From Imperial Dream to Public Disillusionment: Recasting the Russian Far East in Peterburgskii Listok (1903–1906)

By Yiwen ‘Jacky’ Su

Abstract: This paper shows how Peterburgskii Listok, an unofficial, privately owned boulevard daily, mediated the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) for an urban mass readership of petty merchants, artisans, and lower-level clerks. This study treats imperial civilizing visions and political disillusionment as rival narrative frames that the paper juxtaposed and reworked across genres as the war unfolded. Using East View’s digital holdings of Peterburgskii Listok, this study analyzes the paper’s 1903 to 1906 issues, focusing on editorials, journalist interviews, and advertisements that address the Far East, Manchuria, and the war. It reads these materials alongside the war’s chronology, shifting censorship practices, and selected official gazettes and other metropolitan dailies. It argues that wartime reporting shifted the balance among prewar imperial imaginaries tied to the Trans-Siberian and Manchurian projects, moving from developmental promises toward narratives of military failure, administrative incompetence, and contested authority of Tsarist Russia despite persistent censorship. Across genres, the newspaper framed distant events in administrative terms, casting the Far East as a problem of administration, vulnerability, and reform, a framing that intersected with debates about self-organization after 1905.

The study advances scholarship on imperial strategy and regional visions, including Paul Dukes, Mark Gamsa, and Ivan Sablin, by showing how state projects were repackaged in commercial print for a petty bourgeois readership. It also extends press histories, including Louise McReynolds and Zachary Hoffman, by moving beyond ideologically explicit papers with firm editorial lines, such as Novoe Vremia and Russkoe Slovo, to a relatively depoliticized and profit-driven daily and by tracing how editorials, interviews, and advertisements worked together to circulate crisis narratives. It invites further research extending a genre-sensitive commercial press approach to other imperial borderlands to assess how mixed-format print media shaped regional imaginaries and crisis politics in the late imperial public sphere.

Keywords: Press History, Imperialism, Russo-Japanese War, Empire, Perceptions, Disillusionment.

---

As a region often peripheral in the metropolitan public sphere, the Russian Far East rarely sustained attention among urban readers, and its public visibility was largely mediated through censored, state-framed reporting. However, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) in Manchuria and the Russian Far East made the Far East a central focus of national news coverage, leading to increased public awareness of the region.^[1] As the war progressed unfavourably and press censorship loosened in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, a more clear-eyed and critical narrative emerged, contrasting sharply with earlier state-sponsored representations. This divided discourse is particularly evident in commercially driven newspapers such as Peterburgskii Listok, where political positioning was not anchored in a stable ideological program but recalibrated to what editors believed could both sell and remain publishable amid the upheavals of 1905. By analyzing editorials, journalist interviews, and advertisements in Peterburgskii Listok, this paper argues that the newspaper repackaged and recalibrated competing narratives about the Russian Far East during the Russo-Japanese War, making the official developmentalist vision increasingly contested in the metropolitan public sphere.

Peterburgskii Listok was one of the highest-circulation national newspapers in the Russian Empire. It began weekly publication in 1862 and became a daily newspaper in 1882.^[2] Driven by commercial motives, the newspaper often employed sensational and dramatic storytelling techniques to attract a broad readership that included, but was not limited to, small merchants, artisans, and lower-level bureaucrats.^[3] It is therefore suitable to treat Peterburgskii Listok as an important source for tracing popular mentalities and narrative frames, since its profit-driven model required editors to anticipate and cater to what they believed would resonate with a mass readership. At the same time, its reports should not be treated as a neutral record of events or as straightforward evidence of facts on the ground.

Examining Peterburgskii Listok therefore addresses two related omissions in existing scholarship on the Russian Far East: first, it illuminates the mediated understandings of the region available to a mass urban readership, an angle often overshadowed by accounts centered on state strategy and elite debate; second, it brings into view a high-circulation commercial daily whose politics were not expressed through a stable, programmatic editorial line, a genre of newspaper frequently neglected in press historiography. Unlike Novoe Vremia or Russkoe Slovo, which tended to advance explicit and consistent positions, Peterburgskii Listok prioritized broad appeal and sales. Its political positioning was not articulated through an a priori ideological program. Instead, it was calibrated to what editors believed would attract and retain a mass readership, and to what could be printed under changing conditions. This makes the paper valuable not as a direct mirror of public opinion, but as evidence of how commercial incentives and presumed reader demand could shape the narrative frames through which Russia’s imperial role in the Far East was discussed.

Current scholarship on the Russian Far East tends to focus primarily on political and institutional history, with relatively little attention paid to perspectives from ordinary people. Paul Dukes offers a top-down analysis of the Russian Empire’s policies in Manchuria, focusing especially on imperial investments and strategic considerations in the Far East.^[4] My correction: Ivan Sablin, by contrast, uses the concept of “left-liberal national imperialism” to examine how intellectuals and publicists engaged in programmatic political debates about empire, including its eastern periphery, but pays less attention to how imperial vision was mediated through the commercially driven press.^[5] He argues that this discourse ultimately contributed to the establishment of the regionalist Far Eastern Republic in 1920.^[6] While both Dukes and Sablin offer strong accounts of state-directed imperial policy and elite ideological debates, they pay less attention to how relationships to the empire were produced in the information economy of Imperial Russia’s press. A key missing layer is the commercial press. It neither speaks entirely in a state program’s voice nor offers unmediated testimony. Instead, it selects and repackages events into saleable narratives for a mass readership. During the Russo-Japanese War, first-hand experiences, for example, those of returning soldiers, entered the metropolitan information market largely through such mediation. At the same time, most readers in St. Petersburg encountered the Russian Far East primarily through newspapers such as Peterburgskii Listok. In this sense, print media served as a bridge between imperial frontiers and the urban public sphere by translating distant events into narratives that were legible, compelling, and commercially viable.

Another overlooked aspect in previous scholarship is that studies of the Russian press in the period surrounding the Russo-Japanese War have tended to focus primarily on newspapers with explicit political affiliations, while paying less attention to publications like Peterburgskii listok, whose politics were shaped less by programmatic commitments than by market appeal and changing conditions of publishability. Jeffrey Brooks highlights how mass literature, including the street press, not only entertained urban grassroots audiences but also played a vital role in shaping their national and social identities.^[7] Louise McReynolds offers a more systematic study of the publishing industry in late Imperial Russia, paying particular attention to the conflicting perspectives among newspapers during pivotal events such as the Russo-Japanese War.^[8] Her analysis contrasts Russkoe Slovo, which represented a strong liberal and progressive stance, with Novoe Vremia, which maintained a consistently conservative and monarchist position. Scholars such as T. A. Kropotova, M. D. Kiryanova, and Zachary Hoffman have also produced case studies or comparative analyses of media coverage during the war.^[9] However, most of these studies focus on newspapers that had relatively fixed ideological positions from the outset of the conflict. Despite that, some newspapers, such as Peterburgskii Listok, did not follow any clearly articulated political orientation. As McReynolds notes, commercially driven papers often tailored their content to suit readers’ tastes, creating the illusion that they were giving voice to the public.^[10] In this context, Peterburgskii Listok, a high-circulation private newspaper, is valuable precisely because its politics were based on mercenary motives rather than programmatic. Instead of advancing a coherent party line, it packaged war and empire into narratives designed to sell, sometimes by amplifying sensation, sometimes by adjusting to perceived shifts in the news market. Rather, they help reconstruct the contested commercial environment in which imperial meaning was produced and undermined for an urban mass audience.

Before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Peterburgskii Listok offered a cautiously optimistic portrayal of the Russian Far East. It framed the region as commercially promising and militarily significant, while also expressing concern over the threat of foreign encroachment. This perspective reflected an emerging colonial mentality shaped by both ambition and insecurity. Sergei Witte (1849–1905), Prime Minister of the Russian Empire, oversaw the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1900, which significantly improved transportation across the vast territory divided by the Ural Mountains.^[11] However, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been fully completed; it remained a single-track railway in the early 1900s, severely lacking the capacity for large-scale logistics.^[12] As a result, the general public’s understanding of the Far East was shaped primarily by officially censored media. These portrayals often depicted the region as a mysterious periphery filled with commercial potential. In the early stages of the war, it remained a single-track line, incapable of handling large-scale transport.

