniform gray against the heavy, rolling seas.
The Russians, their battleship funnels painted yellow, made easy marks. On
paper, the two fleets were more or less evenly matched. They each had
twelve line-of-battle ships, and although the Japanese had more guns, the
Russians boasted heavier weapons. Togo held an advantage in speed and in
numbers of destroyers and torpedo boats, but this challenge was by no
means insurmountable if Rozhestvensky played his hand right. However, the
Russian admiral was no longer the bold, resolute leader who had left Libau
eight months previously.
From the day's beginning, Rozhestvensky, who was leading a
total of forty-eight ships into battle, weakened his chances by muddling the
chain of command and offering the sparest of battle plans. Through- out the
engagement, he issued only two orders, both before the first shot was fired.
His first order, given even before sighting the Japanese fleet, deployed
Rozhestvensky's fleet in a line-abreast formation (perhaps because the
admiral feared an attack from the east and did not want to be exposed). His
second order, delivered after spotting Togo's ships directly ahead of him,
remanded the first order, instructing his fleet to return to single-file, line-ahead
formation. This order came too late and only furthered the advantage of the
Japanese, who seized upon the Russians' confusion by perfectly executing
one of the most daring maneuvers in naval history.
At 1:55 p.m., as the two fleets jockeyed for position before
engaging, Togo lifted his right hand and cut a semicircle in the air. The
shout "Hard to port!" was raised throughout his ships. Due to the heavy seas
and smoke, Togo had misjudged the Russians' initial approach and found
himself poorly placed to follow his original plan of isolating two of his enemy's
divisions. After his ships passed from starboard to port in front of
Rozhestvensky's fleet, heading in the opposite direction, he gave the order to
completely reverse direction. For several minutes, his fleet would be exposed
at a single spot for the Russians to focus their fire. It was a gamble, but if the
ships survived the turn, his fleet could run on a parallel course, and then, with
their superior speed, the Japanese could cross in front of the enemy's
formation, an ideal vantage point from which to rake them with fire.
During the execution of the turn, guns roared from the flagship
Suvorov, but most of its shells fell wide and short. Worse, most of
Rozhestvensky's fleet, which should have been blanketing the Mikasa with
shells, was in chaos because of his second order to return to single- file
formation. Ships had to slow down, some to a complete stop, so as not to
ram those ahead of them. This also made them easy targets for the
devastatingly accurate Japanese gunners.
"Open fire! Open fire!" First Togo's Mikasa, then each ship coming
out of the turn, directed salvos from over five hundred guns at the Russian
flagship and at the Oslyabya, which spearheaded the fleet's second division
and was one of the ships that had pulled to a standstill. Within minutes, the
range of the Japanese shells closed. The Oslyabya, a modern yet oddly
shaped battleship with a high, sloping hull and tall stacks, received a large-
caliber hit at the waterline near the bow. The sea poured into the ship's
compartments, and soon it began to list dangerously to port, bow down. The
Japanese exploited their advantage, showering the Oslyabya with shell after
shell. The bow turret was ripped away, decapitating one sailor and crippling
the rest inside. While being carried below on a stretcher, a sailor with his foot
shorn off cried, "Monsters! Bloodsuckers! You see what you've started! May
you be swept off God's earth!" An officer stumbled about nearby, his chest
ripped open. Most of the shrieks and moans of the dying were lost in the
continuing barrage that turned the ship's hull and decks into confetti of
twisted steel. Fire leapt across the ship, the acid in the Japanese shells
feeding off the paint. The Oslyabya shook from bow to stern as it was struck
again and again. Soon most of the guns aboard were silenced. Dense black
smoke rose from every quarter, and the air bent in the intense heat. Chunks
of flesh scattered the decks where there had once been men. As the ship's
second offi- cer ran about in a panic, the bow eased deeper and deeper into
the water. Still the shells came. The captain, who had died three days before,
was lying in a coffin in the ship's chapel, the only one to enjoy peace that
day.
Admiral Togo stood unprotected on his upper bridge, one foot
forward, lips pursed, watching his fleet advance on the Russians and firing as
quickly as his crews could reload the guns. His staff officers tried to get him
to move to a safer position — twelve Russian shells had already hit the
Mikasa — but Togo liked his view. On the foremast to his side battle flags,
raised at the engagement's start, signaled that THE RISE OR FALL OF THE
EMPIRE DEPENDS UPON THIS ONE BATTLE. DO YOUR UTMOST,
EVERY ONE OF YOU.
In the Suvorov's cylindrical conning tower, Rozhestvensky
watched the battle unfold through the sliver of a porthole cut in the ten-
inchthick steel structure. The Oslyabya had fallen out of line. Most of the
fleet was in disarray from the savage Japanese attack, and Togo's ships had
closed to within two miles. The distance tightened every minute.
