To the Edge of the World E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 478

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Christian Wolmar expertly tells the story of the Trans-Siberian railway from its conception and construction under Tsar Alexander III, to the northern extension ordered by Brezhnev and its current success as a vital artery. He also explores the crucial role the line played in both the Russian Civil War -Trotsky famously used an armoured carriage as his command post - and the Second World War, during which the railway saved the country from certain defeat. Like the author's previous railway histories, it focuses on the personalities, as well as the political and economic events, that lay behind one of the most extraordinary engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century.

Leseprobe

Also by Christian Wolmar

Engines of War

Blood, Iron & Gold

Fire & Steam

The Subterranean Railway

On the Wrong Line

Down the Tube

Broken Rails

Forgotten Children

Stagecoach

The Great Railway Disaster

The Great Railway Revolution

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2013 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2013

The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9780857890375 E-book ISBN: 9781782392040

Text design by carrdesignstudio.com Maps by Jeff Edwards Index by David Atkinson

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

List of Maps and Illustrations

Maps

Introduction

1. A Slow Embrace

2. Holding on to Siberia

3. Witte’s Breakthrough

4. Into the Steppe

5. Travels and Travails

6. Casus Belli

7. The New Siberia

8. Russia all the Way

9. The Battle for the Trans-Siberian

10. The Big Red Railway

11. The Other Trans-Siberian

12. The Greatest Railway

Bibliography

Notes

Index

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. Trans-Siberian Railway

2. Far Eastern sections of the Trans-Siberian railway

3. Russo-Japanese War 1904–05

4. Mid-Siberian sector

5. Western sector

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Portrait of Alexander III (1845-1894) by Ivan Kramskoi. Rex/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group.

2. Sergei Witte at the Wentworth Hotel, Portsmouth, 01 January 1905. Getty Images/Buyenlarge/Archive Photos.

3. Engraving of icebreaker ferry on Lake Baikal, 1904. Getty Images/Apic/Hulton Archive.

4. Convicts working on the Trans-Siberian Railway, 1900. Rex/Roger-Viollet.

5. Trans-Siberian Railway bridge. Mary Evans/John Massey Stewart Collection.

6. Paramedics in a hospital train of the Russian Red Cross. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

7. Transfer of Japanese prisoners during the Russo-Japanese War. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

8. Native Manchurian people entertaining Russian soldiers. Mary Evans/Interfoto Agentur.

9. Engineers on the railway bridge over the River Ob. akg-images.

10. Workmen splitting logs for the Trans-Siberian Railway. Mary Evans/John Massey Stewart Collection.

11. Trains at a marshalling yard on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

12. Irkutsk Station, 1898. © De Agostini/The British Library Board.

13. Japanese troops entering Vladivostok, 1918. akg-images/Interfoto.

14. Farmers and children sell dairy products to passengers. © William Wisner Chapin/National Geographic Society/Corbis.

15. Leon Trotsky, Petrograd station, 1920. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS.

16. Armoured train on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Mary Evans/Robert Hunt Collection.

17. Pointsman at Novosibirsk, 1929. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

18. Children selling flowers to passengers, 1921. © Ella R. Christie/National Geographic Society/Corbis.

19. Saloon car, 1903. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

20. Buryat people at Talbaga station. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

21. Third-class in Krasnoyarsk, 1905. Mary Evans/Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

22. Vladivostok station. akg-images/Imagno.

23. Passengers on a platform, 1915. Rex/Roger-Viollet.

24. Yaroslavsky station, 1908. Mary Evans Picture Library.

25. Yaroslavsky station, 1974. akg-images/RIA Nowosti.

26. Railwayman beside snow-covered tracks, 1978. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS.

27. Members of the Young Communist League at Yaroslavsky station. akg-image /RIA Nowosti.

28. Builders of the Baikal Amur Railroad, 01 October 1984. © RIA Novosti /Alamy.

29. Plaque at Vladivostok station. Courtesy of Deborah Maby.

30. Novosibirsk station. Courtesy of Deborah Maby.

31. Circum-Baikal Railway. Francorov/Wiki Commons.

32. Rossiya Trans-Siberian train arriving at Ulan-Ude, 2007. Rex.

33. Ulan-Ude station, 2012. Courtesy of Deborah Maby.

34. Christian Wolmar and Deborah Maby. Courtesy of Deborah Maby.

INTRODUCTION

As with my previous railway history books, this is not just an account of a transport system. It is so much more than that. The story of the Trans-Siberian is both a tale of remarkable engineering stimulated by imperial ambition, and also a key part of Russian and, indeed, wider European and Asian history.

The Trans-Siberian is not a single railway. There are several Trans-Siberians, and the one that most fits the name – the route between Moscow and Vladivostok, entirely in Russian territory – was not completed until 1916. Before that the route from Moscow to the Pacific Ocean used the Chinese Eastern Railway, built in conjunction with the Trans-Siberian, through Manchuria, which was part of China (and now known as the Trans-Manchurian). More recently, as described towards the end of this book, the eastern part of the Trans-Siberian has been paralleled with the Baikal Amur Railway, built at great financial and environmental cost by the Soviets through virgin Siberian steppe. This book concentrates on the story of these lines, rather than the various branches built in the twentieth century, such as the Turksib and the Trans-Mongolian, because the focus of the story is Siberia, which illustrates so well the theme that comes out of many of my books: the construction of a railway line results in all kinds of changes, expected and unexpected.

In Siberia’s case, the results have inevitably been both positive and negative. In many respects, this is a tragic history. Soon after it was built, the Trans-Siberian was the catalyst for a major war, fought almost on the scale of the First World War, and then became the centre of much of the fighting in the Russian Civil War. Leon Trotsky famously used an armoured train on the line to lead the fight against the Whites, the counter-revolutionary forces in that war, and there was much bloodshed on both sides. In particular, the biggest mistake was to have built the original line through Manchuria, a move that not only resulted almost immediately in the Russo-Japanese War, but was also instrumental in bringing about the Russian Revolution, as it stimulated the failed Russian uprising of 1905.

The Trans-Siberian itself contributed to the epoch-making revolution of 1917. The concentration of resources by an impoverished government on what was perceived as adventurism in the Far East – especially during the building of the Amur railway in the years running up to the First World War – undoubtedly contributed to the political instability in Russia. The Trans-Siberian, therefore, does not merely have a major role in railway history, but its contribution to the wider geopolitics of the twentieth century cannot be overestimated. Without the Trans-Siberian, modern maps of Europe and Asia might have a very different complexion.

The sequence of wars, as well as the mass migration stimulated by the line, were the source of much suffering, and there are numerous tragic stories in this book. But there is also a fantastic, positive tale to be told, one that is too often omitted or simply forgotten in the clichéd view of Russia. The construction and the continued efficient operation of the Trans-Siberian ranks among the greatest achievements of mankind. Indeed, much of this book is about debunking myths. The Trans-Siberian came in for considerable criticism in the West when it was first built. The Russians were portrayed as corrupt incompetents. While undoubtedly mistakes were made and money went missing, this is to deny a magnificent achievement, one of the great engineering wonders of the world.

As I found when I travelled along the line, this is not some little meandering rural railway with the occasional chundering train, but rather, one of the world’s great arteries, a piece of infrastructure that transformed not only the region in which it was built, but also the entire nation that built it.

The first chapter sets the scene with an outline of pre-railway Siberia and a short account of the development of Russia’s first railways. Indeed, Russia took to the iron road rather late and its backward economic state meant the network grew more slowly than in Europe, despite the vast size of the nation. In the second chapter I explain the reasons why the Trans-Siberian became an important political issue in the latter stages of the nineteenth century, and consider the arguments between the protagonists and the opponents. There were no shortage of schemes put forward, but for a long time Russia’s rulers were opposed to the idea. Then, as explained in chapter 3, the mood changed, largely thanks to one man, the great Sergei Witte, the line’s successful advocate and a brilliant politician and administrator – a rare combination.

It took about thirty years between the idea for the line first emerging and the decision to go ahead. However, the choice of route through Manchuria was to have devastating effects. Remarkably, as explained in chapter 4, it took barely a decade to build the Trans-Siberian, despite the difficult climate, disease, shortage of materials and labour, and widespread corruption. It was an amazing achievement, although the condition of the completed line did leave a lot to be desired.

The fifth chapter covers the experiences of early travellers, which were undoubtedly mixed and at times perilous. Nevertheless, most came away impressed and there was, right from the beginning, a constant process of improvement. Their accounts are certainly varied and entertaining. Chapter 6 covers the first of several wars fought around the Trans-Siberian: the Russo-Japanese conflict, which was stimulated by the construction of the line and proved disastrous for Russia.

In chapter 7 the impact of the construction of the line is assessed. It transformed Siberia from a place just known for exiles and prisoners into a honey pot for immigrants, who arrived in their millions, encouraged by the state. Industry and agriculture both flourished. Chapter 8 tells the story of the completion of the line using solely Russian territory with the construction of the Amur Railway, the most difficult section, in order to bypass the troubled Manchurian route. The ninth chapter is the account of the civil war on the Trans-Siberian, a bloody and prolonged battle that ultimately decided the fate of the Russian Revolution.

Chapter 10 covers the interwar period, again a time of conflict, and then, worse, the establishment of the Gulags that were to cost the lives of millions of people caught up in Stalin’s bloody purges. It also explains the role of the Trans-Siberian in the industrialisation of Siberia, and the subsequent transfer of vast amounts of industry to the east in order to protect it from Hitler’s invasion.

The eleventh chapter covers the terrible history of the construction of the Baikal Amur Magistral or BAM, the world’s biggest railway project, which caused widespread environmental damage and has created a white elephant. Finally, in chapter 12 there is a brief account of the Trans-Siberian in the post-war period and an analysis of its impact on history.

A note on distances. The Trans-Siberian is 5,771 miles (9,288 kilometres) long, according to the famous monument at Vladivostok Station, but over the years the construction of tunnels and the straightening out of curves has reduced its overall distance. It is, therefore, a few miles shorter, but that is hardly significant; although in a sense the Trans-Siberian is a slight misnomer, since it is 9,000 miles from St Petersburg to Kamchatka, the furthermost point of Siberia in the north-east. In other words, the Trans-Siberian does only two thirds of the job. Nevertheless, it is an impressive one. The author of The Big Red Train Ride, the late Eric Newby, summed it up best: ‘There is no railway journey of comparable length anywhere in the world. The Trans-Siberian is the big train ride. All the rest are peanuts.’

A note on dates. Russia used the Julian calendar until just after the October Revolution (which was actually in November in the Gregorian calendar) and changed to the Gregorian on Wednesday, 31 January 1918, which, consequently, was followed by Thursday, 14 February 1918, thus dropping thirteen days from the calendar. I have, therefore, used dates from the appropriate calendar: the Julian for events in Russia before 1918 and the Gregorian thereafter. Dates in Europe follow the Gregorian throughout.

I make no apology for being inconsistent with translations from Russian spelling. There are variants of almost all names, and I have merely tried to select those best known.

I owe a particular debt to two people. First, to Stephen Marks, not only for his meticulous and fascinating account of the circumstances that led to the construction of the line in his book Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917, but also for being kind enough to read the draft and offer numerous corrections and comments. Second, to Bernard Gambrill, who from his Bruges hidey-hole read through the draft meticulously, picking up on errors both stylistic and factual. He also spent a remarkable amount of time digging up hundreds of potential images, and it is thanks to him that the book has such a good selection. My friend Liam Browne researched the section on agitprop trains, which was exceedingly helpful, and several other people have offered advice, including William Aldridge, Jim Ballantyne, John Fowler, Brent Hudson, Andrew Jones, Peter Lewis, Kate Pangbourne, Gordon Pettit, Harvey Smith and John Thorpe, as well as Teresa Glyn, who deserves a mention. There are others whom I am sure I have forgotten, but they will be included in the next edition.

I am also enormously grateful to my wonderful partner Deborah Maby, not only for her support and her practical help in reading the proofs, but, best of all, for accompanying me on the Trans-Siberian in November 2012 for what was quite literally a trip of a lifetime and a fantastic experience. As they say in the guide books: recommended. Thanks are also due to the staff at Real Russia for organising the journey. I am grateful, too, to my agent, Andrew Lownie; Toby Mundy and Louise Cullen at my publishers; and Ian Pindar, the copy editor. I claim, however, all the mistakes.

I dedicate this book to my much-loved and missed rogue of a father Boris Forter (né Kougoulsky, 1896–1976), who would have loved hearing about my trip to his homeland – which, sadly, he was never able to visit after he was forced to leave following the Revolution – and to read my account of this great railway. He was born in Moscow in the year the first major section of the Trans-Siberian was completed, fought against the Austrians in the Carpathian Mountains in the First World War and considered joining the White forces in 1918, a story I relate in the book; but, fortunately (not least for me), he fled to France instead, and later the United States and Britain.

I also dedicate this book to little Alfie, born 114 years later, who already seems to love trains.

ONE

A SLOW EMBRACE

There were many reasons for Russia not to have built the Trans-Siberian Railway – and very few to build it. While by 1869 America boasted a transcontinental railway and Canada, more relevantly, followed suit sixteen years later, Russia was different. Unlike most of Europe, which had embraced liberalism to accommodate the needs of industrial growth, Russia remained an absolute monarchy ruled by a conservative tsar through a political system that made no concessions to democracy. Travel was circumscribed by the state to such an extent that rail passengers needed internal passports to travel around the country. Compared with the United States and Canada, Russia was a primitive country, based on inefficient agriculture and boasting little industry. The territory of Siberia – the vast area east of the Urals through which the railway would pass – was sparsely populated and its climate was far harsher than the western regions of Canada and the United States, which had begun to be settled thanks to their transcontinental railways. It seemed to offer little to attract potential immigrants who would be needed to justify the massive cost of constructing the line. Given the likely poor demand for travel the need for the line could, therefore, be questioned.

Then there was the sheer scale of the enterprise. The railway would have to stretch across the whole of Siberia to the port of Vladivostok, a distance of some 5,7501 miles – 9,255 kilometres – from Moscow, since it made no sense to stop halfway, given its military rationale was to serve the ports on the Sea of Japan and reinforce the ties between the centre and the most disparate parts of the Russian Empire. As a comparison, the First American Transcontinental, which linked an already well-developed network of lines in the American Midwest with California, required only 1,780 miles of new line when work began in California in 1863. Given Russia’s poverty and its feudal, rather than capitalist, economy, neither private firms nor the state seemed in a position to embark on such an ambitious and costly project.

Yet Russia – or rather the tsar – did decide to build the line. The reasons for this momentous decision, as we shall see, were not rooted in any rational assessment of the economic benefits of building the railway, but rather in the tsar’s personal motivations and his assessment of its military and political value. The advantage of being an autocratic leader with no need to consider public opinion or pay too much regard to the parlous state of the Treasury, was that he had the power to make such things happen. His word was law and fortunately he had able aides, most notably Sergei Witte, his finance minister, to carry through the work.

This was a familiar pattern. After all, it was a previous tsar, Alexander’s grandfather, Nicholas I, who had brought the iron road to Russia in the first place on equally untested reasoning. While the first lines had been laid in both the UK and the US in 1830, Russia was hesitant about joining the railway age. Yet Russia desperately needed railways as the nation was a transport nightmare. The lack of investment and the size of the country resulted in lengthy, heroically difficult journeys, and the severe climate meant that sleighs rather than wheeled vehicles had to be used in winter. There was a scattering of good roads in Russia, notably the St Petersburg–Moscow highway, completed in 1816. One of its early travellers, Princess Maria Volkonsky – the wife of Sergei Volkonsky, one of the instigators of the attempted coup against the tsar of December 1825 – took five days to cover the 450 miles between the two cities when she journeyed east to join her husband in exile. That suggests it was certainly among the better roads of the age in Europe. This was the first of a series of highways that Nicholas had built to link the major towns, but minor routes could be travelled only on dirt roads, which became quagmires when the snow melted in the spring or the rain fell in the autumn.

Despite Russia’s primitive economic state, there was a well-organized system of passenger transport on these main roads. The fastest form of transport was that of government diligence, stagecoaches usually drawn by four horses abreast, which carried four passengers inside and three, paying lower fares, outside, together with the conductor and driver. There were, too, slower and cheaper public diligences which carried up to a dozen people, while more affluent families had their own vehicles. The operation of the roads was dependent on the government, which strictly controlled people’s movements. Horses had to be changed at government-run post stations located every ten miles or so and supervised by a stationmaster who ‘was bound to give preference to travellers on government service. The ordinary traveller might therefore have to wait hours or days for horses to become available, but his trials could be lightened by skilful bribery.’2

In Siberia travelling in the sleighs used in winter was infinitely preferable to the summer equivalent. This was normally a tarantass, which was rather like a large, shallow basket that rested on flexible wooden poles attached to the axles. The tarantass, drawn by two horses, carried up to four people with a seat for the driver but no benches for the passengers, who simply made do with finding space alongside their baggage and loose belongings. The smaller, single-horse-drawn telegas, little more than a slightly modified farm cart, was an even more uncomfortable conveyance, used mostly only for baggage, but at times brought into service when tarantasses were not available. The one advantage of not travelling in the winter was that large sections of the road could be avoided in the short, ice-free season by using the ferries that plied their trade along Siberia’s huge rivers and which, in some parts flowed in an east–west direction. By the mid-nineteenth century large paddle steamboats were also available to passengers, providing reasonable accommodation during voyages that could last 1,000 miles or more.

Indeed, before the arrival of the railways, the rivers had been the backbone of Russia’s transport system, even though they were only sufficiently ice-free to be used, at best, for five months of the year. Short river crossings were made on flat-bottomed rafts or barges moored to a chain anchored in mid-stream, but at times large queues developed at key crossing points because there were not enough of them. Nor were these little boats particularly safe or reliable. There were dangers from sizeable ice floes – mini-icebergs, in effect – in the spring, which could send the boat’s occupants flying into the water or even sink the craft with invariably fatal results. At times the sheer volume of these floes stopped the service altogether. Indeed, the elements posed an ever-present danger to progress. If the rivers dried up, the large steamboats could become marooned in the shallows for days or even weeks, while after prolonged rain the rivers became too swollen or fast-flowing for safe navigation. Oddly, bridges, too, posed considerable danger. These structures were often crumbling and rotten, and yamschchiki, the tarantass drivers, excited by what they saw as a challenge, would often accelerate to cross a bridge, judging that they would outpace any collapse – which did not always prove to be the case.

Given the rigours of the journey, optimistic travellers would seek comfort and rest at post houses, which were located about every ten or twenty miles throughout the route, when they could no longer face another night of being thrown around in a tarantass. They were invariably disappointed. These government-run post houses normally consisted of living quarters for the postmaster and his family and a common room for travellers, which was ‘about twenty feet by eighteen feet wide, the two sections being heated by a huge brick oven in the dividing wall’.3 There were a few chairs and tables, but no beds and the ‘guests’ would sleep where they could on furs and coats, lying on uncarpeted filthy floors inhabited by cockroaches and their predators: large, hungry rats. There were no sanitary facilities, which rarely troubled the local travellers, who did not believe in washing on these voyages, as they thought that ‘soap and water sensitized the skin and increased the dangers of frostbite’.4 A British visitor, Harry de Windt, remarked that while the Russian peasant women would not find it a hardship to remain unwashed for months at a time since that was their custom, the aristocratic ladies who travelled to join their husbands in Irkutsk or Vladivostok found it unbearable: ‘The prettiest looked hideous in the early morning hours, with tangled hair, disordered dress and pale, pasty faces, while their diamond rings served to show off the blackness of their hands and nails, which they had probably been unable to wash for days.’5 With typical Victorian gallantry, he omits to tell us what the less pretty ones looked like.

The first part of the trip from Moscow to Siberia, the route to the Urals – the natural as well as official barrier between Europe and Asia – was relatively easy since the roads were in reasonable condition, but thereafter the going got tougher. Steven Marks, the historian of the genesis of the line, sums it up neatly: ‘Siberian transportation west of Lake Baikal was bad, and east of the lake it got worse.’6 The historic route through Siberia, rather grandly titled the post road – a ‘flattering misnomer’7 according to foreigners who ventured on to it – was known locally as the trakt and had been improved in the eighteenth century (using the labour of exiles) to a width of twenty-one feet. For the most part it was merely a line of tall posts or clumps of birch trees to indicate the route through the steppes, just enough for two tarantasses to pass safely. There was not only the problem of mud in the wet seasons, but the sheer remoteness of the route meant that any breakdown led to lengthy delays to find replacement equipment. In the winter the sleighs gave a smoother ride, though the danger then was from storms that could trap the unwary between the post houses which would have provided shelter – albeit crude. There was, too, a hidden danger for unwary drivers. Rocks partly covered by snow could shatter sleigh runners, which would be impossible to repair on the spot and leave travellers spending nights by the roadside in freezing conditions with only the furs of the tarantass to keep them warm. Traffic, too, could be heavy on parts of the route in winter as the road was ‘often blocked by hundreds of one-horse sledges loaded with hide-bound boxes of tea and all roped together to form a single file perhaps a mile long’.8 It was customary for the drivers in these long chains to fall asleep, given they had nothing to do as they were connected to the next wagon; and therefore the horses, left to their own devices, tended to drift towards the centre of the road – to the annoyance of any traffic coming in the other direction.

Tarantasses were limited to a maximum of 8 mph, which was strictly enforced by the government’s agents, but this safety measure was not sufficient to prevent accidents, which were more frequent at night. Since passengers in a hurry would be driven at night as well as day in order to cover the huge distances, sleepy or, more often, sozzled drivers would doze off with inevitable consequences. And if the condition of the road and the flimsiness of the carriages were not dangerous enough, travellers lived at constant risk of attack from runaway convicts, who, particularly in the summer, would form into groups, lying in wait near post stations. With little to lose, they were particularly violent and after robbing their victims of money, clothes, weapons and sometimes even the passports that might enable them to return to the west, would often slaughter travellers to prevent them bearing witness.

Given these difficulties it was hardly surprising that it could take a year and sometimes more to reach Vladivostok, the main port on the Pacific that would eventually be the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In the right conditions, and with money for bribes, the journey could be undertaken much more quickly, but there were never any guarantees about travelling through Siberia. The unexpected mishap was always to be expected.

The term Siberia is, in fact, a rather loose description of the region east of the Urals with a landmass equivalent to the whole of North America, including Canada and Alaska, and Europe put together – some five million square miles, a number that seems almost impossible to grasp – with a population today of forty million. Broadly, it takes in the Asian land mass north of a line drawn between Kazakhstan and Korea, including China and Mongolia. The eastern shores stretch between the Sea of Japan and the Bering Strait, both of which are parts of the Pacific Ocean. Maps barely do justice to the scale of this land mass, because to fit on a page they are generally on a larger scale than representations of other countries, which is justified by the scarcity of towns and villages of any description. It is only by realizing that Siberia encompasses seven time zones,9 compared with four across the US mainland, that the scale begins to be understood.

The standard Western European assumption of equating Siberia with freezing-cold temperatures is not entirely accurate. The southern parts of Siberia through which the railway runs is broadly on the same latitude as central England and has a humid, continental climate with cold winters – typically averaging –15°C in January – and fairly warm summers. It is, though, the more northern, drier areas where the freezing temperatures that are synonymous with Siberia can be found with, typically, January figures averaging –25°C or worse.

Vladivostok, which is tucked away in the southernmost corner of Siberia near both the Chinese and North Korean borders, is almost ten degrees of latitude south of London. While Vladivostok has a legendary feel to it, like Timbuktu, as if it were some unimaginably distant place, it is, in fact, by no means the furthest point from Moscow. To the north-east there are several thousand miles of land mass, ending in the peninsula of Kamchatka, which scowls across the Bering Strait at Alaska, famously sold to America for barely the price of a tsar’s summer residence.

There is an entertaining, if perhaps apocryphal tale that illustrates the scale of the Siberian lands. In the eighteenth century the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna invited half a dozen virgins from Kamchatka to visit her in the capital, St Petersburg. Escorted by an imperial officer, these supposedly chaste maidens were, by the time they reached Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, which was about halfway on their journey, already carrying children fathered by their military chaperon. According to Harmon Tupper, author of a 1960s account of the railway, the Lothario was replaced by a supposedly more reliable fellow, but ‘nevertheless, by the time the young mothers reached St Petersburg – nearly 9,000 miles from Kamchatka – their firstborn had half-brothers and -sisters’.10

Siberia, of course, remains synonymous with the phenomenon of exile. With justification, since the numbers suffering that fate were remarkably high. Exile to Siberia became a punishment as early as the late sixteenth century, but initially only a few criminals were sent there. At the time, Siberia was the lenient option. The Russians had a penchant for particularly unpleasant and cruel treatment of anyone who transgressed the law or challenged the autocratic rule of the tsars. It seemed a feature of the Russian rulers to devise particularly intricate and painful ways to despatch their victims. Men were impaled on sharp stakes, hanged or beheaded for minor crimes, while flogging and branding were commonplace. Mutilation – such as amputation of limbs or cutting out tongues – was also sanctioned, until, in the mid-eighteenth century the empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great, decided that the barbarity had to end. She abolished the death penalty and largely replaced it with exile to Siberia. While the death penalty was later partly reinstated, it was used only sparingly and instead most criminals found themselves being sent east. It was not always a blessing for the hapless transgressors of the criminal code. In fact, such were the depredations suffered by many convicts, a swift death in a prison yard might have been preferable.

Broadly, there were two categories of exile: the common criminals and the political activists, who, for the most part, were more affluent and well-educated than the lawbreakers and made up a tiny minority, perhaps one or two per cent. The overall number of people sent to Siberia, though, was quite extraordinary as the system had a dual purpose. While primarily exile was a form of punishment, it also helped to populate the tribal areas of Siberia with Russians in order to solidify the tsarist regime’s hold over its eastern lands. That, too, of course, would motivate the construction of the railway. The pace of deportations increased greatly in the early nineteenth century and a reliable estimate is that at its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, up to 12,000 people were sent each year, many bringing their families with them, so that overall, between 1800 and the outbreak of the First World War, around one million people were exiled.

Of course, while being sent to Siberia seems a particularly cruel punishment, the French and British had their own exile systems during the nineteenth century, sending people to far-off colonies rather than internally to a distant part of the same nation. After a hiatus during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, hundreds of thousands were sent during Joseph Stalin’s rule, which lasted until the 1950s.

During the early part of this period, exile was, for the most part, a sentence of death. According to Tupper, ‘Exiles were herded on foot to Siberia and died by the thousands for lack of food and shelter.’11 The relatively liberal Tsar Alexander l began to improve conditions for the exiles, establishing stockaded rest houses – étapes, as they were known, since French was the language used by the ruling classes – which offered some protection and respite to the travelling deportees. Nevertheless, the conditions remained brutal. Those sentenced to hard labour were sent to the mines beyond Irkutsk, in deepest, north-eastern Siberia (not salt mines, as myth has it, but silver and gold), where some, dreading a lifetime of incarceration and suffering from the brutality of the guards, committed suicide by drinking water in which they had soaked the poisonous heads of matches. Those sentenced to hard labour and a second group, ‘penal colonists’, were exiled for life, but could become settlers after serving a sentence ranging from four to twenty years.

Despite this, the exile system failed miserably as a way of increasing the population. There is a bit of a mystery here. The numbers being exiled to Siberia suggest that the population should have grown rapidly in the nineteenth century. But census figures suggest it did not. The reason was that most exiles were relatively old – typically thirty to fifty – which meant that by the time they were released to settle they were beyond the age when they could be expected to raise a family. Moreover, there was an inbuilt sexual imbalance resulting from the far greater number of male than female exiles. There was, too, a high death rate, even after various sets of improvements were introduced in the rare brief periods of more liberal rule. While the figures on prisoner numbers suggest that many lived a long time, the jailers who controlled the penal colonies and the mines were effectively a law unto themselves, since they were so far from the capital and therefore routinely failed to report deaths, because they could continue to draw rations and allowances on the part of these deceased prisoners. This was corruption on a grand scale. According to a British Foreign Office report, large numbers of prisoners ‘existed only in official lists of the Siberian authorities, who prolonged the lives of thousands of exiles on paper in order to put the money received from the government for their support into their own pockets’.12 Indeed, that provided almost an incentive to despatch prisoners or encourage them to escape to eke out a miserable existence as a bandit unlikely to survive the winter. The census, however, reveals the real story. The modest increase in the Siberian population during the nineteenth century was, in fact, almost entirely the result of settlement by freed serfs after the abolition of slavery in 1862. There were, too, numerous tribes who had lived there for time immemorial. These were a disparate group, several of whom were nomadic, who had little connection with the Russian state and had their own languages and customs.

The unattractiveness of transport in Siberia to all but a few hardy settlers was, therefore, one of the spurs to the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. However, it took a leap of imagination to set out to build a 5,750-mile line, far longer than any other in the world, when Russia’s railway system was much less developed than its counterparts in Europe and North America. Russia’s first steps to joining the growing number of railway nations were tentative – hardly surprising, given the conservative and authoritarian nature of rule by Tsar Nicholas l. The construction of railways began to be mooted for the first time in Russia in the mid-1820s. As in Britain and continental Europe, man-hauled wagonways had been used for some time in mines and the first horse-drawn railway – a 1.2-mile line carrying silver ore from a mine at the Zmeinogorsk works in the Altai region of south central Russia, near what is now the Kazakhstan border – was built in 1809 by Pyotr Frolov. This line was notable not only as the first to use horses – who could haul three wagons each carrying eight tons of ore, far more efficient than any previous method – but ‘for many cuttings and tunnels built to ease gradients, and for the replacement of angle rails, as used elsewhere, by cast-iron convex rails matching corresponding grooves in the wheels of the wagons’.13 It was, in other words, a very sophisticated railway by the standards of the day, but unfortunately it was in such a remote area of the country that even the tsar was unaware of its existence. It took another twenty-five years before Russia’s first steam engine was built, and it was – as in Britain, where the Stephensons, George and Robert, were the main developers – the work of a father-and-son team. The Cherepanovs, Yefim and his son Miron, were mechanics at the iron works of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, who had previously produced a series of steam engines used to supply power to pumps and over a period of fifteen years had greatly improved their efficiency. In the early 1830s Miron was sent to England, at the time the world’s leading trailblazer on steam technology, to learn how to produce an efficient steam locomotive. By 1833 they had produced their first engine, but – just as with similar pioneering efforts in Britain – it was not very successful. Indeed, the boilers of the first two locomotives they produced both exploded, again a common feature of early locomotive development, but the third, completed in 1835, proved relatively efficient, ‘able to move faster than a horse, even if it could pull only a smaller load’.14 It is a measure of the state of Russia in the early nineteenth century that both Cherepanovs were actually serfs, effectively owned by the factory for which they worked. Sadly, their efforts were in vain as the first Russian railways used foreign locomotives.

Hence the elements of building a railway were available in Russia relatively early, just as railway mania was sweeping the European continent and, indeed, the United States. The political will, however, was lacking, despite the entreaties of the small, forward-looking minority of the aristocratic ruling elite, who realized that the railways were the only viable transport option for a vast nation like Russia with the extremes of climate that made roads impassable and rivers unnavigable for large parts of the year. This group of modernists knew that transport costs were an insuperable barrier to the country’s economic development. For example, the price of some agricultural produce would be three or four times greater in the major cities than at the farm gate, an increase almost entirely attributable to the high cost of river transport. The development of the nascent iron industry, located near the mines in the Urals where Europe meets Asia more than 1,000 miles from Moscow, was greatly handicapped, as the price of iron products from the region was so high in the major cities that firms found it easier to import goods from Britain or France. The unreliability of the transport system was an added burden. In winter when the rivers were frozen, land transport was possible in theory, but in practice roads were often blocked by heavy snow and ice. The effect of this poor transport network went far beyond simple economics: ‘A consequence of this slow rate of movement was that a bad harvest in one province could rarely be compensated by grain shipments from a more fortunate region; hence the frequency in Russia of localized but deadly famines.’15

Numerous proposals for horse-drawn railways were put forward in the 1820s, but rejected by the monarch. Support for railways grew following the opening of the world’s first modern railway line, the very successful Liverpool & Manchester in 1830, which stimulated the development of rail travel across Europe. While the main long-distance mode of transport in Russia, the waterways, was improving thanks to dredging, the construction of canals and the introduction of steam boats, it was clear to the modernizers that the railways represented the future: ‘In the final analysis, Russia’s transport needs could be adequately met only by an integrated network of railways.’16

It took an outsider, a German, Franz von Gerstner, to convince the tsar to support the building of the country’s first railway, the fifteen-mile-long line between what was the then capital, St Petersburg, and Tsarskoe Selo, the tsar’s summer residence. Originally, von Gerstner’s aim had been much more ambitious. He had put forward a plan for building a network of lines across Russia, and tried to appeal to the tsar by emphasizing that the system would be ever ready to send troops around the country at great speed. There were, too, other influential opponents of the railways in the government. Nicholas had surrounded himself with advisers of a similar conservative bent, such as Count Yegor Kankrin, his long-term minister of finance, who, like many senior officials of the time such as von Gerstner, German. Kankrin, an economist, argued that such a large enterprise would divert capital away from agriculture, where it would do far more to improve people’s lives. He also worried about the effect on the traditional carters carrying goods along the highways and on the forests, which would be depleted for locomotive fuel, a rather unconvincing argument given the size and scale of Russian woodland. Nevertheless, his arguments prevailed. Given such powerful opposition, it was no surprise that von Gerstner’s proposal was rejected, but the tsar, who had thwarted a coup attempt by the Decembrists in 1825, was ever alert to the military potential of the iron road. He had noticed that there had been a swift transfer of troops by rail from Manchester to Liverpool during one of the perennial Irish emergencies17 and the parallels between England’s tenuous hold over Ireland and Russia’s difficult relationship with its Polish province were all too obvious.

As a result of the tsar’s interest, von Gerstner was allowed to build the Tsarskoe line to demonstrate the feasibility of running a railway in the harsh Russian climate. Although privately financed, its construction was helped by the granting of various concessions, such as exemption from taxes and the right to collect all the revenues. The six-foot-gauge line (later changed to five foot, the normal Russian gauge) was opened in 1837 with the first train, carrying eight full coaches, taking a mere twenty-eight minutes, an average of almost 30 mph, to reach Tsarskoe Selo. Its extension the following year to Pavlosk, a village sixteen miles further down the line, which, in a rare show of modernity during the dismal period of Nicholas’s police state, was a kind of mini-holiday resort with buffets, concerts and a ballroom to entertain the St Petersburg crowds on their day trips. In order to attract people, in a clever marketing ploy, the railway subsidized the public entertainment at Pavlosk, which features strongly in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, as ‘one of the fashionable summer resorts near St Petersburg’.

Initially the line was operated by a mix of locomotives, imported from Britain and Belgium, and horses, but soon the animals, exhausted by pulling the heavy trains, were put out to grass. The line was an instant success, with people flocking to the railway both out of curiosity and a desire to sample the attractions. In the first year more than 725,000 travelled on the line, an average of 2,000 a day, enabling von Gerstner to pay healthy dividends to his shareholders, since fares were relatively high – though the concerts at Pavlosk were free.

Not surprisingly given the tsar’s obsession with retaining power at all costs, the success of the Tsarskoe Selo Railway encouraged him to give permission for a line to be built linking Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire, with the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which at the time was Russia’s staunch ally. The justification for the scheme was largely military, as witnessed by the tsar’s insistence on locomotive rather than horse traction, and the line was soon extended by the Austrians to Vienna, the Hapsburg capital. It was built by private interests, but supported by a guaranteed rate of return from the government of four per cent – a lucrative arrangement for the railway company. And it was soon put to good use by the military when in 1848 Nicholas sent Russian troops along the line from Warsaw to crush a rebellion in Hungary in a particularly bloody and ruthless way.

Despite the clear success of the Tsarskoe Selo line, opposition remained strong within government circles to the creation of a railway network in Russia. The modernists argued that Russia’s early steps towards industrialization were being hampered by the lack of an efficient transport system. The most obvious initial route for a railway was to link the two main cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, some 400 miles apart, which had been suggested by von Gerstner, but the opposition voices remained vociferous. Kankrin changed his grounds for opposition somewhat, arguing that long-distance railways were not viable – despite their growth in Europe and America – and that it would be impractical to give the railway companies the right to own serfs – although, again, many American railroads in the South did own slaves.

In a manner familiar to students of British government, a commission was set up to assess the viability of the project and its report, published in 1841, was very favourable to the idea. Nicholas gave the go-ahead for the scheme early the following year, although Kankrin, who represented a strand of conservative, anti-railway opinion that was powerful in both Europe and America, resisted to the last: ‘All thinking people abroad consider that it [the Moscow–St Petersburg railway] will realize no profit, will ruin morality and liquidate unproductively capital which could be put to better use.’18

In many respects the difficulties and issues facing the construction of what became known as the Nikolayev Railway (later renamed the October Railway following the October 1917 revolution) were to be repeated, on a grander scale, half a century later when the Trans-Siberian was debated. Finding the finance, determining the role of the private sector, seeking engineering solutions and establishing the political ramifications – all these factors would be considered in much the same way for both schemes. Just as with the Trans-Siberian, it was an epic project in terms of railway construction, becoming, on completion, the second-longest in the world under a sole administration, beaten only by the Erie Railroad in New York State. The story of the Nikolayev Railway mirrors, too, the experience of the Trans-Siberian in terms of its purpose, a way of establishing and consolidating state power. And ultimately, in both cases, it was the decision of the all-powerful tsar that would determine the outcome of these discussions.

Although a group of German bankers had been enlisted to finance the construction of the railway, and von Gerstner maintained an interest, the idea of building it with private capital was soon abandoned and the project became a state enterprise with a budget of thirty-four million roubles (around £3.4 million at the time, and broadly 100 times that in today’s money). Nicholas was a details man, in the habit of dealing with all kinds of matters that other monarchs would have found far too trivial, and he took an intense, supervisory role in the construction of this key railway, personally chairing the committee that was in charge of its construction, a precursor of the similar one that was established for the Trans-Siberian. The scale of this project was daunting, in a country that was still largely agricultural and barely industrialized. The tsar, of course, had one advantage: serfs who were paid little to work on the line. Such a major enterprise, built mostly by hand, required an army of labour. The best estimates suggest that there were 50,000 serfs employed by the railway at its peak, and perhaps ten per cent of them died, mostly from the periodic epidemics of typhoid and dysentery, which spread through an ill-treated and hungry workforce. In contrast, as we will see, conditions on the Trans-Siberian – built half a century later and after the serfs had been freed – were much better and the death toll much lower.

The serfs were not actually owned by the government, but, instead, contractors working for the project would pay their owners, the large landowners, for their services. The serfs themselves were paid a small sum, but most of it was eaten up by compulsory payments for their food and housing. They worked unbearably long hours: ‘The contracts stipulated a working day from sunrise to sunset and the labourers were usually required to work on Sundays and holidays; only heavy rain could be relied on to give them a rest.’19 As well as being badly fed and poorly housed, the serfs were likely to be flogged if they complained, but the liberal supply of alcohol that was made available to them quelled any potential riots. Those who tried to escape were rounded up by a particularly fearsome gendarmerie, specially established to prevent disturbances.

Nicholas’s reputation as an authoritarian figure might be wholly justified, but the oft-told tale about the slightly odd route taken by the railway has largely been debunked. He is said to have ordered the route between the two cities to follow a straight line which he drew using a ruler, and it is indeed straight, apart from three rather incongruous kinks. These are said to have been where his fingers projected over the edge of the ruler, but, in fact, were more likely to have been determined by the difficulties of the terrain through which the line passed. A similar tale arose later over a much longer curve, the Verebinsky bypass, added to the line to avoid a gradient, but since the change was made in 1877 – more than two decades after Nicholas’s death – this, too, enters the realm of myth.

The truth or fiction about another feature of the line, its gauge, is more difficult to disentangle. While the Tsarskoe Selo line was six feet, and the Warsaw–Vienna railway used the standard European gauge of four feet eight and a half inches, the Moscow–St Petersburg line and, subsequently, nearly all Russia’s rail network used five feet. The standard explanation is that Nicholas, obsessed with military considerations, ordered the adoption of this wider gauge for defensive purposes, knowing that the requirement to change gauge at the Russian frontier would hamper any potential invader. This explanation has been accepted as conventional wisdom, but the truth is rather more complex. As was common practice in Russia, once the idea of railways took hold, the tsar had sent missions to Europe and the United States to learn more about them. Typically on such trips, the emissaries would return with skilled foreign personnel able to advise them on how to implement new developments. On the American trip, one of these recruits was George Whistler, a former army officer who had worked on several US railroads – and was, incidentally, the father of James Whistler, the illustrious British-based painter. It was reputedly on his advice that the five-foot gauge, common in the early railroads of the United States, was used, since the six feet of the Tsarskoe Selo would have proved too expensive. However, the very fact that Nicholas would have known of the defensive advantages of having a separate gauge suggests that the choice of five feet was made with military considerations at least partly in mind. In the event, the gauge did prove useful for resisting attack, especially during the Second World War, when the German advance was greatly hampered by the requirement to tranship equipment at the gauge break, but it also made life difficult for the Russians themselves when they were the aggressors in the war against Turkey in 1878.20 There were numerous obstacles for the project to overcome. As well as slave labour, it required skilled engineers who were in short supply, which meant that most had to come from abroad. Whistler was effectively the chief engineer, but the tsar was intent on presenting the project as a Russian achievement and therefore appointed two of his countrymen engineers to be responsible respectively for the north and south sections. There was such a small supply of home-grown engineers in a country with very few universities and technical colleges that ‘the entire graduating class of the Imperial School of Engineering was drafted to the railway in 1843’.21

The topography was not easy. Much of the terrain was undulating and intersected by rivers and gorges, as well as deep swamps and dense forests. With the route designed largely as a straight line, extensive cuttings and embankments were required. It was, too, a project on an unprecedented scale. Apart from churches and castles, nothing that required such large numbers of workers and sophisticated techniques had been accomplished in Russia previously. Only the construction of St Petersburg in the swampy marshes of the eastern Baltic by Peter the Great in the seventeenth century could compare in scale with the building of the Nikolayev Railway. Even in terms of railways across the world, this was a major project as few early lines extended beyond 100 miles.

The technology, like the skilled engineers, was largely imported. The tsar had wanted the materials to be sourced in Russia as much as possible, but because of the underdeveloped state of the nation’s industry, most ultimately came from Britain and the United States. The mills in the Urals, the heart of the Russian iron industry, proved capable of supplying only a small proportion of the rails and their products were far more expensive, not least because it actually cost more to transport on Russia’s terrible roads than the British imports brought in by sea. The locomotives, at least, were largely Russian-built. Nicholas had insisted on domestic production and wanted to use the construction of the country’s first major railway to stimulate the creation of a domestic locomotive industry based at Aleksandrovsk, near St Petersburg. The expertise and the design of the locomotives – of which 162 were manufactured – came from America and, initially, so did the craftsmen, but they were required to train locals both to produce the locomotives and to drive them. However, it took until the mid-1850s for the Russians to develop the skills required to take over the enterprise.

The government had enormous difficulties in finding the money to build the scheme. Raising taxes on an already overburdened agrarian population was not only difficult but risked fomenting revolts. Nicholas’s constant emphasis on military rather than civil spending led to repeated delays during construction as money simply ran out. The speed of construction was not helped, either, by the tsar’s insistence on overseeing decisions concerning even the most minor detail as he kept a tight control on the engineers, both senior and junior, responsible for building the line.

As a result, the line took nine years to complete – twice the expected time – and cost double the original budget, but it proved to be a triumph, as it was used heavily by both passengers and, not surprisingly given the state of the roads, goods. Even though the 400-mile rail journey took about twenty hours, the volume of traffic far exceeded expectations. In 1852, the first full year of operation, the railway averaged nearly 2,000 passengers per day and carried large quantities of freight, mostly flour, grain and livestock. Both the amount of freight and the number of passengers grew rapidly during the decade and the line even became profitable. The high patronage was an impressive demonstration of the need for the railway, especially in the light of the bureaucratic procedures imposed by the tsarist police state, which required every passenger to have both an internal passport and specific permission to travel. A small instance of liberalization encapsulates the nature of repressive tsarist rule. In December 1851, a month after the line opened, Count Kleinmichel, who was in charge of the railway, announced that members of the free classes would no longer require prior police permission to depart from their local station, but instead would merely have to present their passport just before getting on the train. So, in a very small respect, the railway was a liberalizing force, as ‘at least the upper classes of Russian society no longer needed police permission for every separate single journey outside of their place of residence’.22