To the Edge of the World Page 6
Somehow, after years of procrastination and debate, this seems to have been the key round of lobbying that led to the decision to build the Trans-Siberian. Alexander III wrote a rather curious note at the bottom of Ignatiev’s report, which suggested that he did not realize the extent of his own power: ‘I have already read so many reports of the governors general of Siberia and it must be confessed with sadness and shame that up to now the government has done almost nothing to satisfy the needs of this rich but neglected region.’16 He wanted to see prosperity and peace for Siberia, which he stressed was ‘an indivisible part of Russia’, and the line would bring ‘glory to our Fatherland’. Through the railway, the vast region would be ‘Russified’ and industrialized. This was, in effect, a decision to build the line, but it would take another five years before the final go-ahead.
While the wider debates over Siberia were taking place, the railway was creeping towards it as Russia was enjoying something of a belated railway boom. By the time that the Trans-Siberian was being seriously considered in the early 1880s, Russia had a network of 14,500 miles – extremely modest given the size of the country. By contrast, at that time the United States, with its smaller land mass, had more than ten times that number, while the tiny Great Britain had about the same amount.
Nevertheless, this represented considerable progress, given that at the onset of the Crimean War in 1853 there had been just 620 miles. By 1866 there were 3,000 miles, and then by 1877 the mileage trebled, and doubled again by the end of the century. The massive expansion of the railway network was, however, largely at the expense of taxpayers and was a terrible drain on the government’s coffers. This was because earlier attempts to persuade private companies to build lines entirely at their own risk had failed. While technically all the railway companies in this period were in private hands, in order to encourage companies to build these new lines – which were much needed but inherently uneconomic, since they mostly passed through thinly populated territory – the government underwrote their debts. The situation was exacerbated because several lines fell into the hands of unscrupulous railway barons, whose only interest – in parallel with their counterparts in the United States and many parts of Europe – was to make money: ‘No matter how uneconomically or irrationally the railway companies operated, the government was obliged to make up their deficits out of its own treasury.’17 Worse, much of that money had to be borrowed from abroad, which weakened further the rouble, making imports – which were required to stimulate industrialization – more expensive.
In 1877 the rail network reached Orenburg, near what is now the border with Kazakhstan, and traditionally a staging post for people travelling over the Urals into Asia. More importantly, the Ural Mining Railway opened the following year, serving the industrial region; and in 1880 the bridge over the Volga near Syzran, with the grand name of Imperator Alexander II, opened, bringing central Russia closer to the Siberian steppes.
For the time being, however, the Urals remained uncrossed. There was, nevertheless, a section of railway separate from the rest of the network, east of the Urals. This line, the first in Siberia, was started in 1883 and ran from Yekaterinburg to Tyumen, and by connecting with the tracks to Perm, which had been completed in 1878, provided a link between the Kama and Ob rivers. It opened in 1885, but remained cut off from the rest of the rail network for a decade until the Yekaterinburg–Chelyabinsk line, built as part of the overall Trans-Siberian project, was completed in 1896.
Despite the obvious benefits of this boom in railway construction, which continued to be Russia’s main catalyst for industrialization, and despite the tsar’s support, the Trans-Siberian project remained stalled. This was down to the vagaries of the tsarist government’s administration and, in particular, the ministry of finance’s tight control over the purse strings. An absolute monarchy creates an atmosphere in which ministers are constantly manoeuvring to win favour from the ruler. Therefore, control of the construction of the Trans-Siberian – by far the most prestigious government project – became the subject of endless bickering between departments, which meant that it took several more years before the foundation stone could be laid. The war, transport and finance ministries were in a permanent state of struggle, battling it out like a scene from Yes Minister. Most ministers were more interested in pushing forward the interests of their own department than those of wider society or even, ironically, of the tsar.