Even before the Russo-Japanese War, Peterburgskii Listok published several articles on the Far East for a readership composed largely of lower-level bureaucrats, petty merchants, and other urban residents. These pieces often emphasized the region’s material conditions, as shown by the December 11, 1903 issue, which devoted six pages to Dalniy’s urban infrastructure.^[13] The article portrayed Dalian as a highly developed city. Aimed at its middle- and lower-middle-class audience, the report highlighted Dalian’s waterworks, directly rebutting rumors that the city lacked basic municipal infrastructure and that its urban development was overstated.^[14] At the end of the article, the author warned that foreign investors had already begun investing in Dalian, while Russians had missed these opportunities due to their inattention.^[15] As a result, the most prosperous shops in the city bore names that were not in Russian. The report therefore cast the Far East as a modernizing frontier of commercial promise, but also as a contested space in which Russian delay could translate into foreign advantage, a tension that captured the paper’s broader prewar mixture of ambition and insecurity.

Peterburgskii Listok also published articles about the Far East’s military matters. For instance, a report from October 9, 1903, specifically mentioned that the current military deployment in the Far East will ensure Russia’s security.^[16] The article highlighted the bravery and experience demonstrated by the troops stationed in the Far East during military operations in China in 1900, proposing this recent history as evidence of Russian supremacy over the region.^[17] In fact, even before the war began, Russian outlets’ portrayal of the Far East reflected the popular anxieties in state and non-state discourses.^[18] On the one hand, the newspaper promoted the potential of the Far East, emphasizing its commercial value and military security. On the other hand, concerns over foreign interference in the region consistently occupied the newspaper’s attention, revealing a contradictory mindset that blended confidence with anxiety.^[19] However, compared to other regions, reports on the Far East remained relatively scarce. In this sense, Peterburgskii Listok’s early coverage of the Far East constructed it as an ideal colonial space, glorifying imperial control while subtly encouraging migration, despite the limited reporting and the public’s overall lack of familiarity with the region.

When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904, Peterburgskii Listok, like many other newspapers, devoted extensive coverage to the Far East, capitalizing on and amplifying the surge of nationalist sentiment. In its issue of January 29, 1904 (Old Style), the newspaper published multiple reports that portrayed widespread national support for the war. Among them was a message from the acting Minister of Education to Tsar Nicholas II, stating that “the storm from the Far East may compel you to draw your sword for the mission of the nation” and that “the entire Russian people respond to the call of their sovereign.”^[20] Notably, although Peterburgskii Listok rarely covered church-related activities, on this occasion it prominently featured religious ceremonies and fundraising efforts led by the Orthodox Church for the defense of Port Arthur.^[21] By emphasizing the unity of Tsar, Church, and People, the newspaper reflected a clear image of what Sergei Uvarov (1786–1855), Minister of Education under Nicholas I, once formulated as “Official Nationality”, the ideological triad of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, manufacturing consent for this war.^[22]

Apart from that, an editorial then powerfully illustrated the dramatic shift in Russian perceptions of the Far East. It condemned Japan’s surprise attack as treacherous and described Japan as an “Asian barbarian tribe” attempting to destroy “European civilization.”^[23] This type of chauvinistic rhetoric was not unique to Peterburgskii Listok; conservative papers like Novoe Vremia regularly published satirical cartoons portraying the Japanese as short, uncivilized figures invading Europe.^[24] Still, Peterburgskii Listok cast the conflict as Europe against Asia, a move that resonates with long-running disputes over Russia’s identity. The paper’s rhetoric does not map neatly onto a single camp. It combines a Westernizer’s claim to European belonging with a Slavophile-inflected sense of spiritual and civilizational superiority, turning the war into an argument about what Russia was and what it defended. Within this narrative, the Far East was no longer a neglected imperial periphery but had been reimagined as the frontline of the Russian Empire’s civilizational mission—an area now invested with national urgency and symbolic value.

