To the Edge of the World Read online

  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

  Yet the vast majority of passengers travelled in third class, suggesting it was the peasant masses who took to the rails, despite the police procedures. With such a massive bureaucracy, an enduring feature of Russian governance even today, it is hardly surprising that there was little state money available for other purposes. These travellers were encouraged by the surprisingly cheap fares. The cost for third-class passengers was just seven roubles (about fourteen shillings (70p) in equivalent British money of the time), which, though beyond the means of the poorest, was certainly less expensive than similar long journeys on other European railways of the time. There was, too, a real bargain as third-class passengers could travel in freight trains, seated in boxcars with benches, for just three roubles for a journey that took up to forty-eight hours, since their maximum speed was 10 mph. There were only three passenger trains per day, and only one, the daily express, carried first-class passengers; but according to a report in The Times in 1865, the higher cost of nineteen roubles was well worth it. Indeed, the standards seemed to match those of the best European and American trains of the day: ‘Travellers are received in brilliantly lighted saloons . . . luxurious sofas and armchairs invite the weary to repose . . . when the hour of retiring arrives, the valet de chambre conducts the gentlemen passengers [while] smart femmes de chambre point out to the lady travellers their bedrooms and boudoirs.’23 So there was none of the mixing of the sexes that shocked British visitors in America at around the same time.24

  The St Petersburg–Moscow railway was, on its completion, the premier railway of Europe, far better than its contemporaries, precisely because of the interest in the project taken by the tsar: ‘It could be built to such high standards because the government of Nicholas l had been willing to utilize the financial resources of the state to the fullest extent, having also at its disposal the services of experienced, competent and honest administrators, a considerable number of well-trained, skilled and resourceful engineers, a large pool of labour, both skilled and unskilled, as well as access to the latest foreign technology.’25 The result was that Russia had one brilliant railway, as demonstrated by the fact that today’s alignment is almost the same as the original route; but because of the high cost and the scarcity of state resources, Russia was slow to expand its rail system.

  While undoubtedly a success for those who could take advantage of this new form of travel, the impact of the line took time to take effect in terms of the wider economics of the nation. As with railways across the world, the transport of food and raw materials became cheaper and quicker, reducing the cost of transport by as much as ninety per cent, which greatly reduced the cost of food to urban dwellers. The railway afforded new opportunities for peasants who were able to seek work further from their villages, but because there were initially no connecting branches the effect was limited to those living along the line. There had been numerous suggestions for such branches to connect the railway with neighbouring towns from various local notables, but the government rejected all these plans – another illustration of its hesitant attitude towards modernizing the Russian Empire. Most crucially, the industrial area in the Urals was still not connected with the nation’s two main cities, which greatly hampered its economic development.

  In the four decades between the completion of the Nikolayev Railway and work starting on the Trans-Siberian, Russia did embrace the idea of a national rail network, but generally with little sense of urgency and at a far gentler pace than its European counterparts. There was no early period of railway mania as occurred in so many other countries which plunged into the railway age with such enthusiasm. Given the limited resources, it was felt that the country could afford to build only one major railway at a time, especially as the lines were being funded from the state coffers. The completion of the Nikolayev Railway encouraged the tsar to order the construction of the St Petersburg–Warsaw Railway, also as a state enterprise. This time there was no doubting its main purpose – retaining control over its troublesome Polish province and supporting the resistance to any attack from the West: ‘Unlike the St Petersburg–Moscow Railway, this line was to be built primarily for military and administrative purposes.’26 A railway to Odessa on the Black Sea from Moscow through Ukraine, the bread basket of the nation with its fertile soil, would have had a much greater economic impact, but Nicholas’s priorities were all too clear. And, as Richard Haywood points out in his book on early Russian railways, Nicholas even got his military priorities wrong, because a line to Odessa ‘would also have had crucial military value, for the attack by the Western Powers came, not through the Kingdom of Poland, as the tsar had feared, but through Crimea’.27

  The Crimean War proved a spur for an extension of the railway system. At its outset, in 1853, Russia could still only boast a network of 650 miles, far less than its European rivals, such as Britain, which had almost ten times that number, and this proved a great handicap to the war effort. Crimea, bordering the Black Sea, could be reached only by the traditional water routes, and subsequent recriminations over the defeat focussed on the inadequacy of the transport system. The Russians, too, were aware that the British, in contrast, had built the first ever military railway to help break down the long siege of Sevastopol.28 Nicholas, a broken man following the early defeats of his beloved army, died during the war and was replaced by his son, the far more liberal-minded Alexander II, who embarked on a major railway building programme.

