4. I was always opposed to the timber enterprise on the Yalu, because I foresaw that it might bring about a rupture with Japan. I therefore took all possible measures to have it made an exclusively commercial affair, or to have it suppressed altogether.
5. So far as the Manchurian question is concerned, I made a sharp distinction between the comparative importance to us of northern Manchuria and southern Manchuria. At first, I was in favor of removing our troops as quickly as possible from both; but after the Boxer uprising, in 1900, I recognized the necessity of keeping on the railway at Kharbin three or four battalions of infantry, a battery, and a hundred Cossacks, as a reserve for the boundary guard.
6. When our position in the Far East became difficult, and there seemed to be danger of a rupture with Japan, I was in favor of decisive measures, and proposed that we avert war by admitting the untimeliness of our attempt to get an outlet on the Pacific; by restoring Port Arthur and Kwang-tung to China; and by selling the southern branch of the Chinese Eastern Railway.
When Adjutant General Daniloff returned from Japan, he told me that, at the farewell dinner given him there, General Terauchi, the Japanese Minister of War, said that General Kuropatkin and he had done everything in their power to avert war. And yet, even now, I sometimes ask myself doubtfully, "Did I do everything that was within the bounds of possibility to prevent it?" The strong desire of the Emperor to avoid war with Japan was well known to me, as it was to his other co-workers, and yet we, who stood nearest to him, were unable to execute his will.
[THE ROYAL TIMBER COMPANY]
[Editor's Note.]—Among the first questions suggested by General Kuropatkin's narrative and the editorials, reports, and official proceedings that he quotes, are: Who was State Councillor Bezobrazoff? How did he acquire the extraordinary power that he evidently exercised in the Far East? Why was "everybody"—including the Minister of War—"afraid of him"? Why did even the Viceroy respond to his calls for troops, and why was his Korean timber company allowed to drag Russia into a war with Japan, against the opposition and resistance, apparently, of the Tsar, the Viceroy, the Minister of War, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Port Arthur council, and the diplomatic representatives of Russia in Peking, Tokio, and Seoul?
No replies to these questions can be found in General Kuropatkin's record of the events that preceded the rupture with Japan, but convincing answers are furnished by certain confidential documents found in the archives of Port Arthur and published, just after the close of the war, in the liberal Russian review Osvobozhdenie at Stuttgart.[8] Whether General Kuropatkin was aware of the existence of these documents or not, I am unable to say; but as they throw a strong side-light on his narrative, I shall append them thereto, and tell briefly, in connection with them, the story of the Yalu timber enterprise, as it is related in St. Petersburg.
In the year 1898, a Vladivostok merchant named Briner obtained from the Korean Government, upon extremely favorable terms, a concession for a timber company that should have authority to exploit the great forest wealth of the upper Yalu River.[9] As Briner was a promoter and speculator, who had little means and less influence, he was unable to organize his company, and in 1902 he sold his concession to Alexander Mikhailovich Bezobrazoff, another Russian promoter and speculator, who had held the rank of State Councillor in the Tsar's civil service, and who was high in the favor of some of the Grand Dukes in St. Petersburg.