However, because the late imperial press operated under an administrative censorship regime, wartime patriotic alignment was often both a political constraint and a commercial calculation. Under the press laws of 1865, the Chief Bureau of Press Affairs could impose penalties on periodicals ranging from fines, to temporary suspensions of street sales, to closure.^[25] During the Russo-Japanese War, the Interior Ministry further tightened oversight through circulars that required preliminary approval for wartime bulletins and forbade discussion of troop concentrations, maneuvers, and even the cargo moving on the Trans-Siberian Railway. ^[26] At the time, only a few progressive newspapers such as Russkoe Slovo openly expressed anti-war views, while most mainstream publications displayed varying degrees of patriotic support.^[27]  In this context, newspapers had strong incentives to perform public loyalty in order to keep their coverage both publishable under wartime censorship and saleable in the news market, especially since pre-1905 sanctions such as suspending street sales or advertising could be financially damaging.^[28] Therefore, the appearance in Peterburgskii Listok of such patriotic articles, chauvinistic rhetoric, donation reports, and war-related classifieds should not be read as evidence of a coherent conservative editorial program. Rather, it reflects the practices of a commercially driven paper that accommodated material likely to attract readers while remaining publishable under wartime censorship.

Throughout 1904, Peterburgskii Listok employed popular and romanticized imagery to glorify Russian troops while simultaneously relying on Orientalist portrayals of the Japanese, two mutually reinforcing strategies that framed the war as both a test of Russian heroism and a civilizational struggle against an Asian enemy. This popular, melodramatic mode of narration linked the Far East to broader conceptions of Russian identity by presenting Russian troops as heroic defenders and the Japanese as a civilizational enemy, thereby helping sustain support for the war despite military setbacks. During this period, Peterburgskii Listok introduced a dedicated section—typically one to two pages in length, for covering the Russo-Japanese War and the Far East Affairs. These sections provided brief, relatively factual news updates, while war-related content also regularly appeared on the front pages in the form of editorials that projected an optimistic outlook on Russia’s prospects in the war. Despite the lack of substantial victories—such as the Russian army’s defeat at the Yalu River and the siege at Port Arthur—Peterburgskii Listok continued to publish editorials and interviews that expressed confidence in eventual triumph.^[29]

Even after major defeats in the spring of 1904, the newspaper sought to highlight Russian heroism, with two reports dated May 25 and June 5 focused on the valor of the Cossacks, portraying them as embodying the quintessential Russian spirit. In the May 25 report, for instance, a frontline correspondent praised the Cossacks’ guerrilla tactics against Japanese forces. The article concluded with an exaggerated tribute, the Cossacks were described as “tireless men, who could go without food, sleep, or any of the things ordinary people usually need.”^[30] Through stylized, dramatic prose, Peterburgskii Listok lionized and exoticized the Cossacks, presenting them as a folkloric embodiment of courage rather than narrating battlefield achievements in technical military terms. Drawing on a popular cultural repertoire in which the Cossack could be morally ambiguous yet still symbolize national endurance, the paper offered a commercially legible form of wartime patriotism that editors likely expected to resonate amid mounting uncertainty.

Simultaneously, the newspaper relied heavily on orientalist portrayals of the Japanese, depicting them as a warlike and barbaric race threatening to destroy European civilization. These depictions were consistent with broader trends in both conservative and liberal newspapers—Novoe Vremia frequently featured satirical cartoons showing the Japanese as short, uncivilized intruders, while Russkoe Slovo also invoked racial and cultural differences despite its progressive leanings.^[31] Peterburgskii Listok made particularly intensive use of such tropes, using them not only to legitimize the war but also to dramatize the conflict as a civilizational showdown between Europe and Asia. In doing so, the Far East was transformed from a marginal frontier into a symbolic theater of imperial destiny, a space where Russian national character could be projected and defended. This rhetoric is best understood as a market-facing strategy, which mobilized familiar cultural imagery that could plausibly resonate with readers while also serving the paper’s own incentive to dramatize the war and sustain attention in a competitive press environment.

Peterburgskii Listok also gave extensive coverage to wartime donations, repeatedly publicizing contributions by adults and children alike in January and June 1904. These reports should not be read simply as transparent evidence of popular enthusiasm; rather, they helped stage patriotism as a visible civic practice and made participation in the war effort legible to readers as a social norm.^[32]  Such patriotic displays were not unique to Peterburgskii Listok, but also appeared in other national and regional newspapers—Sibirskii Listok frequently reported on civilian efforts to organize volunteer medical aid and relief groups for the front.^[33] Taken together, these reports suggest that the press did not merely register wartime patriotism but actively publicized, normalized, and amplified it. In Peterburgskii Listok, however, this mode of patriotic display became harder to sustain after January 1905, as military failures and revolutionary unrest made earlier forms of celebratory coverage less credible and less commercially effective.