  Alexander, who became tsar in 1855, was able to make use of the terrible debacle of the Crimean War to encourage a period of rapid railway expansion. Unlike his father, he was not hostile to private interests and was far readier to embrace foreign technology. He authorized the creation of the Main Company of Russian Railways, financed by a consortium of mainly French and English investors, but, crucially, with the Russian government retaining the financial risk by guaranteeing a yearly return of five per cent to the shareholders – a kind of state-backed capitalism. This arrangement stimulated a mini-boom in railway construction with several lines being built between the Baltic and the Black Sea, principally for carrying grain and other agricultural produce, including a line linking Kiev with Odessa, and in 1862 the completion of the St Petersburg–Warsaw Railway with a branch to the Prussian border. Helsinki, then part of Russia, and St Petersburg, too, were linked by a railway line. However, the Main Company proved unable to fulfil all its obligations and the relationship between the government and the company was fraught, not least because it was run by a group of French directors based in Paris with a penchant for a luxury lifestyle that did not endear them to th
eir Russian counterparts, who were effectively civil servants. Indeed, ‘the formation of the Main Company proved to be very damaging to the future not only of the Russian railways, but of the Government itself’.29 As was often the way with early railway projects, the Company had underestimated the cost of building lines, partly because of its own incompetence as well as widespread corruption, and repeatedly asked the government for extra loans to complete its various projects. This caused embarrassment to the aristocracy as several ministers and even members of the tsar’s family had substantial shareholdings in the Main Company. Following some renegotiations, most of these lines were completed in the 1860s and Russia was beginning to acquire the beginnings of the type of rail network that was already commonplace in Europe.

  Although Alexander had a greater belief in free enterprise than his father it still proved impossible to persuade private entrepreneurs to build schemes entirely at their own risk. There were doubts that the Russian economy, still largely based on agriculture and mining, could sustain profitable railways. Despite this, the government had understood the importance of creating a rail network and in 1866 drew up a plan for the expansion of the system. This stimulated the greatest-ever phase of expansion in the Russian railway network, with the mileage of 3,000 miles trebling in the decade to 1877 and doubling again to 1897, a period that included completion of part of the Trans-Siberian. While this boom did throw up a few entrepreneurs – ‘railway barons’, as they became known – the impetus still came from government; and these railway magnates were more often interested in making their fortunes at the expense of lucrative contracts from the government, rather than through the construction of profitable lines. Indeed, most of the risk of building and operating these railways was taken by the government, as promoters continued to be guaranteed a set rate of return on their investment. As confidence grew in the Russian economy, several private railway companies did emerge, but by and large the government remained involved in most of the network, since no line could be built without its permission and most needed some kind of financial support. The complex system of private and public ownership was rationalized in the late 1880s by the finance minister, Nikolai Bunge, who effectively forced through the creation of a genuine railway network for the first time. Privately and publicly owned railways were forced to co-operate by, for example, using each other’s rolling stock where that was convenient and the creation of a unified railway tariff. That set the tone for the construction of the Trans-Siberian, which was to be, unequivocally, a government project.

  Unlike the Moscow–St Petersburg Railway, most of the later lines were constructed on the cheap, with sharper curves, insufficient ballast and steep gradients. Bridges were built with inferior material and occasionally collapsed, and rails frequently broke. It was only the fact that the maximum speed was usually 25 mph that prevented a spate of very serious accidents. Stations were often located far from the towns they served, because it was cheaper to route the railways through the valleys rather than the hills on which many settlements had been constructed as a protection against invaders. Many of these same features would be found on the Trans-Siberian.

  Despite this, just as had happened a generation before in Europe, the advent of the railway transformed the way of life of local people and was usually welcomed by them. A few curmudgeonly landowners would complain that the noise would disturb their sleep or the smoke would make their animals ill, but for the most part the arrival of the railway was celebrated and peasants from far afield would come to greet the first train. The economics of the area would change as the labourers building the line would need to be fed and grain prices would rise ‘sometimes by as much as ten times’.30 Then, after the line’s completion, land prices would rise as it became easier to take produce to market.

  The amount of freight carried doubled between 1865 and 1880, then doubled again in the following decade. Much of that was grain, which became an important component of Russia’s export trade; and coal, from the Donets Basin, straddling Russia and Ukraine, became increasingly important. Passenger journeys grew, too, but they were highly seasonal, dominated initially by farm labourers and later, as the more affluent classes took to the railways, by what was called ‘dacha traffic’, the annual trip to the country cottage that nearly every family of means possessed. Russia was still an underdeveloped and backward country, but its railway system was the one aspect of its economy that was, in any way, modern. The system was nothing like as intensive as those in most of Europe or the United States, but nevertheless it was a relatively efficient and effective network that was recognized as being vital to the nation’s economy.