Of course, all the discussions were overshadowed by the question of finance. The minister of finance, Vyshenegradsky, was a fiscal conservative who had made his reputation by reducing costs as a director of two railway companies, and he fought a long and hard rearguard action against the Trans-Siberian project. As Theodore Von Laue, an economic historian, puts it, ‘The Imperial will could not prevail over the parsimony of his Minister of Finance.’18 Following the intervention of the Siberian governor generals, in order to make rapid progress, the tsar called four special conferences in the winter of 1886–7 to consider the many practical, technical and financial aspects of building the line. Then a co-ordinating committee was appointed, only to be scrapped because it proved ineffective, and replaced by a second committee. Vyshenegradsky, whose opposition to the line was based on both fiscal and intellectual grounds – arguing it would bankrupt the nation and was an unnecessary extravagance – not only withheld any significant funding, but manoeuvred to weaken the transport ministry by trying to wrest control of the project for the ministry of finance. He created a department of railway affairs within his ministry in order to sort out the overspending on the railways in government control. By allocating virtually no money for new lines, which he thought ought to be built by the private sector, he even managed, for a while, to stop any surveys on the route being carried out. Vyshenegradsky also enjoyed a piece of good fortune when Posyet, the minister of transport, who had continued to battle away for money to support preliminary work, was forced to resign in 1888 following a rail accident involving the tsar’s train, which could have resulted in the deaths of several members of the royal family.
Posyet’s departure further delayed progress as the new Transport Minister, General German Egorovich Pauker, was a weak-willed fellow who did not push sufficiently for funds to begin the preliminary work on the project. Pauker died after less than a year in office, and his successor, Adolf von Hubbenet, found it equally difficult to persuade Vyshenegradsky as the rivalry between the finance and transport ministries threatened to derail the project, despite the tsar’s support. At root, there was an ideological difference. The ministry of finance was obsessed by keeping a tight rein on the state budget, while the transport ministry had a strategic grand vision that saw the railways as being at the heart of Russia’s industrialization. Indeed, this type of row has been repeated countless times around the world over the past century whenever big projects are put forward, and is even echoed in contemporary Britain today with, for example, Crossrail in London, which was on the drawing board for more than half a century before work finally began in 2009.
Vyshenegradsky kept up his rearguard action by suggesting a plan that would involve constructing only those sections of line where no traditionally navigable river was available. This would have reduced the required construction of railway from more than 4,600 miles19 to just 2,000. It was a bad, old-fashioned scheme, opposed by business interests and engineers, who argued that the need for eight transfers from rail to water would be expensive and slow down the journey. Indeed, it was not unlike the Main Line, a similar early mixed waterway and rail route completed in Pennsylvania more than half a century previously in 1834, which proved to be unsuccessful precisely because it was far less convenient than the railways. Consequently, the idea was given short shrift, but even then Vyshenegradsky had not finished. If the line had to be built, then, he suggested, why should it not be funded by private interests?
Vyshenegradsky had been plotting with General Mikhail Annenkov to obtain funds from French banking interests to build the line. A
nnenkov, who had fought in several campaigns in Central Asia, was a pioneer in the use of railways in wartime. In the 1880s, while fighting to establish Russian control in what is now Turkmenistan, he quickly built a 1,000-mile section of the Trans-Caspian Railway along the Afghan border in order to speed up the arrival at the front of troops and matériel. It was, indeed, an example of the important role that railways played in the waging of war, and had helped obtain military support for the notion of the Trans-Siberian. The Trans-Caspian showed, too, that railways were not just useful in defending territory, but could also help offensive action. Annenkov realized that the line made sense militarily in keeping the Chinese threat at bay, but he also had potential contacts to fund the line, because his daughter was married to a high-ranking French official. His war efforts, particularly his use of the railway, had earned international recognition, and after making contact with the Rothschilds, the renowned banking family, he put forward the idea of obtaining French money to fund the construction of the line. The Rothschilds, who already had extensive railway interests in France and Italy, offered 300 million roubles, which Annenkov, who wanted to be in charge of the project, felt was sufficient, but his efforts proved to be of no avail. Vyshenegradsky’s initial enthusiasm paled and then the committee of ministers came out against the proposal to fund the scheme with foreign money, presumably because of its military importance.