A more sustained critical turn did not become visible in Peterburgskii Listok until January 1905. Before then, even as defeats mounted, the paper largely continued to package the war through patriotic and sensational frames. Bloody Sunday altered both the political climate and the commercial calculus of the press, making an unqualified pro-government stance increasingly difficult to sustain. This transformation marked the beginning of a rupture between the state’s and society’s optimistic portrayal of the Far East and the grim realities emerging from the front. For example, one report on displaced settlers from Vladivostok stressed official abandonment rather than orderly evacuation: a refugee recalled that the authorities had “left us to the mercy of fate” as they “wandered the streets of Vladivostok,” while several “private individuals,” not the resettlement committee, ultimately paid their fares onward.^[34] Another article directly criticized the dysfunction of the military bureaucracy, primarily referencing battlefield losses and ending with a sharp condemnation of the army’s lack of preparedness.^[35] These reports stood in stark contrast to articles from earlier months of the war, which had emphasized the dedication of local officials and the strength of Russian military deployments in the region. Its coverage applies a conditional nationalism strategy, which preserves a patriotic expectation of victory as a politically safer posture, while selectively modulating emphasis and blame to retain readers in a contested media market. Just prior to the Battle of Tsushima in May of 1905, the paper published a short report emphasizing the vulnerability of the Japanese navy, suggesting that a decisive Russian naval victory was still within reach.^[36] Even as Peterburgskii Listok became more willing to question administrative competence, it still stopped short of challenging the war’s legitimacy or the broader imperial project in the Far East. Unlike Russkoe Slovo, which had opposed the war from the outset and framed military defeat as a potential catalyst for reform, Peterburgskii Listok feared the consequences of failure more than the ethical or strategic justifications of the war itself.

After the Battle of Tsushima in late May 1905, when Japan’s fleet under Tōgō Heihachirō destroyed or captured most of Russia’s Baltic Fleet, the plausibility of a Russian military turnaround collapsed for many observers. This defeat did not arrive in isolation. It capped a sequence of setbacks and, precisely because of its catastrophic scale, created a permission structure for sharper criticism by making continued optimism harder to sustain in print. On the home front, the 1905 Russian Revolution had already destabilized the political landscape through mass strikes, repression, and open challenges to state authority after Bloody Sunday, increasing the cost of maintaining an unqualified pro-government line. Against this backdrop, Peterburgskii Listok moved beyond its earlier tendency to blame isolated officials and began to frame defeat in more structural terms, linking military failure to problems of administration and accountability, and at moments even questioning the legitimacy of the war itself.^[37] In doing so, the paper edged toward a reformist liberal register that treated political change as a condition for national recovery rather than as a distraction from the war. A particularly striking example of this ideological turn came on June 16, 1905, when Peterburgskii Listok began serializing Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko’s novel The Blind War (Slepaya Voina).^[38] Told from the perspective of ordinary soldiers, the novel presents a bleak portrayal of both combat and daily life in Manchuria. Danchenko not only condemned the corruption of the officer class and the brutal treatment of enlisted men, but also questioned the larger rationale for the conflict. By the novel’s end, the war is described as a “massacre between two peoples who had once lived in harmony”—a direct and unambiguous anti-war statement.^[39]

Danchenko, who had long maintained an anti-war position and had previously published in Russkoe Slovo, makes Peterburgskii Listok’s decision to publish this work especially significant given the paper’s earlier alignment with pro-war sentiment.^[40] Conservative outlets like Novoe Vremia, continued to denounce the idea that military defeat could serve as a catalyst for reform—a position rooted in its rejection of post-Crimean liberalism after the Crimean War (1853-1856).^[41] In contrast, Peterburgskii Listok had, by the war’s final months, accepted the reformist logic promoted by Russkoe Slovo: that imperial failure in the Far East could and should become the basis for structural change. In this way, the realist, bottom up narrative of war’s brutality and the Far East’s unviability as an imperial frontier finally overwhelmed the official discourse that had long portrayed the region as a promising, developable periphery.

Peterburgskii Listok’s coverage of the Russian Far East were unstable and internally divided, reflecting a commercially driven effort to accommodate heterogeneous reader expectations: on the one hand, growing reformist criticism after military defeat; on the other, the continued appeal of imperial visions that many readers were not yet prepared to abandon. On one hand, its editorials expressed deep anxieties about the region, rooted in both cultural and geopolitical concerns. A recurring theme in the newspaper was that the war had been a grave mistake that brought enormous casualties and national humiliation; political commentary even recast that failure as a prompt for thorough reform.^[42] At the same time, however, another editorial gave space to a competing perspective, one that attributed Russia’s failures in the Far East to its insufficient cultural and civilizational influence in the region. An article concluded with the declaration, “All the European powers have already secured colonies for this purpose; Russia, too, must have an outlet to absorb its surplus population. Therefore, we must defend our territories in the Far East at all costs.”^[43] This duality reflects what historian Ivan Sablin has called “left-liberal nationalist imperialism,” a worldview in which intellectuals and political actors sought domestic reform while maintaining aggressive imperial ambitions abroad.^[44] In this light, the collapse of grand wartime narratives—especially those centered on Dalian’s promise before the war—did not erase the Far East’s symbolic importance. Instead, the region became more difficult to invoke in public discourse, as it evoked not opportunity but trauma and loss.

The newspaper’s advertisements revealed a far more grounded and disillusioned perspective, particularly from returning veterans and working-class, challenging the editorial fantasy of the Far East as a site of imperial opportunity. Beginning in 1906, Peterburgskii Listok’s classified pages saw a surge in job-seeking notices from soldiers returning from the Far East, many of whom had practical skills such as electrical repair, but still struggled to secure employment.^[45] Advertisements in the Russian press were not just commercial tools but indicators of social reality and local needs, especially in Peterburgskii Listok, whose readers—artisans, petty merchants, and tradespeople—relied on steady labour markets.^[46] For the readership, the Far East was not a site of promise but one of displacement and economic precarity. The stark contrast between the newspaper’s editorial promotion of imperial development and the classifieds’ reflection of postwar economic failure underscores a deeper class-based divergence in perceptions of the Far East. If intellectuals and ideologues envisioned the region through the lens of civilizing missions and demographic expansion, some ordinary Russians—both on the frontier and home front—encountered it as a place that had betrayed imperial promises and revealed the limits of state propaganda.

Peterburgskii Listok suggests that imperial narratives were already volatile under the strain of geopolitical realities, and that the popular press functioned as a contested arena in which these narratives were reiterated, reframed, and sometimes destabilized. Whereas conservative papers such as Novoe Vremia tended to sustain a more programmatic patriotic line and other mass papers adopted different tonal strategies, Peterburgskii Listok reveals how commercially-driven framing could quickly recalibrate as the costs of the war and domestic instability became harder to contain. Through editorials, interviews, and advertisements, the newspaper charted a complex trajectory in its representation of the Russian Far East—from early optimism and nationalist exaltation to ambivalence, critique, and eventual disillusionment. In 1904, it helped construct the Far East as both a battlefield for civilizational struggle and a stage for Russian national identity, appealing to lower-middle-class readers through accessible language and romanticized heroism. Yet as the Russo-Japanese War progressed and defeat loomed, the limits of this narrative became increasingly visible, and by 1905, Peterburgskii Listok had begun to echo the reformist tone of liberal newspapers, with its postwar coverage further undermining the fantasy of a developable Far Eastern frontier. In doing so, the newspaper not only reflected but actively participated in the broader collapse of imperial legitimacy. Ultimately, Peterburgskii Listok demonstrates how a commercially driven newspaper could repackage imperial vision for a mass urban readership under the combined pressures of war, censorship, and the market. Its coverage of the Russian Far East during the Russo-Japanese War and the immediate postwar years reveals a widening gap between imperial developmentalist rhetoric and the material realities registered in its own pages. In that gap, the Far East ceased to appear simply as a frontier of imperial promise and instead emerged as a site of military defeat, political failure, and disillusionment with the earlier developmentalist narrative.

---

Endnotes

^[1] Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), 169.

^[2] Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 118.  

^[3] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 52.

^[4] Paul Dukes, Russia in Manchuria: A Problem of Empire, 52.