"Your Excellency, we must change the distance," yelled
Rozhestvensky's commander, over the roar of explosions. "They've got our
range already and they'll make it hot for us."
The admiral turned, a gleam in his eye. "Not so fast.We've got the
range too."
Above and all around him, the four-foot-long Japanese shells
wailed through the air before hitting. Outside Rozhestvensky's armored tower,
the Suvorov was in desperate shape. Men scrambled through smoke and over
slick pools of blood to help the injured, to escape the fires, or simply to take
cover from the rain of hot metal. The gunners continued at their task, but
most of the range-finder operators had been killed and the gunners were
essentially aiming in the dark. The main mast had disappeared. The signaling
halyards were gone. Throughout the ship, separate conflagrations began to
join into one leaping inferno.
At 2:30 p.m., the conning tower — the ship's brain, as one
observer put it — was hit. Twice. The armor deflected the force of the
broadside, but shell splinters ricocheted about the small chamber until they
sliced through flesh. Rozhestvensky and his commander suffered cuts on
their faces and arms. The helmsman and flag gunnery officer were killed and
now lay face-down at their instruments, blood coating the panels. On his
knees, the admiral stayed in the tower, but his telegraph and voice tubes
were damaged, his rudder was jammed, and he could see nothing through
the smoke and flames enveloping his ship. Less than half an hour into the
battle, Rozhestvensky had completely lost control of his fleet. The Russian
armada disintegrated, every man and ship for himself. Togo maintained his
attack in formation, knowing he had won.
At 2:50 p.m., the Oslyabya was the first battleship to sink.With
its engines stopped, guns silent, and bow underwater, the ship took an eight-
hundred-pound shell on the already-listing port side. Then another. Then
another. Water gushed through a hole "big enough to drive a troika through,"
as a survivor described it. As the ship went vertical, sailors spilled over the
sides into a sea of flame. An officer yelled, "Get away from the ship, the devil
take you! If you don't, you'll go down in the suck! Away!" Over two hundred
men never had even that small chance of escape. Locked under shellproof
hatchways and forgotten by their comrades, those in the engine rooms and
stokeholds went down with the ship, screaming for help in the darkness until
the cold sea closed over them.
By that time, Togo's fleet had already turned its broadsides on the
other Russian battleships. By 7 p.m., the battle was effectively over. Through
the night, Togo's torpedo boats and destroyers picked off those ships that
had avoided the day's annihilation. By the morning of May 15, the bodies of
thousands of Russian sailors littered the waters of the Korea Strait. With his
entire fleet, Togo surrounded the surviving four Russian battleships and
demanded their surrender. A few vessels had escaped during the night,
including a torpedo boat carrying a blood-smeared, delirious Admiral
Rozhestvensky, who had abandoned the Suvorov before it sank. A Japanese
destroyer captured him later that day.
In winning one of history's biggest naval battles, comparable in
scope and significance to Admiral Horatio Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, Togo
had lost a sum of three torpedo boats. Word reached St. Petersburg
the next day.

On the morning of May 16, the frozen surface of the Neva River was breaking
up. From the quays and surrounding streets, it sounded as if some invisible
force was striking the ice with a giant ax. First, cracks had appeared across
the surface, then gaps widened between chunks of ice. The river's surface, a
smooth blanket of white throughout the winter, was now crowded with clumps
of soot-gray ice. Slowly, the current began to move these enormous floes
downriver. They collided, spun, and broke apart into smaller pieces,
loosening the stubborn ice on the riverbanks. In the weeks ahead, the Neva's
flow would finally run clear into the Gulf of Finland. It was a relentless,
inevitable process.
Fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg that same morning, Nicholas
was horseback riding through Tsarskoye Selo. The air smelled of wet lilacs.
Nicholas treasured his country estate. Set behind a tall iron fence and
guarded by mounted Cossacks, Tsarskoye Selo was a paradise far removed
from the city's chaos. On the eight-hundredacre park where Nicholas
galloped stood two palaces with extensive gardens, a zoo, triumphal arches,
numerous chapels, paths weaving through forest groves, an artificial lake
dotted with sailboats — even a Chinese pagoda and Turkish baths.
Nicholas finished his ride in front of Alexander Palace, where he
had retreated after the Blessing of the Waters ceremony in January. Built a
century before, the hundred-room palace was modest compared to the
nearby Catherine Palace, which rivaled Versailles in size and opulence. Even
so, Nicholas and his family were not at a loss for luxury amidst the long
gilded halls and mauve boudoirs lit with crystal chandeliers and scented with
fresh-cut flowers. There, hundreds of smartly dressed servants tended to their
needs. As Nicholas walked through the palace that morning, however, the
luxurious surroundings must have been lost on him. He desperately awaited
news of Rozhestvensky's squadron.
