The war in Manchuria was raging, the artillery was roaring, and the Japanese and Russian armies fought to the death under the fortress of Dalian, and the corpses were everywhere; And thousands of miles away, in the heart of Russia, an invisible war is also in full swing.

It is worth noting that Japan never thought of a real victory over Russia. This is because whether it is from the perspective of industrial economy or comprehensive national strength, quasi-first-class Russia has completely exploded the third-rate Japanese ten streets; In the 20 th century, when the competition of wars had already entered the consumption of comprehensive national strength, it was an impossible dream for Japan to completely defeat Russia with a small land. Under these circumstances, Japan devised a very sensible strategy from the outset, which was to promote change by fighting: to intensify the class and national contradictions in Russia through victory in the Far East, so as to end the war in favor of Japan.

I have to say that Japan in the Meiji era was really full of talents, and there were countless unparalleled heroes who existed like demons. A genius agent named Genjiro Akashi has a heavy responsibility and travels alone to Russia to engage in activities to subvert the Romanov dynasty, which is completely different in race, color, language, and customs; With astonishing energy, strong will, great skill and keen insight, he accomplished this almost impossible task impeccably. Setting up intelligence and communication networks, plotting against oppressed grassroots Russian officers, inciting the independence movements of the three Baltic states annexed by Russia, meeting with Finnish independence leaders, obstructing the transportation of troops, secretly smuggling weapons to anti-Russian minorities and armed forces, actively cooperating with the British government, and leading European public opinion to the side of non-white Japan...... During this period, it also involved a game confrontation with Russian spies, and the difficulty and intensity of their work were beyond human imagination. Fueled by him, the contradictions between the toiling masses and the ruling class in Russia rapidly intensified. And in 1905, when the frontline battlefield suffered consecutive defeats, it ushered in a general outbreak.

In Europe at that time, with the exception of Germany, which had established a primary social security system for workers (which is historically true). Wilhelm II was far from being as unbearable as later generations had rumored), and the front-line workers were generally regarded by those in power as "lemons that were discarded after the juice was drained" and were arbitrarily squeezed and humiliated; And in Russia under the tsar. The hardships faced by the workers are even more difficult to describe in words.

Although the enlightened Tsar Alexander II had abolished serfdom 40 years earlier, it was clear that the dirt of millennia of history would not be completely erased: the serf-turned-workers were still regarded as slaves by the bourgeoisie and the elites, who exploited them in the most brutal way. More crucially, the successors, Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, were extremely conservative monarchs; They believe that the current state system is an eternal truth, and that those lowly animals should be enslaved forever for generations, so they cling to the vested interests of the ruling class and refuse to let go, refusing to cut a small part of the cake in their hands to the bottom. In this way, Alexander II's enlightened reforms were not implemented as thoroughly as in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and other countries, but only half of them were carried out and disappeared into the air. After 40 years of reforms. Russia is only coated with a glossy layer of modern national fat on the surface, but its essence is still the aggregate of the rotten and brutal, whipped and harsh feudal autocracy; This backward relations of production have created a serious conflict with the constantly developing working class.

In Russia, the toiling workers endured more than 12 hours of heavy work a day, all kinds of harsh working conditions, and the humiliation and slavery of the factory owners and bureaucrats, and suffered great physical and mental damage, but their wages were extremely meager. They toiled more than 300 hours a month for a measly income of around £0.5 to buy the family's poor black bread to keep them from starvation, and if someone fell ill or had an accident, they were left to fend for themselves like animals without any help. It stands to reason that ordinary people will not rise up and rebel if they have a bite to eat. The salary they receive is just enough to meet this most basic condition; This time, however, the Russian workers could not hold on.

As a result of the prolonged war, prices in Russia skyrocketed, and the meager incomes of the workers could no longer meet their livelihood needs. Nor could the upper echelons of the bureaucracy be willing to use the modest rubles in their hands to bail out these untouchables who were born serfs. That's not all, but there is news of defeat one after another from the front, and the invincible Russian giant was beaten by the Japanese monkey and his nose and face were swollen. This instantly ignited their long-suppressed rebellion. On January 3rd, when the New Year's bells were still ringing in the cold wind. A massive strike broke out at the Putilov plant, the largest in St. Petersburg; The strike movement spread throughout St. Petersburg in a matter of days. In their petitions, the workers demanded freedom of speech, press and association, the convening of a constituent assembly to change the Russian autocracy, the introduction of an eight-hour workday, the cessation of the war, the ownership of land by the peasants, and the raising of wages in order to cope with the sharp inflation caused by the war.

Faced with this situation. Tsar Nikolai was furious. The supreme monarch of all Russia was bitter and indignant at the defeat in the Far East, and was eager to exert all his might to torture the treacherous yellow-skinned monkeys to death; Now these lowly workers from serfs are rebelling in their nests and no longer producing much-needed munitions for the front-line troops, which is simply a muffled death against the will of the Tsar! Due to the "ingenuity" of the previous Tsar Alexander III, the crown prince should not be educated by the policy of softness until the age of 30, but the emperor apparently did not calculate his longevity, and when Prince Nicholas was 26 years old, he kicked his legs to see God. Influenced by decades of extremist ideology of harsh suppression and stabilization, Nikolai hated the revolutionary wave at home; In response to the large-scale strike movement of the workers in St. Petersburg, Nikolai, who had always ruled the country with violence, did not show mercy and immediately issued a suppressive order to allow the shooting.

