The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

48 Ë The Russo-Japanese War

Dekanozishvili himself died of consumption in France in 1910. He missed Georgia

greatly. Before he died, he said:

I’m nished, but it is not the Russians who have nished me. It’s the want of some good Georgian

air to clear my lungs.... I wish I could smell the mountain air and the pines below Kazbek [a

mountain in Georgia: it was here that, according to Greek mythology, Prometheus was chained

to a rock as punishment for stealing re for human use] just once more.... I have never given

way to the Russians. They put me in prison. They beat me. After I escaped they always hunted

me. After that they tried to bribe me to submit, and they even promised to let me live in Tiis –

think of it, to go back and live again in Tiis – if I would not work against them. I never agreed.

God curse them.¹¹⁶

He died a Georgian patriot: until his death he believed that “one day God will make

Georgia free and triumphant. I can see it. Georgia triumphant. Georgia great and Geor-

gia free.”¹¹⁷

Behind the scenes, however, Akashi’s operations did contribute invisibly but sub-

stantially to Russia’s defeat in its war against Japan. As Abraham Ascher has noted

regarding Poland:

For the Tsarist government, unrest in Poland proved to be very costly indeed. Even before the

revolution [of 1905], early in 1904, it maintained an army of 250,000 men in Poland, larger than

the one then in the Far East; and by mid-1905, the government felt obliged to increase it by 50,000

men, this at a time when every soldier was needed at the front. It can also be argued that because

such a large military force was tied down in Poland, the government found it more dicult to cope

with unrest in other parts of the Empire, which compelled it eventually to grant concessions when

it would have preferred not to.¹¹⁸

Whether Tokyo considered the results sucient to justify Japan’s vast expenditure on

its European intelligence operations is unknown. In any event, in Asia Japan’s opera-

tions proved far more eective than Russia’s. Russia failed to take Japan’s threat seri-

ously enough: it was to be a short, victorious little war over “little brown monkeys,” as

Tsar Nicholas was said to have called the Japanese. But Russia had few specialists on

Japan and few speakers of the Japanese language when the war began and so Russia

miscalculated its enemy.¹¹⁹By contrast, Japan had been training Russian specialists

for some years and had been practicing elaborate intelligence and counterintelligence

operations since well before the war. According to incomplete data collected by the

116 Armstrong,Unending Battle, 196–97.
117 Armstrong,Unending Battle, 198.
118 Abraham Ascher,The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1988), 158.
119 See Bruce W. Manning, “Miscalculating One’s Enemies: Russian Military Intelligence before the
Russo-Japanese War.”War in History13, no. 2 (2006), 141-70.