To the Edge of the World Read online

  Finally, a New Yorker with a passionate interest in Siberia tried his luck with a more thoroughly developed scheme. This was Perry McDonough Collins, another adventurer and reportedly the first American to cross the entire breadth of Siberia, which he accomplished partly by river. Given the rather odd title of Commercial Agent of the United States at the Amoor [Amur] river by the US government, he was a rather more serious candidate than his predecessors for promoting such a grand scheme, and was, according to various figures like Murayev and the tsar’s second son, the Grand Duke Constantine, who offered him support, ‘an honest, persuasive and immensely likable self-made man’4 with a gift for oratory. Collins – bored of his job as a banker and gold-dust broker in San Francisco dealing with the 49ers, the original gold-diggers – had developed an obsession with Siberia, seeing it as a possible El Dorado for American traders. He hastened to St Petersburg, where he met Murayev and various other officials and embarked on his journey through Siberia.

  His journey, accompanied by a mysterious ‘Mr Peyton’, provides an insight into travel on the post road in the mid-nineteenth century and demonstrates how fast it was possible to travel through Siberia, provided the traveller had official support – since he was the lucky recipient of a personal letter from Murayev, which definitely speeded things up for him, and was prepared to endure the hardship of almost perpetual motion. Collins, who had been advised by Murayev to travel in winter when progress was faster, averaged 100 miles per day to reach Irkutsk, a distance of 3,545 miles, in just thirty-five days, travelling on all but seven of them, and in his characteristically meticulous way he reported: ‘we changed horses 210 times on the journey, with some 200 drivers and 25 postilions.’5 There were inevitable mishaps, most seriously when at one point the sleigh plunged into a ditch and the driver was thrown off while the horses bolted. Collins tried to reach the reins, but was unable to do so and the sleigh came to a halt only when the horses smashed into a tarantass coming the other way, resulting in the death of one and the total wreck of both vehicles. The horse, notes Collins coolly, was turned into steaks and soup at the next post house and its skin exchanged for a couple of bottles of vodka.

  As possibly only the second American6 to venture there, he was given a hero’s welcome in Irkutsk and then proceeded further east, where he sailed down the Amur. During the journey he started putting forward his proposals for a Siberian railway to the Russian authorities. He sent the local governor a letter suggesting a line from Chita, 250 miles east of Lake Baikal, to the Amur river, which would have created a through transportation route to the Pacific and, of course, the United States. He saw the Amur as a way of opening up Siberia to the outside world, from the east. He, too, reckoned it would need $20 million – a figure that, oddly, keeps popping up in these schemes – and 20,000 men to build it. He wanted the government to provide the land and materials in exchange for stock, and it would be offered the right to purchase the line at any stage. The proposal was passed on to St Petersburg, where, inevitably, it ended up on Chevkin’s desk. By then a Siberian Committee had been created on which Chevkin sat and he spoke strongly against the idea – who would feed all the workers? he mused – and despite Muravyev’s support, the idea was killed off.

  Collins fared better with his other proposal: a plan to cross Asia – and, indeed, the world – with a telegraph wire to connect the Russian Empire with both the United States and Europe via an underwater cable in the Bering Strait that separates Russia from the American continent, Alaska and British Columbia.

  Elsewhere, telegraphs were springing up next to railway lines, which provided an obvious route for them, but here the idea was for a simple set of wires to run across Siberia. Backed by Samuel Morse, the inventor of telegraphy, Collins obtained a concession from the Russian government to erect the line and also gained permission from the Canadian and US governments. Then, cleverly, he sold his franchises to the Western Union. This was fortunate, because an Atlantic cable linking America with Europe and, eventually, Russia was laid by a rival company without the need to cross the Siberian steppes, so the $3 million that had been spent on erecting wires in Siberia was wasted.

  There were also plans from within Siberia for railways that crossed at least a major part of the region. It was not only the obduracy and lack of interest of politicians like Chevkin that ensured the failure of all these ideas, or even the technical difficulties, but more fundamental political considerations. The very fact that a railway could be built changed the relationship between Russia and its wild east. The issue of laying tracks to the Pacific brought up wider questions of the nature of the Empire and the role of Siberia within it, which would be the subject of much debate and controversy over the next three decades. Indeed, the question of the railway became subsumed in wider issues about what to do about Siberia as part of the Russian Empire, an issue that exercised several government committees and commissions and which was given urgency by the humiliation of the defeat in the Crimean War.

  While many of the early suggestions for a Siberian railway may have been rather fanciful, the next quarter of a century was dominated by hand-wringing debates about Siberia that took the matter very seriously indeed. At root was the attitude towards this distant province. It did not go unnoticed in Russia that the United States was beginning to establish itself across its vast – but not as vast – continent. It would be wrong to suggest that the question of the Trans-Siberian was entirely dictated by military considerations. As Steven Marks puts it, ‘many writers have portrayed the Siberian Railroad as serving exclusively the defence of Russia’s Pacific shore and Far Eastern border; but they have overlooked the domestic concerns that affected the security of the Empire and were ultimately as important as the menace of foreign powers’.7

  In the 1850s the government had established a Siberian Committee, which broadly took the view that the future of the region lay in the gradual establishment of large estates owned by the aristocracy, using the toil of their serfs (who were not emancipated until 1861). It was, in fact, precisely the same kind of bucolic vision that the Southerners tried to defend in the American Civil War – and, indeed, had sought to create in the American West – with ranches and their black slaves. The key concern was that Siberia might declare its independence, secede in the same way as the Southern US states, but with the key difference that it would probably have been impossible for the Russian government to impose its will and reunite the Empire. Stimulated by various political exiles who had, as it were, gone native, such as many of the Decembrists sent there after their attempted coup in 1825, a Siberian regionalist movement had developed. It was not particularly focussed or coherent, but was rather ‘a heterogeneous, amorphous movement of Siberian intellectuals who stood in the broadest sense for the interests of their region’.8 The regionalists saw Siberia as a land separate from Russia, with its tradition of tribalism and different geographic characteristics, populated by people with greater independence and spirit than their western counterparts.

  The movement’s most charismatic advocate was Nikolai Ladrintsev, who argued that Siberia should have the same kind of future as America and Australia, with a combination of settlers and the indigenous population creating prosperity. Instead, Siberia had ‘been left in the tundra, the miserable result of arbitrary administration, dependence on the metropolis, and the central government’s exploitive self-interest in Siberia as a penal colony and source of furs and minerals’.9 This movement was taken seriously in St Petersburg, where it was feared it would lead to the creation of an independent Siberian state, even though that was not necessarily the position of the regionalists. The official response was typically heavy-handed and was aimed at eradicating the very notion of Siberia. Tsar Alexander III (who had assumed the throne when his father, Alexander II, was assassinated in 1881) issued a series of decrees that aimed to accelerate ‘the gradual abolition of any sign of the administrative separateness of Siberia and the destruction of its internal administrative unity’.10 The region was
broken up into various administrative entities, which meant that by 1887 the very name Siberia was no longer used for any part of the Empire. The flip side of this was that the tsar supported the construction of a railway to stimulate the economic development of the region.

  Inevitably, though, the military aspects of the pros and cons of building a railway featured prominently in the discussions. While the Western section of the Siberian railway could be justified in terms of helping emigration from the overpopulated parts of European Russia, and by the exploitation of mineral wealth, building a line through the sparsely populated territory beyond Lake Baikal could be justified only on the basis of strategic considerations. Nothing raises the temperature of the political debate more than supposed threats from other nations. And, in fairness, with Britain at the height of its gunboat-diplomacy pomp, and the major powers in land-grabbing mood across Asia and Africa, there was no shortage of genuine threats. Russia had extended its empire in the east through Muravyev’s efforts and subsequent treaties with China and Japan, imposed largely at the end of the barrel of a gun. But technological developments were also a threat, since improved shipping made it easier for Japan, America and, in particular, Britain – the pre-eminent world power of the time – to see parts of Siberia as potentially ripe for exploitation, especially in the event of a war, given Russia’s weak hold over its distant territory. These nations, too, were all keen to establish control over China, which was weak and largely defenceless, and its fate was clearly bound up with that of Russia’s Far East.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century Russia and Britain were in constant competition for territory in Central Asia and the Far East. Throughout the period between the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 and the start of construction of the Trans-Siberian, there was tension between Britain and Russia over the status of Primorye, the region which includes Vladivostok. Indeed, during the conflict Russia had even feared a British attack on its Pacific coast; and in the 1880s the two countries nearly came to war several times over British occupation of Afghanistan, which was intended to create a buffer between its Indian colony and Russia, whose territorial ambitions were creeping southwards. According to Marks, ‘the situation was aggravated by the imminent completion of the Canadian Pacific railroad, which would cut the journey between England and Japan from the 52 days it took through the Suez canal to 37 days’.11 There were even incorrect allegations that the British had built and financed the Canadian Pacific, which was eventually completed in 1885, and these arguments were used to strengthen the case for building the Siberian railway. China, too, came heavily into the equation. Manchuria, formerly an empty buffer zone between the two great Asian empires, was being populated and there was talk of various railways across its territory. In the fluctuating alliances among the major European powers of the era, Britain played complex diplomatic games with China as a pawn that greatly worried Russian military strategists.

  The war with Turkey had strained the government’s finances but highlighted the value of efficient rail transport to supply an army during a conflict. The railways had proved their worth, too, in battle against Afghan troops in Central Asia. The humiliation of the Crimean War, where the defence of Sevastopol was made much harder by the lack of a railway, was, too, an important consideration. Therefore, by the mid-1880s, many military strategists were pressing for the construction of the Siberian railway as vital to the nation’s strategic interests. It was seen as a way of maintaining Russian control in the same way that Britain had established control over India through the construction of a railway network in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny (1857–8). It was the military potential of railways that attracted the attention of Tsar Alexander I, as it was becoming clear that the iron road was an essential part of the armoury of both occupation and warfare.12

  Indeed, the military motive for building the line was both defensive and offensive: ‘As military strategists throughout the 1880s discussed construction of a railroad across Siberia, or at the very least from Vladivostok to the Amur river, their ostensible intent was to enhance the defence of Russian territory, but official perceptions of the railroad presupposed that it would also be the means to an offensive, “forward” policy in China.’13 That reasoning actually engendered some opposition from supporters of the alternative strategy of strengthening the navy patrolling the Pacific coast, obviating the need for a land connection. Nevertheless, the idea of a land connection had far more resonance in government circles, but the high cost was always used by opponents of the scheme, especially finance ministers.

