After consideration of all the facts put forward, the members of the council came to the unanimous conclusion that, “although the Ya-lu Timber Company really appears to be a commercial organization, its employment of military officers of the active list to do work that has military importance undoubtedly gives to it a politico-military aspect.” The council, therefore, in order to deprive Japan of a pretext for looking upon the Timber Company as an enterprise of a military-political character, acknowledged the necessity of “at once taking measures to give the affair an exclusively commercial character, to exclude from it officers of the regular army, and to commit the management of the timber business to persons not employed in the service of the Empire.” On July 7 these conclusions were signed by all the members of the council, including State Councillor Bezobrazoff. I declined to go personally into any of the economic questions concerning Manchuria, and said that the proper person to do this was the Minister of Finance. State Secretary Bezobrazoff was asked to work out the following points with the assistance of experts selected by him:
1. “What action should be taken and what economic policy should be followed in Manchuria in order to reduce the deficit on the Eastern Chinese Railway.”
2. “To what extent the measures for increasing the revenue of the line and the economic policy in Manchuria, recommended by the experts, would affect the economic situation of the Pri-Amur region.”
Another duty entrusted to this sub-committee was the compilation of a list of all the private enterprises which were being carried on in Manchuria. At the last meeting of the council on July 11 the sub-committee’s report on the economic question was read out, and it was decided “to take note of its conclusions without discussion, and to attach them to the council’s proceedings.” Admiral Alexeieff suggested that to this should be added the words, “so that when considering the question of the further economic development in Manchuria, we should endeavour not to invest more State moneys in it.” This addition was supported by all the members of the council, excepting State Councillor Bezobrazoff, who did not feel himself able to offer an opinion on the subject.[64] No other conclusions on economic questions generally or any other enterprises in Manchuria were signed by the members of the council at Port Arthur, and matters of an economic nature were not looked into.
It is evident, from the facts above set forth, that the statement in which M. Roslavleff charges the members of the council with signing minutes of proceedings that gave the Bezobrazoff adventure a place among useful Imperial enterprises is fiction. Upon what it was based we do not know. The duty of immediately carrying into effect the conclusions of the council—to put an end immediately to the military-political activity of the timber enterprise on the Ya-lu—rested upon Admiral Alexeieff, by virtue of the authority given to him. The thing that he had to do, first of all, and that he was fully empowered to do, was to recall our force from Feng-huang-cheng, and the mounted rifles from the Ya-lu. Why this was not done I do not know. Personally, I did not allow Lieutenant-Colonel Madritoff, of the General Staff, to continue his connection with the Timber Company, and I may add that he and other officers who had associated themselves with the enterprise did so without my knowledge. But no matter how effective might be the measures taken by Admiral Alexeieff to give the Ya-lu enterprise a purely commercial character, I still feared that this undertaking, which had obtained world-wide notoriety, would continue to have important political significance. In my report of August 6, 1903, which was presented to the Emperor upon my return from Japan, I therefore expressed the opinion that an immediate end must be put to the operations of the Timber Company, and that the whole business should be sold to foreigners. The thought that our interests in Korea, which were of trifling importance, might bring us into conflict with Japan caused me incessant anxiety during my stay in the latter country. On June 26, 1903, when I was passing through the Sea of Japan on my way to Nagasaki, I made the following note in my diary:
“If I were asked to express an opinion, from a military point of view, upon the comparative importance of Russian interests in different parts of the Empire, and on different frontiers, I should put my judgment into the form of a pyramidal diagram, placing the least important of our interests at the top and the most important at the bottom, as follows:
