Siberia's Iron Road

The Trans-Siberian, Then and Now

One hundred and ten years ago this month, Romanov heir-apparent Nikolai Alexandrovich stuck a spade in the ground at Vladivostok and emptied its contents into a waiting wheelbarrow. This formal act marked the start of the greatest engineering feat of the 19th century—the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, stretching across 7500 km and seven time zones, from Chelyabinsk in the Urals to Vladivostok on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

An iron road across Siberia had been under discussion in Russia for decades, but had been put off repeatedly due to the immensity of the task, huge state debts and contentious debate about the merits and effects of the endeavor. Finally, in February 1891, the promise of Far East colonies, Siberian riches, international prestige and commercial opportunities galvanized support in the government for the railway. The planning commission divided the railway into six separate lines, so that construction could proceed simultaneously on several fronts. Tsarevich Nicholas turned the soil and laid the cornerstone for the easternmost Ussuri line (running from Vladivostok north to Khabarovsk) on May 31, 1891. Within months, work had begun on the western sections of the railway.

The immensely political process of drawing the path of the Trans-Siberian and engineering its construction was fraught with corruption, mismanagement and brutality. Contractors commonly cheated the government by overcharging, under-performing, and/or declaring bankruptcy; much of the path was not surveyed before track was laid and substandard materials and work procedures caused innumerable accidents and delays; workers were famously mistreated, ill-fed and poorly-housed (if at all).

By any standard, the Trans-Siberian was a herculean undertaking. But its accomplishment was made all the more difficult by the vastness and character of the terrain. Consider that, for most of the railway’s planned route, there was no hardwood with which to make rail ties, Artesian wells had to be drilled (this was the era of steam trains, after all), and iron and stone had to be “imported” from the Russian heartland. And most all tasks had to be completed through brute manual labor, from driving pylons and cutting sleepers, to laying rails, moving earth and rock, draining swamps and clearing tunnels.

Initially, much of the work was done by Russian migrant workers. But their numbers were insufficient, so tens of thousands of prison laborers and foreign workers were pressed to the task. The former were paid miserly wages and given shortened sentences. Among the latter were Italian stonemasons, whose bridgework still girds the line today, over 100 years later. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Koreans, Persians and Turks. Together, they endured the privations of this difficult labor, many dying from exposure and from infectious disease, from typhoid to the bubonic plague.

When the indomitable Sergei Witte became Finance Minister in 1892, he took over the Trans-Siberian project as his own. Unlike his predecessor, the miserly Ivan Vyshnegradsky, Witte was a firm believer in deficit spending. “Money,” he once said, “can only be found by spending it lavishly.” The money he found through foreign loans, chiefly from France. Initial estimates put the cost of building the railway at $175 million. By 1904, official accounts said that $250 had been spent. The number was actually significantly more, especially when consideration is taken for the East Chinese line, built across Manchuria.

Witte resolved that the Trans-Siberian should be built by Russian industry, which turned the railway into an engine for growth. Whole towns and industries sprang up alongside the path of the railway, for the railway needed everything from forges to cement plants to timber mills. At the height of construction, one-third of Russia’s pig iron went to the making of rails, spikes and bridges.

And yet, Russia could not keep pace. The breakneck speed of the project and the mismanagement of expenses led to extensive corner-cutting. Grades were made steeper than safe and curves sharper than advisable; the rail used for the line was half the weight of that normally used and the rail ties were spaced twice as far apart. Short term gain was constantly sacrificed to proper engineering, such that, when the railway was finally opened to passengers in 1900, trains had to travel excruciatingly slowly, about 13 miles per hour, and even so, accidents and derailments were common—three times a day on average. There was also still much work to complete. The difficult Trans-Baikal stretch of the line (around the lower edge of the lake) was not completed until 1904—in the interim, an immense, British-made ferry, the Baikal, was used to transport entire passenger trains across the lake in spring, summer and fall; tracks were laid on the ice in winter.

Through international intrigue, bribery and occupation, the East Chinese line across Manchuria was completed in 1901, affording a more direct link from east of Lake Baikal to Vladivostok. The alternative route had passengers board a ship in Sretensk, east of Baikal, then sail down the Shilka and Amur rivers to Khabarovsk, where they would connect up with the Ussuri line begun with Tsarevich Nicholas’ spade in 1891. The immensely challenging Amur line, bridging these same two points but within Russia, was begun in 1908. It involved traversing hundreds of waterways and mountain regions, to say nothing of swamps, permafrost and malaria-carrying mosquitos. When this last line was finished, in 1916, Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway was complete, allowing passengers to ride all the way from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok by rail (9,297 km, or 5,777 miles).

