What Was the Treaty of Portsmouth?
The treaty was signed at 3:47 p.m. on 5 September 1905 (23 August Old Style) at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. Sergei Witte led the Russian delegation; Komura Jutarō led the Japanese. Theodore Roosevelt, who had pressed both sides to negotiate since at least June 1905, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 — the first American to do so — for brokering the peace (see Figes, The Crimean War to World War I teaching materials; Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, 1996).
The war itself had begun with Admiral Togo Heihachirō’s surprise torpedo-boat attack on the Russian Far Eastern Squadron at Port Arthur on the night of 8/9 February 1904, and had ended with the destruction of Admiral Rozhestvensky’s Second Pacific Squadron at the Battle of Tsushima on 27–28 May 1905. Portsmouth closed the war.
Negotiations
The two delegations arrived in Portsmouth in early August 1905. Witte, a former Finance Minister and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, had been sent by Tsar Nicholas II with the secret instruction never to agree to a war indemnity. Komura, a graduate of Harvard Law School, had instructions to demand one. The two sides met in the commandant’s house at the shipyard; talks ran from 9 to 30 August.
The three sticking points were Korea, Manchuria, and Sakhalin. On Korea the parties agreed that Russia would recognize Japan’s “paramount political, military, and economic interest” — a phrase drafted by the Japanese. On Manchuria, Russia agreed to evacuate her remaining troops and to transfer her lease on the Liaodong Peninsula, including Port Arthur and Dalian, to Japan. On Sakhalin the parties split the island at the 50th parallel: Japan got the southern half (about 13,900 square miles), Russia kept the north. Most importantly, the treaty contained no indemnity clause. Witte’s stand against cash payment held; Japan received the southern half of Sakhalin in lieu (Stevenson, 1996).
Witte’s reception in Russia
Witte returned to a Russia in the grip of the 1905 Revolution. The left denounced him for surrendering Sakhalin without a fight; the right denounced him for surrendering anything at all. A bomb was thrown at him on the railway platform at St Petersburg on 14 October 1905, the day the October Manifesto was published. The manifesto itself was partly Witte’s price for a successful peace: he had warned Nicholas that a defeat abroad without domestic reform would mean revolution (Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2004).
Consequences
Portsmouth confirmed Japan as a great power and ended Russia’s role as the dominant external actor in Korea. The two states, however, moved rapidly into alignment: the Anglo-Japanese Alliance had been signed in 1902 and renewed in 1905; the Russo-Japanese Convention of 1907 divided Manchuria into two spheres of influence; and the two empires fought on the same side in 1914. Portsmouth was not a permanent settlement of Far Eastern questions, but it bought twenty-five years of relative peace on the Russo-Japanese border (Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).