Russian trains are changing.
The fastest Sapsan[1] services now dash from Moscow to St. Petersburg in well under four hours. Cast back just 50 years, and the premium daytime express train demanded twice as long for the same 400-mile journey.
Speed is surely good for business, but less conducive to the telling of life stories and the sharing of confessions. For decades it was the very slowness of Russian trains that opened the door to en-route entertainment and fueled the imagination of Russian writers. In the opening lines of The Idiot, Dostoyevsky has his epileptic protagonist reveal his life story to complete strangers in a third-class carriage on the Warsaw to St. Petersburg train. Fellow traveler Parfyon Rogozhin reciprocates with a few extraordinary confidences of his own.
No one reveals the secrets of the heart or the darkness of their souls in the clinical world of the speeding Sapsan. No, storytelling takes time, and the slow train through rural Russia was the perfect confessional. Reflections that stall are nudged along by the curiosity of strangers and the gentle flow of the passing landscape beyond the carriage window.
It has been 175 years since Russians had their first experience of rail travel. The 16-mile line from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk was completed in the summer of 1838, although a limited service as far as Tsarskoye Selo had started the previous year (see Russian Life Sep/Oct 2012, "Russia's First Iron Road"). The Czech railway pioneer Franz Anton von Gerstner had, during the 1830s, been eagerly promoting plans for railways in Russia, but the tsar's ministers had their doubts. The short route from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk was a canny compromise. It allowed von Gerstner to demonstrate his prowess in building and operating a railroad, and for the tsar it promised a fast link from St. Petersburg to the imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo.
With the completion of the line to Pavlovsk in 1838, the railroad immediately offered a favored excursion from St. Petersburg. There were bars, dining rooms, and a ballroom at Pavlovsk station, prompting Count Kankrin, the Minister of Finance, to remark that, while in other countries the first railroads linked great industrial centers, in Russia the inaugural route led only to a tavern. A portion of the ticket price for journeys on the line was allocated to support entertainment, and the railway station at Pavlovsk had its own resident musicians. The notion of train arrivals and departures being signaled by music, which still persists in Russia today, was thus part of the Russian railway experience from the outset. Few stations have ever attracted such celebrated musicians as Pavlovsk. Johann Strauss the Younger spent 10 summers in the service of the railway company, embellishing the arrivals of trains in Pavlovsk with a medley of quadrilles, polkas and waltzes.
The Pavlovsk route was an instant financial success, reaping a handsome dividend for those who had invested in von Gerstner's scheme and encouraging the tsar to approve the empire's first two long-distance rail routes: a line from Warsaw to the Austro-Hungarian frontier (with an onward connection to Vienna) and, inevitably, for a commercial railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
Count Kankrin raised his perennial opposition to anything associated with railways in Russia, voicing concerns that easy access to travel might undermine public morality. Perhaps he had an inkling what tales might be told in the cloistered social world of the train. He also worried that scarce capital that might more sensibly be invested in agricultural improvement would be squandered in grandiose schemes for railroads.
Tsar Nicholas I overruled his Minister of Finance and took a personal interest in the planning of the St. Petersburg to Moscow railway, debating with surveyors the merits of this or that route over or around the Valdai Hills, and settling in the end for an almost straight line via Bologoye and Tver. At the latter, the railway benefited from a useful link with the Volga waterway system.
The inaugural train on the line between Russia's two premier cities ran in 1851, taking 22 hours for the journey. It is precisely the same route that is followed by the Sapsan express trains that today allow residents of St. Petersburg to make a there-and-back-in-a-day excursion to the Russian capital.
Within five years of its opening, the St. Petersburg to Moscow railway, renamed the Nikolayev Railway after the death of Tsar Nicholas in 1855, was carrying over a million passengers per year. The price of foodstuffs in St. Petersburg tumbled, as the railway gave access to produce from the cheaper Moscow markets.
The success of the early railways, particularly the routes from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk and Moscow, was not sufficient to carry the weight of public opinion. There remained a deep-seated ambivalence to the railway in many strata of Russian society. Educated Russians were aware that there were winners and losers in the railroad game. Veliky Novgorod, an influential city rich in historical associations, saw its fortunes rapidly decline when the tsar's preference for a straight-line route between the two capitals dictated that the new railway bypass the city.
It fell to writers to translate into words the prevailing angst over how the railway was threatening rights and traditions. Railways, generations of writers would argue, ushered in the boundless energy of a blossoming commerce. Thus they were the harbingers of evil. This movement found an early champion in Leo Tolstoy. In fact, Anna Karenina can be read as one of the most celebrated anti-railroad tracts of nineteenth-century literature.[2]
The poet Nikolay Nekrasov, always one to show compassion over the trials and tribulations of the rural peasantry, invited the opprobrium of the tsarist authorities when his literary journal in 1864 published a denigration in verse of the Nikolayev Railway. Nekrasov's poem The Railway asserted (some say "exaggerated") that the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow was effectively built on the skeletons of the Russian serfs who had perished in the construction of the line.