In truth, using the private sector to fund the Trans-Siberian was always unrealistic. The line was to be built in territory that could hardly be more unpromising for railway economics. It was very long and went through underpopulated lands with little likely passenger traffic. While it would transport some minerals and agricultural produce, it was never going to make the kind of decent return on capital which investors, particularly big bankers like the Rothschilds, would expect.
The project, therefore, was to be planned and funded by government. Not everyone believed it was possible, however. The British establishment was particularly disparaging. They laughed at the ability of the Russians to carry out such a mammoth enterprise and, indeed, such was the contempt in Whitehall that a furious British military attaché in St Petersburg rebuked his own government for searching ‘for a thousand details to discredit the enterprise in the eyes of Europe’. Instead, he suggested, ‘British energy should be directed to obtaining orders for the iron rails, rather than cavilling and carping at a railway extension.’20
However, while British contempt for Russian enterprise might have been born of a combination of xenophobia and hubris, a dose of scepticism was probably the right response. The decades of squabbling and controversies that had delayed the decision to go ahead showed that Russia’s administrative processes had more in common with the feudalism of the eighteenth century than the modernism of the approaching twentieth. It was, in reality, only the dedication and force of will of a particularly skilled and, indeed, ruthless, politician, Sergei Witte, that saw the project through to completion. All such projects need champions and nowhere was that more true than in a Russia still ruled by the primitive system of absolute monarchy. And Witte proved to be just the right man for the task. A long-time railway manager and briefly transport minister, Witte had been Vyshenegradsky’s protégé and was appointed as his replacement as finance minister in August 1892. That appointment meant the right man was in the right place at the right time – one of those fortuitous accidents of history. Otherwise, the Trans-Siberian might have stayed on the drawing board.
THREE
WITTE’S BREAKTHROUGH
When Sergei Witte became minister of finance, work on the Trans-Siberian had barely started and there was still a lack of momentum within government circles behind the project. Indeed, Witte found a situation where neither money nor resources had been allocated to the scheme, and there was no clear mechanism to see the project through. He would quickly change all that.
There are not many finance ministers who, like Witte, can claim to have built one of the wonders of the world. There is no doubting that it is Witte who most deserves the accolade of father of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Even though he was no spendthrift, he recognized the importance of the line in several respects. Like many great men, Witte needed a considerable amount of luck to complete the project. He needed, too, the right Zeitgeist to push forward a project that had been mooted for so long and yet seen so little progress. Witte was that relatively rare beast in tsarist Russia: a man whose ability rather than his birthright had propelled him to the top of government. Born in the Georgian capital, Tblisi,1 in 1849, Witte’s background was modest; although there was aristocratic blood in his lineage – the odd princess and count – his father, Julius, was merely an official in the local governor general’s office. Witte studied mathematics at Odessa University, where his well-received dissertation was on infinitesimal numbers, a choice replete with irony for someone who would later spend billions of roubles on building a railway.
Both his father and grandfather died during his time at university, leaving his family on hard times. Consequently, he had to find a stable job very quickly, which, inevitably, pushed him into the civil service. He joined at the lowly ninth rank (chin) in the deeply hierarchical structure, but was always destined for higher things, because of what he called his ‘noble’ blood – which was somewhat diluted – and because of his undoubted abilities, which quickly attracted the attention of his superiors. His mentor was Count Vladimir Bobrinski, Russia’s minister of transport, who counselled Witte against becoming an engineer, arguing with great foresight that the railway needed men with a good liberal education, rather than narrow specialists. So Witte went to work for the Odessa state railway, which at the time was owned by the government. Witte was initially a ticket clerk, but also, according to his memoirs, ‘studied freight traffic, worked as assistant stationmaster and full-fledged stationmaster, and acted as train inspector’.2 It was, indeed, precisely the sort of on-the-job training which was given to bright new recruits by British Rail, except that after just six months he was appointed director of the traffic office, the key role in ensuring the smooth running of a railway.
