Day 23

Railway development in Russia had not followed the European pattern, because of its weak economy and the stringencies of the police state imposed by the Tsar’s regime, who feared that the railways would be a democratizing force. The line between St Petersburg and Moscow, completed in 1851, was one of the world’s great early railways, built by an engineer, Pavel Petrovich Melnikov, who was easily the equal of a Brunel or Robert Stephenson. He produced a railway which was almost dead straight with gentle gradients but despite its success it did not, as happened in western Europe, lead to a network of secondary lines and branches. Partly the reason was cost allied to the lack of capital in pre-industrial Russia, but crucially the railway could not be profitable because Tsar Nicholas demanded that all passengers were subjected to a police check before travelling and required to carry a passport. This stymied the development of a strong passenger base by limiting travel to the rich and the politically sound.

The humiliating defeat in 1856 of Russia by Great Britain and France in the Crimean War showed that Russia had fallen well behind its European rivals and it acted as a spur for modernizing the state. Consequently, under Alexander II, a forward-looking tsar, there was a modest railway boom in the 1860s, but the constraints under which the Russian railways had to operate meant that even by the 1880s there was only a sketchy network of main lines. For example, there were main lines connecting St Petersburg with Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire, and Kiev and Odessa, but nothing like the complex networks being built elsewhere. Even in European Russia, west of the Urals, the density of railways 2 before the start of the construction of the Trans-Siberian in 1891 was less than one twentieth of the UK’s system. The lack of sustained investment and the poor maintenance of the track affected performance as even express trains averaged, at best, 30 mph. The journey time for the near 400-mile trip between Moscow and St Petersburg, which was originally thirty hours, was still a ponderous fifteen hours in 1880, an average of just 26 mph, far slower than contemporary trains in Europe. As in Europe, the state’s role in the railways increased as the private companies which had been encouraged to build them fell into financial difficulties.

The Trans-Siberian was much more than a mere extension of the existing railway network. Since the sixteenth century Russia had been growing in all directions from its heartland, the Duchy of Muscovy. After its victory over Napoleon in 1812 Russia had continued its expansion into the Caucasus Mountains and across the Urals into Siberia but had never consolidated its hold over these distant lands. Alexander III, although more conservative and cautious than his father (who was assassinated in 1881), saw the railways as a powerful unifying force which would allow him to impose the stamp of Russian authority in these regions and pushed strongly for the building of the Trans-Siberian. Siberia was a grim land, with a small population largely concentrated on a few river arteries and roads, and mostly employed by the state either to maintain the roads or guard the territory. There was, too, an assortment of criminal exiles – being sent to Siberia was a long established tradition – many of whom had escaped to scratch an impoverished living off the land, frequently making life difficult for the few honest citizens. Diplomats and bureaucrats despatched to serve in the Pacific coast town of Vladivostok, the largest settlement in the region, though still little more than a collection of huts and only wrested from the Chinese in 1860, complained of the expensive rotting meat and vegetables and the lack of staples such as fresh milk and butter. There was, though, ‘an abundance of drinking houses, taverns and houses of pleasure’, 3 which added to the feeling that civilization’s toehold in Russia’s far east was precarious as a result of the harsh climate, poor land and absence of transport links. This was not the burgeoning Wild West of the United States full of entrepreneurs and adventurers out to make a fast buck. There was, however, wealth in the form of minerals which gave the railway at least a small measure of economic purpose, but the true value of this vast hidden treasure only became apparent when a thorough geological survey was undertaken after the Trans-Siberian had been completed.

~~Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the world -by- Christian Wolmar