Fear and Loathing in the Far East: Bandits, Law, and the Russo-Japanese War

Abstract

Like other popular illustrated journals of the era, Niva deployed a “special correspondent” to the Far East to send back reports from the field during the Russo-Japanese War. In the issue published on 5 November 1904, the journalist Vladimir Taburin described the following adventure. He met with a lieutenant colonel at a train station and proceeded to join his detachment on an expedition along the Liao River to hunt down a group of so-called khunkhuzy. Although most of these bandits successfully evaded the Russian troops by fleeing over the border to Mongolia, one straggler was apprehended. Preparations were well underway for the bandit to be hanged when the brigade commander ordered a last-minute reprieve: “the Russians did not come here to fight with Chinese ... Russians are not violent. Any khunkhuz who is conscious of his guilt and drops his weapon will be forgiven. I release you to your freedom. Go and tell these words to your companions.”1 This resolution took Taburin by surprise. While this story shimmers with clichéd morality on its surface, dipping below reveals some striking absurdities, the most egregious being the Russian commander’s claim to nonviolence. Not only was Russia in the midst of fighting a brutal war (or, as was clear by November 1904, losing a brutal war), but Russian forces had been fiercely engaging with Chinese bandits at their Far Eastern border for years. What sort of edifice was capable of supporting this paradox? According to Judith Butler, nonviolence is more claim than principle; it is “an address or an appeal.” The pressing point thus becomes “under what conditions are we responsive to such a claim, what makes it possible to accept the claim when it arrives, or, rather, what provides for the arrival of the claim at all?”2 Some part of the answer can be gleaned from Taburin’s tale. 1 Niva, no. 51 (1905): 9–11. 2 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 165.