Two decades later, Nikolay Leskov pondered in The Pearl Necklace whether the expansion of the railroads might account for the poverty of modern Russian narrative, and in the last century Osip Mandelstam used the voice of the narrator in The Egyptian Stamp to comment on how the tyranny of the timetable and the rhythm of the railway had subverted Russian prose. Mandelstam had, as a boy, attended concerts at the train terminal at Pavlovsk, but clearly wasn't impressed by the railroad. Ironically, after he and his wife were exiled to Voronezh, the couple spent a good part of their time mingling with the crowds in railway station waiting rooms – places that afforded invisibility and helped them avoid arrest.
Russian railways had a way of getting the last word, just as indeed they did in 1910 with Leo Tolstoy. After vilifying railways repeatedly throughout his career, the great writer was condemned to breathe his last in the stationmaster's cottage of a remote railway station. So Tolstoy's spirit now has to endure not merely a railway station named after him, but also an entire train. The daily overnight service between Moscow and Helsinki is called Leo Tolstoy.
Tsar Nicholas I may have had difficulty persuading his Finance Minister on the merits of railroads, but a later generation of advisers to the tsars did not need to be reminded of the strategic and economic significance of Russia's expanding railway enterprise. Mikhail Reutern, Minister of Finance to Tsar Alexander II, advised the emperor that, "without railways, Russia cannot be secure within her borders."
The Crimean War (1853-6) gave a hint of the importance of railways in military tactics, and in 1855 Russian observers watched in amazement as British forces built the Grand Crimean Central Railway through difficult terrain within a matter of weeks, thus securing the delivery of supplies and ammunitions to the Allied forces. Russia learned that it too could deploy railways in the service of empire, pushing ahead in the closing years of the nineteenth century with the Trans-Siberian and China Eastern Railways – the latter built with such speed (from 1897 to 1903) as to fuel Japanese fears that Russia had designs on Manchuria and indeed the whole of China.
The ensuing tensions precipitated the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), which was arguably the first international conflict in which railways assumed a major strategic role. Appropriately enough, it was a former railway manager, Count Sergei Yulevich Witte, who led the Russian delegation that eventually secured a humiliating peace agreement with the victorious Japanese. The whole affair proved that railways might lend a false sense of security to an evolving empire.
Much closer to the centers of population in western Russia, railways were annihilating space and proving a key tool in compensating for the almost complete lack of decent roads in Russia. By the time the Russo-Japanese War ended, Moscow and St. Petersburg were less than a dozen hours apart by train. The railroad network now extended from the Arctic to the Black Sea.
Yet, as the British found in India (where the railroad of the Raj was transformed into Indian space), an empire that promotes its railway cannot stop all comers climbing aboard its trains. Cossacks and Chechens, Doukhobors and Molokans, talibs and rebbes all appropriated the railway into their own culture and consciousness, many creating their own railroad literatures in the process. The Jewish communities of the Pale[3] were especially quick to take advantage of the trains. By the turn of the century a distinctive Yiddish tradition of travel writing was celebrating the railroad. A stratum of society in Imperial Russia which had played merely cameo roles in Chekhov and Dostoyevsky now stood center stage in the work of Sholem Aleichem and David Bergelson, both writers from a Hasidic tradition who set their work on and around Russian trains.[4]
The railway in Russia defined the very limits of empire, both in terms of its geography and its cultures. In the final years of Imperial Russia, the pioneering photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was commissioned by the tsar to create a documentary record of a changing Russia. Between 1909 and 1915, he toured Russia in a special train, equipped with darkroom facilities, capturing through his lens the memorable images of a country that was moving inexorably toward industrialization, war and revolution.
When the new Soviet Union emerged from the ashes of Imperial Russia, its railway network was vastly inferior to that of the United States, Germany or Britain. Conflict and neglect had taken their toll. Yet in the following decades, a succession of five-year plans allowed investment in new routes and the modernization of obsolete infrastructure to an extent that was unparalleled in western Europe or North America. The railroad became an essential mainstay of Soviet life.
But one thing did not change during the Soviet period. The train was a place for quiet conversation, a retreat from the reality of life beyond the carriage window. That quintessential feature of the Russian railway was undiminished. The hospital and church trains still ran — though the latter soon disappeared from Soviet railroads, only to reappear in the 1990s as the Orthodox hierarchy realized the value of the railway in bringing the Divine Liturgy to remote rural communities that had lost their priests and their churches.
