On 7 February 1904, Kuropatkin was named as
commander of the Russian army in Manchuria, assem-
bling to combat a potential Japanese takeover of the
all-important harbor of Port Arthur. Although he was
serving under Admiral Evgeni Alexeiev, the czar’s vice-
roy in the Far East, it was Kuropatkin who led some
100,000 Russian soldiers against the Japanese, seven di-
visions strong led by Marshal Iwao Oyama, at Liaoyang
on 25 August 1904. After seven days of horrific fight-
ing, Kuropatkin was forced to withdraw to the north,
although he lost only 16,500 dead to Oyama’s 25,000.
Historian Douglas Story writes of the battle of Li-
aoyang (also Liao Yang):
During the night of August 31, General Baron
Stakelberg withdrew his headquarters to Liao
Yang, as did General Ivanoff. General Mistch-
enko moved round the town on the west and oc-
cupied ground to the north and east whence he
might retrieve the position lost by General Or-
loff, restrain Kuroki’s attack, and leave General
Kuropatkin’s line of retreat open. General Grekov
was left to fight a rear-guard action which he
maintained throughout September 1.
The defence of those grand old soldiers en-
abled General Kuropatkin to withdraw his troops
and guns, most of his stores, and to destroy what-
ever could not be carried away, prior to the Japa-
nese entry into Liao Yang. The Japanese who had
aimed at cutting off the Russian retreat to the
north, of enveloping them in the mud about the
Tai-tse-ho, found themselves in possession of a
town peopled by Chinese and Cossack stragglers.
Those last suffered terribly at the hands of the
yellow men. Not one escaped.
While the armies of Oku and Nozu had
hammered fruitlessly at the last defences of Liao
Yang, General Kuroki had endeavoured to force
Kuropatkin’s left rear and so obtain the mas-
tery of the railway line and the way of retreat to
Mukden. General Orloff, who lay at Yen-tai with
more than an army corps of men, broke before
the attack and lost General Kuropatkin his entire
tactical advantage.Following the battle of the Shaho (or Sha Ho) River
(26 October 1904), the czar removed Alexeiev and re-
placed him with Kuropatkin as the “Commander of all
Russian forces fighting Japan.” On 21 February 1905
at Mukden, now called Shenyang, China, Kuropatkin
again faced Oyama, who, backed by 300,000 Japanese
troops, faced the Russians with 350,000 men. After
17 days of vicious and deadly fighting, on 10 March
Oyama’s forces encircled the city, where the Russians
were holding out, but he discovered that Kuropatkin
had quietly withdrawn some time earlier. Again, the two
sides had fought to a draw, but 90,000 Russians lay dead
along with 50,000 Japanese. Following this defeat, the
czar replaced Kuropatkin with General Nikolai Liniev-
ich on 21 March 1905, and Kuropatkin was named as
the commander of the First Army in Manchuria. For
less than a year, until 16 February 1906, he toiled, un-
able to lead his army into battle without following the
orders of others. He finally retired from the army and
returned to Russia, where he wrote his memoirs of the
Russo-Japanese War, published in four large volumes in- In Otchet general-ad”iutanta Kuropatkina (Report
by Adjutant General Kuropatkin, translated into En-
glish in 1909), he defended his overall command while
admitting many mistakes.
The beginning of the First World War in 1914 saw
Kuropatkin being called into action once again. In Sep-
tember 1915, Czar Nicholas II named him to replace
Grand Duke Nicholas as supreme commander of Rus-
sian forces, and on 22 February 1916, Kuropatkin was
made commander of Russian forces on the northern
front, conducting a series of offensives, all of which were
unsuccessful. In July 1916, he was relieved of his com-
mand and became governor-general of Turkestan. Later
that year, he suppressed a rebellion in Central Asia.
The end of the czar’s regime in February 1917 left
Kuropatkin with no allies in St. Petersburg, and he was
placed under arrest and taken to the city, renamed Petro-
grad. He was freed several days later, but his military career
was over. He spent the remainder of his life on his estate
called Sheshurino near Pskov, where he later worked as
a teacher in a local school. He refused offers to lead the
White Russian forces fighting the Communist govern-
ment of Vladimir Lenin after the end of the First World
War. Kuropatkin died at Sheshurino on 16 January 1925.
References: “Kuropatkin, Aleksei Nikolaevich,” in The
Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, 55 vols.,
edited by Joseph L. Wieczynski (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Aca-
demic International Press, 1976–93), 18:191–192; Bruce,
George, “Liaoyang” and “Mukden I,” in Collins Diction- kuRopAtkin, Alexei nikolAevich