In the early morning of January 22, more than 100,000 unarmed workers and their elderly and infirm families gathered in front of the Hermitage Square to petition in front of the Hermitage Square, holding aloft portraits of the Tsar and church flags, singing prayers and hymns in the snow. However, the Tsar apparently did not have any desire to listen and communicate with these lowly cattle people. After warnings to dispel to no avail. The guards of the Winter Palace opened fire on the crowd, and more than 1,000 people fell in a pool of blood on the spot. Another 3,000 people were injured. The Hermitage Square was littered with corpses and bleeding. The frozen blood shimmered in the sunlight with a terrible and bewitching glow. However, the Tsar's White Terror did not calm the situation, but instead rebounded violently like a spring compressed to the extreme, allowing the people's decades-long resentment against the misery of life and the bitterness of the tyranny to find an outlet through this event. The indignant Russian people went on strike in every city to protest against the tsar's atrocities, and a local upheaval turned into a wave of anti-government that spread throughout Russia due to various internal and external factors.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 broke out.

In St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large cities where large numbers of workers were concentrated, all the workers stubbornly and organized production stopped, and clashes between the demonstrators and the tsarist army were increasing; In the large industrial city of Lodz, workers even built dozens of walls in the streets of the city and engaged in three days of street fighting with the Tsar's army, which had forced them to return to work. The total number of striking workers reached 440,000, spread throughout the empire. It seriously affected the normal operation of the Russian war machine. Encouraged by the workers' movement, the peasants living in the hellish strata also began to revolt; They set fire to the landlords' farms and fields, and looted all the gold, silver and jade in the mansions of the wealthy and the rice and flour in the warehouses. The protests turned into large-scale terrorist riots, and many of the top officials of the Tsarist government were assassinated by radical revolutionaries: the Governor of Finland, Bobrikov, the Minister of the Interior, Plevy, and even the Governor-General of Moscow, the Archduke Sergei, were killed in the Kremlin a month after the bloody Sunday.

As time went on, riots and riots aimed at the revolt of the oppressed classes against their miserable situation reached a climax, and racially enslaved minorities and small European states that had been forcibly annexed rose up in an attempt to restore their former glory of freedom and independence. Genjiro Akashi accomplished a breathtaking miracle under extremely difficult conditions, successfully detonating the thunder volcano that lurks in the decaying and authoritarian Russian society; When the news of the large-scale unrest in Russia reached the Far East, the entire Japanese base camp breathed a sigh of relief. As soon as the revolutionary magma in Russia begins to erupt, Japan will truly embark on the right path to a calm end to the war!

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Just when Nicholas II was anxious to suppress the chaos in his country, news came from the Far East battlefield like a thunderbolt from the sky again. After a series of tragic bloody battles, the lonely fortress of Dalian, which had been held for one year, finally collapsed under the siege of Japan. 20,000 exhausted Russian troops came out of the blackened and collapsed dilapidated fortifications and surrendered to the Japanese. When this urgent military report from the front was sent to the Winter Palace, Nikolai, who was already in a very bad mood because of the suppression of the domestic revolution, was even more furious, and after reading a few words, he roared on the spot and tore the report into countless pieces; It wasn't until 2 hours later that the waiter brought a new one. The details of the fall of Dalian finally surfaced.

Originally from Kodama secretly commanding the siege troops, the Japanese offensive has changed from the previous bull-like brute and direct attack. Instead, it is mixed with a little flexible flexibility in the fierceness of opening and closing, and the power is doubled. Through a series of methods such as irregular shelling, covert raids, and feints and deception, the Russian defenders were mentally destroyed and dispatched back and forth to make them seriously fatigued. For the first time, the Japanese army took the initiative in a siege battle. On 15 February, through a successful tactical deception and a sustained onslaught of concentrating all their forces, the Japanese finally wedged a key area on a higher ground in the core of the Dalian Fortress at the cost of 10,000 casualties, which became a crucial turning point in the entire battle for the Dalian Fortress.

The 280mm howitzer, the country's most important weapon, was set up on this high ground by the Japanese army, and with a range far beyond that of ordinary army artillery, the Japanese launched a thunderous bombardment of the remaining Russian fortifications. In an instant, the steel bars exploded and shattered, and the nearby artillery towers and bunkers that had harvested the lives of countless Japanese officers and soldiers turned into ruins and dust under the thunder and artillery fire of this day. The Japanese siege officers and soldiers walked through the gaps opened by the fall of these fortifications on the blood, internal organs, limbs and corpses of countless battle-dead robes, and launched a close-range desperate battle with the Russian reserves who came to reinforce and intercept them in the rubble of the criss-crossed streets. Since Japan had entered a state of general mobilization for war at this time, the total number of troops participating in the siege of Dalian Fortress exceeded 90,000; At this moment, the Russian defenders have been consumed by less than 30,000 under the long-term siege, and they are completely unable to resist the Japanese charge in the war of attrition without fortifications. After opening a gap for the siege troops, Kodama ordered the artillery to turn to clear the harbor of shore artillery facilities that faced the sea and could not support the land; Before the billowing smoke from the Russian coastal defense batteries had cleared, a small Japanese fleet appeared at sea level, using their artillery fire and heavy howitzers on the high ground to form a crossfire, covering almost the entire Russian defensive structure in the fortress. Although the ships "Matsushima", "Itsukushima", and "Naniwa" are old scum protection cruisers, their 320 mm and 260 mm heavy guns are tantamount to weapons to support the land battlefield! Although the Russian defenders were still stubbornly resisting, the form of being mounted on the face by the enemy's giant cannon had already determined the outcome of their final defeat.

Under the joint onslaught of the Japanese army, sea and heavy artillery from multiple angles, the Russian batteries were smashed open one after another, and the Russian army had completely lost the barrier to continue to hold on. On March 12, the red and white plaster flag of the Japanese army fluttered throughout the city of Dalian. At this time, the Japanese and Russian armies were engaged in the largest land battle of the war near Mukden, and the combined forces of both sides exceeded 600,000. He vaguely felt that the outcome of this war was completely out of his control! (To be continued......)