After the Revolution, in an effort to mobilize workers and peasants, a distinctly new variety of train appeared on Soviet railroads. This was the propaganda train, championed by Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin who, although already nominally Head of State, personally led a number of agitprop-train tours. Each of these trains had its own political commissar, library, printing press and projection facilities – deftly exploiting the new medium of film to bring the Bolshevik message to the communes. These trains were mobile messengers to the nation, their colorful exteriors decorated with cartoons extolling the merits of socialist agriculture and lampooning the wayward capitalists.
Trains have of course always been propaganda tools. Even at the height of the Cold War, Soviet rail carriages could be seen throughout Western Europe – a perpetual reminder that Russia was not so very far away. There were direct services from Moscow to Oslo, Geneva and Rome, as well as to Dutch and Belgian ports.
Russian Railways (RZD), the state operator founded in 1992, is today by far the most internationally-minded of any national railroad administration. The 2013 schedules show direct trains from Russian cities to 27 other countries. You can climb aboard a Russian sleeping car in Moscow and alight in any one of 20 different European countries, although the change of gauge at the western margin of the former Soviet Union[5] still means long delays as railroad cars are hoisted onto new bogies for the onward journey to Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and beyond.
RZD has pioneered long international routes, launching a direct Moscow to Nice service in 2010 (recalling the travel patterns of pre-Revolutionary Russia when the French Riviera was a favored vacation destination for the elite of Moscow and St. Petersburg). The Moscow to Paris service had a big boost in late 2011, receiving a dedicated through train to replace the occasional carriage that was attached to a Russian train from Moscow to Berlin, lingering there for 11 hours before being hitched onto a German train for the onward overnight journey to Paris.
The international strategy espoused by RZD stands in stark contrast to the more parochial approach to networks preferred by many operators in the European Union, where all too few services cross international frontiers. In fact, it is a curiosity of rail travel in Western Europe today that there are many journeys for which the only direct train on offer is run by RZD.[6] Other new services inaugurated in recent years by RZD reflect a growing Russian affection for holidays to the Adriatic region. In 2009, a new direct train was launched from Moscow to Bar, on the coast of Montenegro. Last year, its frequency was doubled and RZD introduced for summer 2012 a new through link to Split on the Croatian coast.
RZD Chairman Vladimir Yakunin, who in the late 1980s was a Soviet diplomat posted to the UN in New York, presides over a railroad empire that has over 50,000 miles of track (more than half of which is electrified) and 975,000 staff. Backed by strong support from President Putin, Yakunin has personally spearheaded RZD's very successful efforts to attract international investors. One of Yakunin's pet projects is to get the Russian five-foot gauge extended well west of the boundary of the former Soviet Union, so giving RZD a share of the heavy freight market in central Europe. Speaking at the Innotrans trade fair in Berlin in September 2012, Yakunin emphasized that a new Russian-gauge line to Vienna would do much to facilitate trade between China and the European Union, while conceding that many politicians in the EU still worry that "such a line might be used for military advantage, making it all-too-easy for Russia to send tanks to Vienna."
For a new generation of environmentally minded Europeans, the train is fast becoming the preferred option for journeys to Russia. The new Allegro high-speed service from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, opened just two years ago, has transformed communications in the region. Service frequency was doubled within six months of the launch and over the current 2012/2013 Christmas and New Year period the length of each train is being extended from seven to 14 cars.
True devotees of the rails see the new generation of Russian high-speed services as almost too comfortable. The social magic of the Russian train has traditionally been rooted, like so much of Russian life, in patience, endurance and a measure of discomfort. A shared commitment to those values bred solidarity and conversation. These are virtues revealed at their best in the lower travel classes, nicely exemplified by Dostoyevsky's "idiot" protagonist as he made his way back to Russia from a Swiss asylum in a third-class carriage.
Services like Sapsan and Allegro give a new view of Russia, one that is less rooted in history. Cruise through the Swiss Alps or the Canadian Rockies by train, and the emphasis is on the landscape. Huge panoramic windows blur the boundary between the train and the world beyond.
Most Russian trains have been different. The traditional Russian long-distance train has an interior focus. Compartment and corridor designs limit sightlines to the wider world beyond the train. Perhaps it is because Russia is a country with too much landscape, so the train become a retreat from that landscape into an inner sanctuary. It is a place where kolbasa, hard-boiled eggs, vodka, boiled chicken, chess, and life stories are shared with complete strangers. RL
1. Sapsan is the Russian word (Сапсан) for the peregrine falcon. It is not the first Russian train named after a bird. The overnight service from Kursk to St. Petersburg has long been colloquially referred to as the Cоловей or "nightingale."
2. It is symbolic that, although in many senses a novel of the railroad, there is so very little detail about actual trains in Anna Karenina. While Tolstoy's contemporaries in Britain and America extolled the beauty of the steam engine, Tolstoy's trains are ghostly creatures that barely warrant description.