Even though the “ribbon of rail” across Russia was complete in 1916, it was at best a flawed jewel in the empire’s crown. For the next 40 years, considerable work had to be done to repair and rebuild the shoddily constructed lines (reconstruction had, in fact, begun as early as 1900 on the already completed line). In 1928, the First Soviet Five Year Plan included adding a second rail line (much of the work being completed by labor camp inmates) and electrification (all but some of the easternmost portions of the railway are electrified today). Subsequently, the Turkestan-Siberian railway was built, between Novosibirsk and Almaty. In the 1940s, the Trans-Mongolian line was added, connecting Ulan Ude with Ulaan Baatar, capital of Mongolia, and, in 1956, extending to Beijing.

The BAM (Baikal-Amur Mainline) was begun in the 1930s largely because of fears that the Chinese could seize parts of the Trans-Siberian which tracked near to their border, but also because of the immense mineral riches in the region the line would traverse. The 3400 km route was to branch off the Trans-Siberian at Taishet, near Bratsk, then travel around the northern edge of Lake Baikal, then east to Komsomolsk, running several hundred miles north and parallel to the Trans-Siberian. The initial work was conducted by labor camp inmates, but came to a halt after Stalin’s death. Work was re-inaugurated in 1971 and given a shot in the arm in the mid-1970s by Komsomol student workers, who went there to take part in the “Hero Project of the Century.” Needless to say, horrendous working conditions welcomed the young heroes who traveled east and completion targets were wildly unrealistic. The line technically opened in 1985, but this included a dangerous detour around the unfinished Severomuisk Tunnel. This 10 mile-long tunnel has proven an engineering nightmare, with immense underground rivers and geothermal activity. After many delays, the tunnel was reportedly completed in early 2001, but the BAM line will remain a little-traveled white elephant for years to come.

In the century of its existence, the Trans-Siberian has had huge economic, demographic, and geopolitical significance for the development of Russia. The railway gave access to Siberia’s vast mineral and material riches, providing a lifeline for industrialization and wartime buildup. Today, sections of the Trans-Siberian are the busiest parts of Russia’s rail system—one of the world’s most heavily used—with freight trains passing every couple of minutes. The country’s reliance on this iron road is significant because there is no single, reliable paved road across the breadth of Russia.

In the 1890s, Russia faced a demographic crisis of a rapidly expanding peasant class with not enough land for them to work. In fact, the year of the railway’s beginning was a year of deep famine in Russia, brought on largely by Witte’s predecessor selling too much Russian grain abroad. The Trans-Siberian was thus  seen as a safety valve for “emigration” to Siberia, where peasants were granted very generous land plots. Even in the abhorrent “stables on rails” that were the fifth class rail cars of the time, chances of safe passage east far exceeded the previous alternative—travel on foot or by cart. Clearly the railway served this goal well. In the 1890s, just five million souls lived in Siberia, today there are over 32 million. Unfortunately, however, the iron road that enabled migration to Siberia also made “more efficient” the exile of millions of Russians during Stalin’s reign of terror.

Finally, the Trans-Siberian railway made Russia at once both a European and an Asian power, with all the attendant military consequences. Without the railway, Russia would not have gone to war with Japan in 1904. Nor would the Bolsheviks have so easily consolidated power (or have their revolution mortally threatened by a few thousand Czech soldiers who seized control of half of the railway’s length). And, without the Trans-Siberian, the Soviet state could not have salvaged its military might from German attack in WWII, as it did when entire factories were uprooted and transferred to Siberia.

Constructed with imponderable human suffering and huge financial cost, Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad is today a true wonder of the world. Given the technologies and knowledge at the time of the railway’s construction, it is a wonder it could have been built in 25 years. Equally amazing is that, despite all of its initial problems, it has so utterly transformed and shaped Russian history.

One hundred years ago, a poor man had to walk or hitch a ride across Siberia on a cart. At best, the trip took a year, maybe a bit less, and incuded the threat of disease, assault, exposure and attack by wild animals. Today, for about $400 you can travel from Beijing to Moscow in under a week, without walking so much as a mile, all the while ensconced in the comfort of a heated carriage. RL

Recommended additional reading: Most of the better books on this subject are out of print, but you should be able to find copies in used bookstores, or even on large bookstore’s remainder racks. There are two very fine, readable histories of Siberia, Bruce Lincoln’s The Conquest of a Continent (Random House, 1994) and Benson Bobrick’s East of the Sun(Simon & Schuster, 1992). See our Guide to the Trans-Siberian box on page 40 for information on some good travel and information guides.