not to support a law that outlawed the hiring of those
with monarchist leanings; he was succeeded by Jules
Grévy.
MacMahon then retired, having never been a poli-
tician, as he noted in his memoirs. “I have remained a
soldier,” he wrote, “and I can conscientiously say that I
have not only served one government after another loy-
ally, but, when they fell, have regretted all of them with
the single exception of my own.” He died at his home in
Montcresson, Loiret, on 16 October 1893, and, follow-
ing a funeral with full military honors, he was laid to rest
in the crypt of the Invalides in Paris, where naPoleon
bonaParte had been interred some 80 years before.
References: “M’Mahon, General of France,” in Men of
the Time. Biographical Sketches of Eminent Living Charac-
ters. Also Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Women of the
Time (London: David Bogue, 1856), 520–522; Wind-
row, Martin, and Francis K. Mason, “MacMahon, Marie
Edmé Patrice Maurice de, Duc de Magenta,” in The
Wordsworth Dictionary of Military Biography (Hertford-
shire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997), 177–179;
Bruce, George, “Magenta,” in Collins Dictionary of Wars
(Glasgow, Scotland: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995),
149.
Makharoff, Stepan Osipovich
(Stepan Makharov, Stepan Makarov)
(1848/49–1904) Russian admiral
Born in the village of Nikolaev in the Ukraine on 27
December 1848 O.S. (or 8 January 1849 [N.S.]), Stepan
Makharoff was the son of Osip Makharoff, an officer in
the czarist navy. In 1858, he was transferred to the Far
East, and his wife and son traveled with him. That same
year, only nine years old, Stepan Makharoff was placed
in the National Maritime Academy located at Niko-
laevsk-na-Amure, where he learned the skills to enter the
Russian merchant marine corps. Coming to the atten-
tion of some of the commanders in the school, he joined
the Russian navy in 1864 and rose rapidly through a
series of promotions.
Makharoff saw his first action in the Russo-Turk-
ish War of 1877–78, when he commanded the gunboat
Grand Duke Constantine in a succession of hit-and-
run torpedo-boat attacks on ironclads in several Turk-
ish ports, including Sukhum Kalé. Following the end
of the conflict, he was promoted to the rank of captain
and named as an aide-de-camp to Czar Alexander III.
In 1880, working under the famed Russian general
Mikhail Dmitreyevich Skobelev, Makharoff saw action
in Russian Turkestan (now the independent nation of
Turkmenistan) and took part in Skobelev’s march to the
fortress of Geok-Tepe, whose surrender in December
1880 completed the Russian conquest of the region.
Another Russian officer who participated in Skobelev’s
mission was Alexei kuroPatkin, who, like Makharoff,
would figure largely in Russian military history.
In 1881, fresh out of Turkestan, Makharoff was as-
signed as the commander of the cruiser Taman, which
protected the Russian legation in the city of Constan-
tinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). His studies of the area
included one of the military and naval defenses of the
Bosporus Strait. From 1882 to 1886, he served on the
staff of Admiral Andrey Popov in the Baltic, eventually
traveling around the globe on the ship Vitiaz from 1886
to 1889. This voyage led to a book, The Vitiaz and the
Pacific Ocean (1894), one of 50 books Makharoff wrote.
A paper he had written in 1881 on water currents in the
Black Sea and Mediterranean earned him a reputation
as “the father of Russian oceanography.” As an inven-
tor, he conceived an armor-piercing tip for shells, called
Makharoff tips. In 1890, he was promoted to admiral,
the youngest man in Russian history to be named to that
rank. He was subsequently named as commander of the
Mediterranean Squadron in 1894, as chief of fleet train-
ing in 1895, and as commander of the Baltic Fleet in
1896.
At the end of the 19th century, one of the key
areas of Russian interest was the peninsula of Korea.
The power struggle between Russia, a longtime military
power in the northern Pacific, and Japan centered on
control of Korea, which became the focus of world at-
tention by 1904. The previous year, historian Alexander
Hume Ford had written that “Korea is the bone of con-
tention over which Russia and Japan are most likely to
come to blows. It is equally essential to either country as
a guarantee of future peace.” Makharoff, as commander
of the port of Kronshtadt in the Baltic since 1899, tried
to warn his leadership of the need to reinforce the nearby
Russian naval port of Port Arthur, but his cries went
unheeded.
On the night of 8 February 1904 (or 26 January
1904 [O.S.]), Japanese forces attacked the Russians at
Port Arthur, and Makharoff called on St. Petersburg
to send torpedo boats via the Trans-Siberian railway as0 mAkhARoFF, StepAn oSipovich