The night before, he had shut himself away with his war council in
the walnut-paneled study, poring over charts to ascertain where the fleet
could be. His naval minister, Admiral Avelan, had reassured him that even if
Togo attempted to elude the Russian fleet, Rozhestvensky would draw the
Japanese out completely, even if he had to bombard one of their ports. Such
was the bravado of Nicholas's inner circle.
Wild rumors ran throughout St. Petersburg. Some talked of a
great Japanese victory. Others said that the Russian fleet had arrived in
Vladivostok unscathed; the newsboys in St. Petersburg were already selling
that story in the streets. But if Nicholas believed every wire report or consul
message, then Rozhestvensky had already successfully waged his fight a
month before in the Strait of Malacca off Indochina, and the tsar's worries
were over.
But they were not; he was very worried. The past four and a half
months had trampled his hope for a quiet, peaceful year. On January 9, three
days after he escaped death on the Neva, 120,000 workers and their families,
dressed in their Sunday best, had converged on the Winter Palace to petition
him to ease their oppression. The defenseless crowd, carrying icons and his
own portrait, refused to disperse, and his soldiers led cavalry charges against
them, killing 130 and wounding many more. "Bloody Sunday," many were
calling it.
Mayhem erupted in the days and weeks that followed. As one of
Nicholas's faithful described it at the time: "Strikes are rolling over Russia as
feathergrass over the steppe, outrunning each other, from Petersburg to
Baku, fromWarsaw to the heart of Siberia. Everybody is engaged . . .
workingmen, students, railway-conductors, professors, cigarette-makers,
pharmacists, lawyers, barbers, shop-clerks, telegraphists, schoolboys . . .
The atmosphere is overcharged. . . . People cross themselves asking 'What
is going to happen? What is going to happen?'" In the countryside,
Nicholas's "dear" peasants either ransacked their landowners' manor houses
or simply torched them to the ground. Most high officials feared for their lives.
On February 4, a terrorist assassinated the governor-general of Moscow,
Nicholas's uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, by throwing a bomb into his carriage
as he left the Kremlin. Noblemen-turned-liberals pressed for a voice in ruling
the country. Meanwhile, revolutionaries made it clear they would be satisfied
only with the tsar's head. By May, even though Nicholas could not expect
outright victory against Japan, he had to question what would happen within
Russia if Rozhestvensky failed.
As he walked through Alexander Palace after his ride, Nicholas
received his first reliable piece of information, a cable from the captain of the
cruiser Almaz, which had managed to elude the Japanese and had recently
arrived in Vladivostok. He reported that the Suvorov, the Oslyabya, and the
cruiser Ural were lost and the battleship Alexander crippled. The Almaz had
departed the Korea Strait before the battle had ended, but no other ships
were in Vladivostok. The captain asked in his cable, "Could it be that none of
the squadron's ships has reached Vladivostok?" It was inconceivable that all
the others had been lost.
Over the next two days, however, the terrible facts of the battle
arrived from the Far East. History has recorded different anecdotes depicting
Nicholas's reaction to the developing news. One account had him at a court
dinner receiving a telegram about the fleet, taking out his gold cigarette case,
and having his master of ceremonies announce, "His Imperial Majesty
permits smoking." In another story, he was riding on the imperial train with
his minister of war and reacted to the grim reports with élan, formulating new
plans for the war within minutes. Still another had him opening the dispatch
while playing tennis. "What a terrible disaster," he apparently said, then was
handed his racket and finished his game.
One or none of these may be true, but Nicholas was indeed
famous for retreating into himself, never exposing his emotions when dealing
with problems. Yet in his diary, usually reserved for pedantic accounts of his
meals, leisure activities, and the weather, he was forthcoming. On May 16
and 17, he was "depressed" and frustrated at the inadequate, often
contradictory news. On May 18, he wrote of a "difficult, painful, and sad"
feeling in his soul. The next evening, he seemed to come to terms with the
truth: "Now finally the awful news about the destruction of almost the entire
squadron in the battle has been confirmed. Rozhestvensky himself is a
captive!" In the same entry, he lamented how the gorgeous spring day had
only deepened his sorrow.
Government ministers, liberal groups, exiled revolutionaries, and
world leaders rushed to assign blame, forward their agenda, and predict the
tsar's political future. The Russian and international press followed every
move, often unabashedly pushing their own viewpoint. Yet nobody spoke
directly for the roughly 4,830 sacrificed at the Battle of Tsushima, nor for
twice that number wounded and captured. Until, that is, a band of sailors
from the Black Sea Fleet made their voices heard.

Copyright © 2007 by Neal Bascomb. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.