  Neither grain nor passengers, however, were the real motivation behind the government’s interest in growing the rail network – that remained military. The Warsaw line, for example, had been used soon after its opening to put down one of the perennial Polish rebellions. Therefore, despite the government’s constant penury due to wars, a desire to have a strong rouble and the slowness of industrial development, railways were seen as a key priority. As Alexander III’s war minister later put it, ‘railways are now the strongest and most decisive element of war. Therefore, regardless of financial difficulties, it is exceeding desirable to make our railway network equal that of our enemies.’31 Nothing else can really explain the interest in the Trans-Siberian, which, as the next chapter will show, developed soon after the mid-century.

  TWO

  HOLDING ON TO SIBERIA

  As the network of lines was spreading around European Russia, the idea of building a railway stretching deep into Russia’s Far East had begun to take hold. But slowly. There were various promoters, idealists and fantasists with a claim to being the first to have set out the concept, and because several of these were foreign, non-Russian writers tend to give undue credence to such claims.

  One particularly ill-informed story which has been given widespread prominence is that the first budding Trans-Siberian developer was a British gentleman named Mr Dull, a tale that was simply too amusing for many writers not to repeat. It is, unfortunately, a myth. The fellow in question was actually a Thomas Duff, whose initials had been lost in the retelling of the story but whose descendants have now corrected the misreported account. Certainly, his plan was not dull. Duff was an adventurer who went to China and returned via St Petersburg, where in 1857 he met the transport minister (officially known as the Minister of Ways and Communications), Constantine V. Chevkin, and suggested the building of a tramway from Nizhny Novgorod, 265 miles east of Moscow, east via Kazan and Perm to the Urals, which would have been the start of the Trans-Siberian. Duff had worked out some detail suggesting it would cost $20 million, but would earn a healthy rate of return of fourteen per cent. In return, he wanted a guarantee of four per cent interest from the government. Duff also reportedly said that the tramway could be horse-drawn, using some of the four million horses that supposedly roamed around western Siberia. Despite the fact that even the ever-inventive Victorians would have spotted the impractical nature of the idea, numerous historians have intimated that this was a serious suggestion. Sadly it was probably just a joke born of a casual remark.

  In any case, Chevkin, portrayed aptly by Eric Newby as ‘a man noted for his irascibility and a masterly obstructionist to boot’1 – a description that could be ascribed to many of his successors in government who thwarted attempts to modernize Russia – was unimpressed with the idea and showed Duff the door, saying that the scheme ‘did not seem realizable because of the climatic conditions’.2 Duff tried again three years later to no avail.

  To overcome the problem of snowdrifts alluded to by Chevkin, a former governor of Tomsk named Suprenenko made a suggestion that was even more outlandish than Duff’s wild horses joke – except he was serious. He put forward the idea of a horse-drawn railway enclosed by a wooden gallery all the way to Tyumen, 1,100 miles east of Moscow, and Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. Not surprisingly, Chevkin showed him the door, too.

  At the same time, ho
wever, there were serious ideas emerging for railways within Siberia. The first proposal came from a Russian, Nicholas Murayev, the far-sighted and relatively liberal governor general of eastern Siberia. Appointed in 1847, his mission was naked imperialism, to protect and extend Russian interests in the Far East. He expanded Russian control over territory disputed with China in violation of a treaty, increasing the Empire’s territory by some 400,000 square miles, almost twice the size of France, including the crucial Amur river route that opened the way to the Pacific. He built countless fortresses to protect these gains and tried to make Siberia’s economy more viable by exploiting resources such as coal. Transport – and railways in particular – he realized would be key to maintaining control over the expanded territory and he carved out a forty-mile route from opposite Aleksandrovsk, a newly established Russian post on Sakhalin Island in the sea of Japan, to Sofiysk on the lower reaches of the Amur river, which for much of its length forms the border between Russia and Manchuria. His idea was that this would become a railway, creating a transport route that avoided the mouth of the Amur, which is dangerous to shipping because of the shifting sands. While Murayev, the imperialist, might have been unconcerned that this went through Chinese territory, Chevkin was not – so this plan, too, went into the waste-paper basket.

  Then along came a group of three Englishmen whose surnames – Sleigh, Horn and Morison – sound like a dodgy firm of high-street solicitors but whose first names have been lost in the mists of time. They sought to build a line from Nizhny Novgorod right across Siberia to Aleksandrovsk in order to ‘facilitate relations between Europe, China, India and America’,3 a laudable aim at a time of international tension in the aftermath of the Crimean War. Like Duff, they too had a financial plan, offering to organize a loan of $25 million in exchange for being given the land and a 90-year concession, but the idea seems to have elicited little interest from the government.