By a Different Path

The Russian squadron that set out at the end of 2012 toward the shores of Syria somehow ended up in 1904 near Chemulpo, where the cruiser “Varyag” and the gunboat “Koreets” entered into a deadly clash with the Japanese squadron. Our sailors couldn’t stay aside—because “Russians in wartime don’t abandon their own.” This intervention and the events that followed served as the impetus not only for changing the course of the Russo-Japanese War, but also for changing the course of all world history. Japan was defeated both at sea and on land. Yet the victim of British intelligence networks was Emperor Nicholas II. Many events followed from that time. Japan was forced to sign a peace treaty, and as a pledge, the emperor’s daughter Matsuhito became the fiancée of the new Russian tsar, Mikhail II. The Bolshevik leader Lenin returned to Russia, where, together with the runaway exiled settler Joseph Dzhugashvili, he agreed to take part in building a new Russia.