  The military imperative was also given a boost by the completion of the Canadian transcontinental in 1885, given the shorter journey time between England and Japan, which was seen as a potential military advantage. Psychologically, for the Russians, the construction of the Canadian transcontinental proved more important than its American predecessor completed sixteen years previously. Canada was a similarly vast, rather underpopulated country and its furthermost province, British Columbia, could well have seceded had it not been for the construction of the line across the new nation. The Russian Far East, like the Canadian West, was remote and semi-detached. If the Canadians could use a railway line to bind their country together, so could the Russians.

  Proposals for a Siberian railway were dreamt up by all kinds of characters ranging from the crazy to the pragmatic during the 1870s and 1880s. There was a fellow called Hartmann with an idea for a line from Tomsk, about 1,800 miles from Moscow, to Irkutsk, and then from the other side of the lake to Sretensk, in the Amur basin. He wanted an annual subsidy of $2 million and an eighty-one-year concession. Then there was General Mikhail Annenkov, who had built the Trans-Caspian Railway from the sea to Samarkand, claiming that he could build the line in just six years at the ridiculously low price of $30,200 per mile. Both of these got nowhere, as did even the best schemes of this period.

  There were potentially several alternative routes, too. There were proposals for a northern one from Perm to Tyumen on the Tura river; another further south linking Nizhny-Novgorod to Kazan and Yekaterinburg, also ending in Tyumen; and a third from Perm to Yekaterinburg and then to what is now Belozerskoe. The concept moved an important step forward in 1875, when Konstantin Posyet, the transport minister, posited the idea of a railway to exploit the wealth of Siberia. It was the first official document to advocate a line stretching into the depths of Siberia. He argued that Siberia was no longer ‘a desolate and terrible country inhabited by convicts’,14 but rather a rich source of resources which could be exploited with a railway connection. He wanted it to run from Moscow right through to the Amur river, but if that were impossible, at least as far as Irkutsk. He wanted it to use the northern route through Perm, rather than existing trade routes through the south in order to spur the development of these areas, which were home to tribes and untouched by civilization. His plan, though, attracted scant support from the committee of ministers, the contemporary equivalent of the Cabinet. Although, Posyet’s proposal did not gain the support of the committee, it did decide to go ahead with the construction of a railway from Nizhny-Novgorod along the right bank of the Volga to Kazan and Yekaterinburg, a proposal endorsed by the tsar in December 1875.

  This did not mean, however, a Trans-Siberian Railway, but rather a line that stretched just the other side of the Urals. The next decade and a half was a period of fierce controversy and debate over whether the Trans-Siberian should be built and, indeed, why. The discussion over the possible construction of the line was characterized by ‘ideological, personal and ministerial divisions, as well as financial exigencies, would keep the issue from being resolved one way or another’.15 Supporters of the scheme faced an uphill task in winning over the politicians, even though the tsar himself was clearly supportive and the creation of a committee was seen as a way of breaking the deadlock. The Russian system of governance was fraught by divisions between government departments, whose ministers saw themselves as ruling over their particular fiefdom
with little reference to their fellow politicians. Difficult matters, like the issue of the Trans-Siberian Railway, were passed on to committees and commissions, whose members always seemed more expert at procrastination than decision-making. As an example, the Baranov Commission, created to look at the inadequacies of the railway system during the Russo-Turkish war, sat for six years after the conflict had ended. Moreover, as with almost every government in the world, ministerial paralysis was made worse by the finance ministry’s hostility to any type of spending whatsoever. Posyet’s continued support for the Trans-Siberian came up against the conservativeness of the minister of finance, Ivan Alekseevich Vyshenegradsky, who was adamantly opposed to the idea of the railway. Of course, sitting on top of all this chaotic structure, the tsar was an absolute monarch who could simply make decisions on his own. So it was with the Trans-Siberian.

  In 1886 the tsar received complaints from the governor generals of both Irkutsk and Primorye, expressing concern that their territory was vulnerable to land-grabbing by the Chinese. Specifically, Count Alexei Ignatiev, the governor general of Irkutsk, warned that large numbers of Chinese were infiltrating Transbaikalia, the region around Lake Baikal, and consequently that a railway was essential to bring soldiers quickly to the area. He proposed a line between Irkutsk and Tomsk, from where there was river communication with Tyumen, now connected by rail to Yekaterinburg and Perm. In what was clearly an organized piece of political pleading, the governor general of Primorye, Baron Andrei Korff, suggested a 660-mile-long line from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to Sretensk, on the Amur, from where steamers could reach the Pacific. The two railways would, in effect, have created a Trans-Siberian route.