^[5] Ivan Sablin, The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922 : Nationalisms, Imperialisms, and Regionalisms in and after the Russian Empire. First edition. (Boca Raton, FL: Routledge, an imprint of Taylor and Francis, 2018), 12. 

^[6] Sablin, The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1.

^[7] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 214.

^[8] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 168.

^[9]Zachary Hoffman, “Subversive Patriotism: Aleksei Suvorin, Novoe Vremia, and Right-Wing Nationalism during the Russo-Japanese War,” Ab Imperio 2018, no. 1 (2018): 69–100. https://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2018.0003; T. A. Kropotova and M. D. Kiryanova. “Activities of Institutions of Russian Red Cross Society in Tobolsk Province during Russo-Japanese War: Materials of Newspaper ‘Sibirskiy Listok.’” Nauc̆ nyj Dialog (Online) 12, no. 6 (2023): 417–31. https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2023-12-6-417-431. 

^[10] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 155.

^[11] Anton Fedyashin, “Sergei Witte and the Press: A Study in Careerism and Statecraft.” Kritika (Bloomington, Ind.) 14, no. 3 (2013): 517.

^[12] Paul Dukes, Russia in Manchuria : A Problem of Empire. London, England ; Routledge, 2022, 36.

^[13] “На Дальнем Востоке”, Peterburgskii Listok, Dec. 11, 1903, 10-15

^[14] “На Дальнем Востоке”, Peterburgskii Listok, Dec. 11, 1903, 11.

^[15] “На Дальнем Востоке”, Peterburgskii Listok, Dec. 11, 1903, 11.

^[16] “С Дальнего Востока”, Peterburgskii Listok, Oct. 9, 1903, 12.

^[17] “С Дальнего Востока”, Peterburgskii Listok, Oct. 9, 1903, 12.

^[18] Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Another ‘Yellow Peril’: Chinese Migrants in the Russian Far East and the Russian Reaction before 1917,” Modern Asian Studies 12, no. 2 (April 1978): 314.

^[19] “На войне”, Peterburgskii Listok, Dec. 24, 1903, 4.

^[20] ”Верноподданническое обращение к Императорскому Санкт-Петербургскому университету“,  Peterburgskii Listok, Jan. 29, 1904, 17.

^[21] “Кронштадтъ, 28-го Января.”, Jan. 29, 1904, 4.

^[22]Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education : An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855. (Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 135.

^[23] ”Новое предательство Японии”, Peterburgskii Listok, Feb. 12, 1904, 2.

^[24]Zachary Hoffman. “Drawing Stereotypes: Europe and East Asia in Russian Political Caricature, 1900-1905.” Sibirica : The Journal of Siberian Studies 19, no. 1 (2020), 86.   

^[25] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 186.

^[26] Hoffman, “Subversive Patriotism,” 80.

^[27] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 186.

^[28] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 221.

^[29] Nish, Ian. The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5 : Volume 3. 1st ed. (Bielefeld: BRILL, 2003), 189. 

^[30] “Казаки и война“, Peterburgskii Listok, May. 25, 1904, 2.

^[31] Hoffman, “Drawing Stereotypes,” 111.

^[32] “Жертва малютки”, Peterburgskii Listok, Jun. 26, 1904; “Война и дети”, Peterburgskii Listok, Nov, 7, 1904.

^[33] T. A. Kropotova, and M. D. Kiryanova. “Activities of Institutions of Russian Red Cross Society in Tobolsk Province during Russo-Japanese War: Materials of Newspaper ‘Sibirskiy Listok.’” Nauc̆ nyj Dialog (Online) 12, no. 6 (2023): 423.  

^[34] “Бегство переселенцев из Владивостока”, Peterburgskii Listok, Mar. 4, 1905, 8

^[35] “Дѣло не легкое“ Peterburgskii Listok, Mar. 8, 1905

^[36] Peterburgskii Listok, May. 12, 1905, 1.

^[37] “Слепая война”, Peterburgskii Listok, Jun. 29, 1905.

^[38] “Слепая война”, Peterburgskii Listok, Jun. 29, 1905.

^[39] “Слепая война”, Peterburgskii Listok, Jun. 29, 1905, 16.

^[40] McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 186.

