Chapter 55: Grand Duke of the North

Strictly speaking, Imperial Russia had no explicit law on the books punishing hoarding and profiteering.

In national emergencies like famine, however, it was often cracked down on by imperial edict, and this time was no different.

But the nobility, by its very nature, was a class that never answered for anything.

However flagrantly they violated an edict, cases of nobles being officially punished for hoarding and profiteering were all but unheard of in Russia.

And no wonder, seeing as their very rank guaranteed them judicial privilege.

Granted, Alexander II’s judicial reform had established the principle of equality of all before the law.

But the ones doing the prosecuting were fellow nobles, and the bench handing down the verdicts was noble too.

Dragging nobles off and punishing them like commoners was, from the nobles’ point of view, something that must never be allowed to happen.

“Violating His Majesty the Emperor’s edict is a grave error, of course, but the notion that wrongdoing must be punished applies strictly to commoners.”

“Quite right. Let us apologize to His Majesty and promise never to do such a thing again.”

“Let us do so. His Majesty is a generous man; if we apologize sincerely, he will accept it.”

So the Nobles’ Committee got its story straight.

And the charges against the ringleaders of the hoarding and the perpetrators of the loan fraud quietly began to shrink.

“Some evidence may have turned up, but in the end, aren’t the ones handing down the verdicts our own people?”

“Exactly. The Okhrana may handle the indictments, but we can work the bench however we please.”

“Let’s make the charges as light as possible. A modest fine and a confinement order should more than suffice.”

“Hoarding is an ambiguous thing to prosecute as a crime in the first place, is it not? What is it, really, but the crime of trying a little too hard to run one’s family estate well?”

Surely a fine or a bit of quiet contrition would be penance enough.

This was no pretense; the great majority of Russia’s nobles genuinely believed it.

For nobles to admit they had done anything wrong at all was, in itself, extraordinary.

However much investigative power the Okhrana held, as long as fellow nobles drew the conclusions in the courtroom, no one was going to face serious punishment over a matter like this.

Word even had it that some of them were already counting the days to their release and giggling about it.

Exactly as expected.

-What’d I tell you? Those guys are wired differently from the ground up.

It really is fascinating.

Whenever I think surely they can’t go that far, they always manage to exceed expectations.

I never expected the nobles to throw their own colleagues into Manchuria with their own hands in the first place.

I figured they’d wave it all off with a single line of stern warning at most.

But for me and the Tsar, this was actually the best possible windfall.

When the harvest fails, public discontent inevitably piles up.

Witte and I had put our heads together, and the conclusion was that no matter how much of the reserves we released or how much we got goods moving, there was no stopping the price of wheat from rising.

“Young Master, to be frank, even if we release all the reserves, returning to last year’s prices is impossible. A crop failure is a crop failure.”

“Can’t be helped. That’s how it should be. If a little preparation were enough to shrug it off, why would the word famine even exist?”

“That said, we can make sure the citizens have a specific target to curse when they ask why bread has gotten so expensive.”

“See, Chairman, this is why you and I understand each other so well.”

Witte smiled meaningfully and lifted his coffee cup.

It’s a pointless hypothetical, but what if the nobles had put on a show of bleeding, swallowed their losses, seen the guilty cleanly punished, and at least pretended to stand with the peasants?

Then the nobles could have won a public verdict that they had done their part, and they could easily have avoided being singled out as the cause of this famine.

And in that case, however sky-high the Tsar’s popularity was riding, he’d have taken at least a hairline scratch of the damage himself.

But if they’d been capable of that, this whole mess would never have happened in the first place.

“Director-General Yakov. I think it’s time to spread the word through the streets of Petersburg.”

“Understood. I’ve prepared enough to blanket not just Petersburg but every major city in Russia.”

The reason bread prices had shot up like mad this time and refused to stabilize was entirely because the nobles had siphoned off the grain.

And yet, good heavens.

Those same nobles were going to walk free without any real punishment?

“However I turn it over, it’s not exactly a false rumor.”

“Of course not. There isn’t a single lie mixed in, is there?”

Yakov left the conference room at once with a snort of laughter, and starting the very next day, the Okhrana’s domestic intelligence network sprang into action as one.

Just as Yakov said, not one word of it was a lie.

The nobles stockpiling the grain, their wriggling out of punishment, all of it was true.

We simply left out the one fact that stabilizing bread prices had been nearly impossible from the start.

-How principled. Not even lying to whip people up.

And as expected, before a few days had passed, ugly words began erupting all over the city.

“Hold on, I definitely saw the news that the nobles got caught hoarding, so why isn’t the price of bread coming down?”

“I hear those noble bastards only said they’d release the flour and went and hid it somewhere else!”

“What?”

“And on top of that, they’re getting off without any punishment at all!”

A few verdicts ending in token fines or quiet contrition had already come down, but in the citizens’ eyes, such rulings looked like nothing so much as a taunt.

“How many people are suffering because of those bastards, and that’s supposed to pass for a verdict?”

“His Majesty opened even the imperial granaries, and those thieving bastards locked theirs up instead!”

The rumors spread too fast to contain.

Human emotion boils over most easily when there is a clear target for its rage.

Workers whose fury had reached the breaking point came right to the very brink of open riot, torching nobles’ warehouses and smashing their property.

A hellish two-option quiz with no way to walk out in one piece.

Face the law’s judgment fairly and repent in Manchuria.

Or become the punching bag of citizens driven out of their minds by the price of bread.

Anyone could see the former was the lesser evil, yet astonishingly, a good number of them stubbornly chose the latter.

“You garbage bastards!”