3. The Pale was that area of western Russia (including Poland, which had in 1867 been assimilated into the Russian Empire) where Jewish settlements were permitted.
4. For example David Bergelson's novella Arum voksal (Around the Train Terminal), and Sholem Aleichem's Di ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Tales).
5. It was an American railroad engineer, George Washington Whistler, who determined that Russian railroads should be constructed to a five-foot gauge, a few inches wider than that which prevailed elsewhere in continental Europe. Whistler worked on the St. Petersburg to Moscow railway. He is better remembered nowadays as the father of the famous artist James McNeill Whistler.
6. Two examples are Genoa to Vienna and Hanover to Strasbourg. In practice, many travelers within the EU eschew those direct Russian trains, opting instead for more familiar operators, even though that necessitates a change of train along the way.
The tsars were generally great fans of the expanding railroad, despite having to endure a number of mishaps, some of which – it must be said – were at least partially self-inflicted. On one occasion, Tsar Alexander II was en route to Odessa and his train paused at Kotovsk in Ukraine (in those days known as Birzula). Keen to get some fresh air, yet anxious to avoid the crowds gathered on the platform, the tsar climbed down from the royal train on the opposite side, where there was only open countryside. The train almost immediately departed, leaving the tsar unexpectedly exposed and inconveniently stranded.
In October 1888, Alexander III and his family were involved in a serious train wreck while en route from the Crimea to St. Petersburg. There were some two dozen fatalities in the accident at Borki, which took place on the main line from Kharkiv to Kursk. The Romanovs, who were taking lunch in the dining car at the time, all escaped uninjured (saved, in fact, in no small measure by the tsar himself, who reportedly held the roof of the collapsed carriage on his back until everyone could get out). The tsar himself, and the Russian people, generally attributed the Romanovs' good luck to divine intervention. The managers of the railroad company quietly noted that excessive speed was a major factor in the disaster. Tsar Alexander III too often demanded that the trains conveying royal travelers be driven at speeds well beyond the normal limits.
Both these incidents are recorded in The Memoirs of Count Witte. Sergei Yulevich Witte was an experienced railroad professional who later had a distinguished political and diplomatic career. Just a few months prior to the Borki train wreck, Witte had irritated the tsar by warning of the dangers of the excessive speed of royal trains, including on the very stretch of track where the accident occurred – being proven right on this helped launch his career.
The railroad operating practices pioneered on the route from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk have left an enduring legacy in Russia. The southern terminus of the line (at Pavlovsk) was the first opportunity to build a grand station, unhampered by the constraints on space at the city end of the route in the heart of St. Petersburg. The tsar's railroad engineers had visited England. They travelled on the railway from Southampton to London, which in those days had its city terminal in the Vauxhall district of London. The grandeur of that station, and the appeal of the adjacent pleasure gardens, prompted the promoters of the Pavlovsk railway to recreate the spirit and style of Vauxhall in Russia. Thus, a little to the bemusement of visiting Londoners, Russians still refer to any major railway station as a voksal. The currency of the word in modern Russia even extends beyond railroads: hence avtovoksal for a bus station.
Russian visitors to London are sometimes tempted to take the train out to Vauxhall, just five minutes from Waterloo on the main route to the southwest. Those who make that pilgrimage to what they believe to be the prototypical voksal are invariably disappointed. The present Vauxhall station dates from much later and is renowned among Londoners for its general dilapidation and the prevailing mood of chaos. It is the very antithesis of Russia's grand railroad terminals.
The example of The Idiot noted on page 36 is just one of many celebrated railway confessions in Russian literature. A striking example is in Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), where Pozdnyshev exploits the constrained social world of the train to confess having murdered his own wife. The quasi-religious setting is highlighted in the opening chapter with a merchant in the train car making a triple sign of the cross (in the Orthodox manner) as a prelude to the conversation that ensues. The novella is thus framed by religious imagery, very appropriately for a polemic on Christian asceticism, and concludes with Pozdnyshev roaming the railways of Russia begging forgiveness from any fellow-traveler willing to lend an ear.
Russian poetry and prose often exploits this rich theme. Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909), who like Tolstoy died at a railway station, picks up the confessional motif in his 1900 poem In the Train Car with the line "assure me I have your pardon." Chekhov's short story About Love (1898) cunningly exploits the intimacy of the compartment in a moving but all-too-late confession of love. Turgenev's Smoke (1867) shows that the train offers the chance for travelers to face up to their own sins and shortcomings. Litvinov, returning to Russia, reflects on his own life. It is a nice reminder of the enduring appeal of the train as a place that allows us to secure new perspectives: both on the world that slips by beyond the window but also on ourselves and our own lives.
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