During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8 he claimed in his memoirs to be practically the sole manager of the Odessa Railway, responsible for delivering all the traffic to the front and his efforts came to the notice of the tsar. It was at this time that Witte suffered the worst mishap of his career, when a train carrying recruits crashed down a ravine and burnt out, killing more than 100 men. The disaster was caused by a maintenance crew, who had removed a rail but failed to replace it or, indeed, to put up warning flags during a blizzard. Along with the director of the railway, Witte was held responsible, even though he had no direct involvement in the maintenance of the railway: ‘public opinion in those days was envenomed by that spirit of liberalism which is essentially hatred against those who stand out either because of position or wealth, the spirit which animates the revolutionary mob’,3 was Witte’s rather revealing explanation. The pair were sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, but in the event Witte served only two weeks, thanks to the support of the tsar, who had been impressed by his commendable war efforts, and even then Witte was allowed out of jail during the day to continue going to work.
The Odessa Railway was privatized during the war and therefore Witte found himself working for Jan Bloch, one of the big ‘railway barons’ of the period, who had made fortunes out of the expansion and operation of what was Russia’s biggest industry. By 1886 Witte was running what had become the Southwestern Railway, and his organizational skills were proving to be second to none. He managed to turn the fortunes of the loss-making railway around through his understanding of management and economics. The main obstacle, in his view, was that the railway was run by engineers and they had no business sense, always seeking to spend money on the track and infrastructure rather than realizing the importance of ensuring lines were profitable and, indeed, functioning. This, in fact, is an age-old conflict in railway management, and Witte was adama
nt about asserting his authority over the engineers, even though he was not one himself.
Witte’s progress to the highest echelons of Russian society was not all smooth. Shortly after his arrival to work for the government in St Petersburg in 1889 he found himself a widower when his wife died suddenly, but he soon fell in love with Matilda Ivanovna Lissanevich, the wife of a physician and the daughter of a Lithuanian postmaster. More worryingly, he met her in a salon where her reputation was anything but impeccable, with rumours of torrid affairs with numerous noblemen. And, worst of all in the highly anti-Semitic Russia of the time, she was a Jew. Witte ignored the gossip and any religious objections, paid 30,000 roubles for her divorce and married her, despite the fact that such a divorcee with a dubious past could never be admitted at the Court, which Witte now frequented as part of his new post.
During this time Witte also had a brief brush with extremist politics that could have ended his career. After the assassination of Alexander II by left-wing revolutionaries in 1881, Witte was involved in a tale of spying and assassination that would not have disgraced a John le Carré thriller. Witte was moved by what he felt was this terrible tragedy of regicide to help create the Holy Druzhina (Holy Brotherhood), a secret society of counter-revolutionaries. The movement attracted widespread support among the elite, and in a convoluted episode Witte was sent to Paris to spy on an agent, Polyanski, who had been ordered to kill a man called Hartman, one of the plotters involved in a previous attempt on the tsar’s life. Witte was supposed to kill Polyanski if he failed, in turn, to kill the plotter. However, Polyanski got wind of the plan and confronted Witte, and eventually after moments of farce involving the two ‘apaches’ (gunmen) who were supposed to carry out the bloody deed, the crazy plan was called off and Witte returned to Russia, leaving the movement in disgust at such far-fetched activity. He was, in fact, despite his adherence to the absolute monarchy, no right-wing fanatic and, in particular, was outraged that after the assassination there was a purge of Jews from the railway, a policy he called ‘senseless nationalism’ that destroyed the careers of countless ‘highly competent men’.