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Saghalien commands the estuary of the Amur, and Muravieff, the distinguished Russian commander in East Asia, appreciated the necessity of acquiring the island for his country. In 1858, he visited Japan with a squadron and demanded that the Strait of La Pérouse, which separates Saghalien from Yezo, should be regarded as the Russo-Japanese frontier.
Had not Muravieff Amurski with a few Cossacks quietly occupied her Amur territories without provoking anything more dangerous than a diplomatic protest; and had not Ignatief annexed her rich Primorsk provinces, including the site of Vladivostok, by purely diplomatic means?
The latter concession left the door open for Muravieff to push on Russia's claims to this important wedge of territory. His action was characteristic. Russia thus threw her arms around the great province which had provided China with her dynasty and her warrior caste, and was still one of the wealthiest and most cherished lands of that Empire.
Muravieff, Menschikoff, Luders, and other Russian commanders opposed to the Allies, were all old men, all past sixty years when the war began. Prince Menschikoff was sixty-four when he went on his famous mission to Constantinople, and he did not grow younger in the eighteen months that followed, and at the end of which he fought and lost the Battle of the Alma.
Three years later Muravieff ordered 6000 Cossacks to migrate from these trans-Baikal settlements to the land newly acquired from China on the borders of Manchuria . In the same year the Russians established a station at the mouth of the Amur, and in 1853 gained control over part of the Island of Saghalien. For the present, then, everything seemed to favour Russia's forward policy.
Michael Bakunin was born in 1814 at Torschok in the Russian province of Tver, being a scion of a family of good position belonging to the old nobility. An uncle of Bakunin's was an ambassador under Catherine II., and he was also connected by marriage with Muravieff. He was educated at the College of Cadets in St. Petersburg, and joined the Artillery in 1832 as an ensign.
Japan naturally refused a proposal which would have given the whole of Saghalien to Russia, and Muravieff then resorted to the policy of sending emigrants to settle on the island.
Nothing shows more evidently than the speeches of M. Muravieff and Professor Martens about the Japanese war not contradicting The Hague Peace Conference nothing shows more obviously than these speeches to what an extent, amongst the men of our time, the means for the transmission of thought speech is distorted, and how the capacity for clear, rational thinking is completely lost.
This was certainly the policy of his Ministers, Prince Lobánoff, Count Muravieff, and Count Lamsdorff. It was oceanic. The necessary prelude to Russia's new policy was the completion of the trans-Siberian railway, certainly one of the greatest engineering feats ever attempted by man.
Muravieff deserves to rank among the makers of modern Russia. He waited his time, used his Cossack pawns as an effective screen to each new opening of the game, and pushed his foes hardest when they were at their weakest. Moreover, like Bismarck, he knew when to stop. He saw the limit that separated the practicable from the impracticable.
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