“You think you’re the only human beings here? We’re human too!”

And this time, Petersburg well and truly turned upside down.

* * *

The citizens’ rage aimed itself squarely at the nobles’ mansions.

The heavens’ caprice that was the failed harvest and the resentment over bread prices climbing by the day all buried themselves in the single target called the nobility.

Search as one might, there wasn’t a whisper of criticism aimed at the Tsar, while citizens blind with rage massed like storm clouds before the nobles’ mansions.

“We all know the wheat is rotting in those warehouses!”

“Open your warehouses, you cowardly nobles!”

“You pieces of garbage! And you still call yourselves human?”

The police did their best to soothe the citizens, but honestly, with as many nobles as there are in Russia, there was no way they could protect them all.

Still, by this point, the quicker-witted among them began making moves to switch sides.

“Your Majesty, I opposed the hoarding from the very beginning. The Committee trampled my objections.”

“I too opened all my warehouses to comply with Your Majesty’s edict as fully as I could!”

The ones who had hit the eject button on the Nobles’ Committee tripped over each other to prostrate themselves before the Tsar.

There was no way they’d truly opposed it from the start, but so what?

As long as they were useful, that was enough.

“I see. You mean to say you merely failed to object openly for fear of the Nobles’ Committee, yet you intended to follow my word?”

Honestly, given that the Tsar was at the teeth-grinding stage with the nobles by now, I expected him to order them flung straight into Manchuria on the spot.

Instead, Nicholas II told them to withdraw while he gave the matter some thought, and then floated his thinking to me first.

“But… once we cut down even men like those, won’t the Committee only band together more tightly?”

Oh, now this is a surprise.

Of all people, my old man being the first to put his finger on the beauty of divide and conquer.

“As expected of our Majesty, a truly wise judgment. Shouldn’t we treat the ones who came over reasonably well, so the other side starts to splinter?”

“Hahaha, exactly, no? Though my one worry is that if we don’t call them to account, the people will rise up again.”

“Of course they must be punished. Something on the level of ‘go cool your head in Manchuria and come back’ would be just right, wouldn’t it? Officially, we can call it a sentence of exile.”

“How truly humanitarian. My mercy shall shine once more.”

At the thought of the citizens’ acclaim, the corners of the Tsar’s mouth shot upward yet again.

The truth was, the labor reeducation camps had a reserved block set aside exclusively for nobles who had defected to the pro-Tsar faction.

Ledgers and pens instead of pickaxes; quarters with stoves instead of tents.

We even quietly agreed to let them bring their servants over from back home.

-Whew, talk about a Manchuria VIP package.

If we’re going to pull off a divide and conquer, this much is the least we can offer.

Once this whole commotion had swept through, Manchurian development actually picked up speed.

With the added perception that the imperial house was this serious about developing Manchuria, France pushed its investment in even more aggressively.

On top of that, Witte was radiating from every pore the reason he’d been hired, proving his competence.

“Young Master, while we’re at it, what would you say to extending the Chinese Eastern Railway down into Korea?”

“Ah, you mean the Gyeongui Line. The railway Japan tried to lay during the war.”

“If you already know of it, this will go quickly. We scooped the whole thing up, so all that remains is to finish it and connect it northward, no?”

At the height of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan had attempted to build a railway to move troops and materiel rapidly up to Manchuria.

Of course, the war ended before they could put it to any real use, and they had to cough the whole thing up untouched.

Russia, having pocketed those crumbs, needed only to complete the railway and push it a little farther north, and a connection with the Chinese Eastern Railway would be possible.

Which meant completing the goose that lays the golden eggs, a line running straight from Busan all the way to Harbin.

“Manchuria’s coal and soybeans could then be moved easily by sea as well as by land. We would simply use the Korean Peninsula’s ports. Though of course, that part will require further coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

In this era, logistics is money, and railways are dominion.

With Seong-jun’s knowledge layered on top, the picture came into even sharper focus.

A rail line running straight down the Korean Peninsula wouldn’t stop at being a mere cash cow.

The moment the Russian flag was planted in Busan at the southern tip, Japan would find a blade pointed right at its throat, and it would never dare to crawl back out.

“Militarily, it would be an excellent move as well. Even if Japan recovers its national strength, any advance northward becomes outright impossible.”

“Precisely. And all of it can be pursued as part of a national defense policy for Russia’s security.”

Witte nodded in satisfaction, his eyes gleaming.

Where did that listless, washed-up old man from our first meeting go? These days he’s utterly in his element.

“Report to His Majesty at once and get his approval. Have you drawn up a draft?”

“Long since prepared.”

A man with vengeance carved into his bones who’s also this good at his job… where would I ever find another talent like that?

Just as everything was rolling merrily along, a sudden report flew in from one of the overseas branches.

“Young Master, forgive the interruption mid-meeting, but we’ve received word that something is off about Korea (the Korean Empire).”

“Off? How so?”

“Signs have been detected that the Korean imperial house is quietly reaching out to Britain.”

…Excuse me?

-There it is! Gojong-style reed diplomacy.

They tried to use Russia to check Japan, and now that Japan has crashed far harder than expected, they’re going sniffing around Britain?

My head went blank for a moment, but I could roughly guess the logic behind the move.

If Russia seized Manchuria completely and developed it, then Russia, holding both Manchuria and Primorye in their entirety, would become the strongest power in Northeast Asia.

The Korean Empire, already under Russia’s influence, must have gotten the jitters that it might genuinely end up a colony at this rate, I suppose?

Still, come on. Even so, the timing is far too much of a coincidence.

Gojong’s miracle diplomacy had upended the Northeast once again.

~~~

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