^[41] Hoffman, “Subversive Patriotism,” 98.

^[42] ”О Даляне“, Peterburgskii, Listok, Dec. 23, 1907, 3.

^[43] ”Современное положение на Дальнем Востоке”,  Peterburgskii, Listok, Apr. 14, 1907, 2. ⁴³ Peterburgskii Listok, Mar. 2, Apr, 29, Oct, 21, 1906.

^[44] Sablin, The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 12.

^[45] Peterburgskii Listok, Mar. 2, Apr, 29, Oct, 21, 1906.

^[46]Felix Cowan. “Building Urban Community in Late Imperial Russia: Early Twentieth-Century Kopeck Newspapers as Local Institutions.” Journalism History 51, no. 2 (2025): 3. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2025.2468166.

References

Anisin, Alexei. “The Russian Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905: A Discursive Account of Nonviolent Transformation.” Politics, Groups & Identities 2, no. 4 (2014): 643–60.     https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2014.969741.

Ben-Canaan, Dan, Frank Grüner, and Ines Prodöhl, eds. Entangled Histories: The Transcultural Past of Northeast China. Cham: Springer, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02048-8.

Brooks, Jeffrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Cohen, Aaron J. “Long Ago and Far Away: War Monuments, Public Relations, and the Memory of the Russo-Japanese War in Russia, 1907–14.” The Russian Review 69, no. 3 (2010): 388–411. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9434.2010.00573.x.

Cowan, Felix. “Building Urban Community in Late Imperial Russia: Early Twentieth-Century Kopeck Newspapers as Local Institutions.” Journalism History 51, no.2 (2025): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2025.2468166.

Dukes, Paul. Russia in Manchuria: A Problem of Empire. London: Routledge, 2022.

Fedyashin, Anton. “Sergei Witte and the Press: A Study in Careerism and Statecraft.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, no. 3 (2013): 507–34. https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2013.0041.

Frame, Murray. “Censorship and Control in the Russian Imperial Theatres during the 1905 Revolution and Its Aftermath.” Revolutionary Russia 7, no. 2 (1994): 164–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546549408575622.

Hoffman, Zachary. “Drawing Stereotypes: Europe and East Asia in Russian Political Caricature, 1900–1905.” Sibirica: The Journal of Siberian Studies 19, no. 1 (2020):  85–118.

Hoffman, Zachary. “Subversive Patriotism: Aleksei Suvorin, Novoe Vremia, and Right-Wing Nationalism during the Russo-Japanese War.” Ab Imperio 2018, no. 1 (2018): 69–100. https://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2018.0003.

Kropotova, T. A., and M. D. Kiryanova. “Activities of Institutions of Russian Red Cross Society in Tobolsk Province during Russo-Japanese War: Materials of Newspaper ‘Sibirskiy Listok.’” Nauchnyi Dialog 12, no. 6 (2023): 417–31. https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2023-12-6-417-431.

Matsuzato, Kimitaka, ed. Russia and Its Northeast Asian Neighbors: China, Japan, and Korea, 1858–1945. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

McReynolds, Louise. The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.                              https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400862320.

Nish, Ian, ed. The Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5. Vol. 3. Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2003.

Николаев, П. А., ed. Русские писатели 1800–1917: Биографический словарь. Vol. 1. Москва: Большая российская энциклопедия, 1989.

Peterburgskii Listok (St. Petersburg). Various issues, 1903–1906. Imperial Russian Newspapers. East View Global Press Archive. Accessed March 26, 2026. https://gpa.eastview.com/crl/irn/newspapers/leaf. 

Podalko, Petr E. “‘Weak Ally’ or ‘Strong Enemy?’: Japan in the Eyes of Russian Diplomats and Military Agents, 1900–1907.” Japan Forum 28, no. 3 (2016): 266–81.                               https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2016.1147482.

Sablin, Ivan. The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922: Nationalisms, Imperialisms, and Regionalisms in and after the Russian Empire. Boca Raton, FL: Routledge, 2018.

Siegelbaum, Lewis H. “Another ‘Yellow Peril’: Chinese Migrants in the Russian Far East and the Russian Reaction before 1917.” Modern Asian Studies 12, no. 2 (1978): 307–30.

Whittaker, Cynthia H. The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984.

---

About the Author: