To the Edge of the World Read online

  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 administr
ation, 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.