Drunk Russian Soldiers Lost The Russo-Japanese War
Public DomainThe defeated Russian fleet at Port Arthur.
The Russo-Japanese War (1904 to 1905) was a humiliating defeat for the Russians, and the consequences of their loss may very well have set the stage for the revolution that followed.
When the Japanese first attacked Russia’s Far East outpost at Port Arthur, the Russians assumed it would be a quick victory for them. However, there was a major problem plaguing the Imperial Russian Army: alcoholism.
At almost every level, Russian soldiers and officers seemed to be unable to control their drinking. Many were caught drunk on duty, and the issue was only exacerbated when they called up peasant conscripts. Tactically, it was a mess that often devolved into drunken, violent riots.
As Time reported in 2021, Russian newspapers described accounts of Japanese soldiers finding Russians “so dead drunk they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs.”
Other European countries took notice as well. One Viennese newspaper wrote, “The Japanese did not conquer, but alcohol triumphed, alcohol, alcohol.”
Perhaps the most humiliating defeat came in May 1905, when Admiral Zinov Rozhestvensky’s Baltic Fleet — which had sailed for eight months halfway around the world to relieve Port Arthur — engaged the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima. The Russians were catastrophically defeated, losing nearly their entire fleet, in large part because they were chronically drunk and poorly disciplined.
Public DomainThe Russian battleship Oslyabya, the first all-steel battleship to be sunk by naval gunfire, was destroyed at the Battle of Tsushima.
Alcohol wasn’t the only reason for the loss, though. Russia had also been using outdated equipment, emboldening incompetent leaders, and overstretching supply lines across Siberia, but the military’s fondness for vodka came to symbolize the larger rot within the establishment.
The defeat triggered the 1905 Russian Revolution, led Czar Nicholas II to prohibit vodka during World War I, and ultimately hastened the collapse of the Russian Empire.
