The Heart of the Trans-Siberian

Once upon a time, a certain gentleman was traveling along the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway. Suddenly, somewhere around the midpoint of his travels, he spied an imposing train station. The gentleman concluded that he had arrived at a rather large municipality and exited the train, intending to spend a night in the local hotel, then take in the local sites the next day.

Imagine our gentleman's surprise when he discovered that there was no city whatsoever here, just a tiny village huddled about the station, consisting of no more than a dozen wooden homes.

We should also note that this was a day in early spring, and the melting snow was sliding down from the mountain into the valley. Now in these parts the local bears were not averse to sitting atop such sliding floes, riding them down the mountain like a child on a sled. And as Fate would have it, at that very moment when our gentleman was casting his gloomy gaze toward said mountain, three bears were scooting down the mountain in the aforementioned manner.

This lattermost fact, apparently, was the final straw, for our gentleman, after running back to the station for safety, caused an unpleasant scandal. He was completely beside himself, indignantly screaming about bears "sliding on their butts" and demanded to see the stationmaster. Since that day, the mountain to the right of the station has been known as Bear Mountain.

Needless to say, the stationmaster took our gentleman in, calmed him down, gave him a bit of tea with cranberry jam, and provisioned him for his further journey with some dried omul and a small bag of pine nuts.

the birthplace of this railroad anecdote is a little station along Lake Baikal: Slyudyanka. The finer details — the bears, the omul, the nuts and what not — are certainly the spawn of a rich local folklore, and it is a bit of an open question whether the deceived gentleman actually existed or not. The former resident of Slyudyanka who told me the story herself heard about the misunderstanding with the visitor when she lived in the town soon after the Second World War. So there must be at least some historical foundation for this urban legend, for why else would it endure so long, passed from mouth to mouth since well before the revolution?

Slyudyanka, which lies 100 km from Irkutsk, received its "deceptive" station in 1904. At that time, train stations were not merely functional structures, but centers of social life. Music was performed here; there were promenades — just as there were in parks or along riverbanks; smart ladies and gentlemen had grand arrivals and partings, followed by soirees and dinners in restaurants.[1] What is more, stations, with all their surrounding structures, were architectural symbols — faces for their towns. Their size and sophistication rather strictly corresponded to the town's development, as well as to its overall size, geography and population.

The beautiful Slyudyanka Station was made of stone, and not wood, which is what might have led to the assumption that it represented a rather large city. And the stone station's appearance was all the more remarkable, in that it was not made of brick, but of marble… But then again this was a time when the swiftly collapsing world of Tradition was clinging to outward appearances, to rank and title. Not unlike the bankrupt owner of a luxurious estate who wastes huge sums of money on the contents of his household, in order to give the appearance that everything is proceeding and will proceed in this manner for centuries hence.

Prior to the arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Slyudyanka was known only as a valley that shared its name with a river at the southern tip of Lake Baikal, a place where mica, marble and other stone had been mined since time immemorial. It only became a settlement after the construction of the railroad, when the valley forest was harvested to build some 40 wooden homes. It did not even achieve the official status of posyolok ("village") until 1928.

Today, Slyudyanka is a small city of some 20,000, and, in the context of its modern architecture, the train station hardly seems something out of the ordinary. Yet it is still the main local attraction, as well as the source of local myth and legend.

According to the plan, the station was supposed to be made of brick, and some assert that it is in fact made of brick, and only faced with local marble, yet this is not the case. There are also those who say that it was built by foreign experts who employed some sort of unique, ancient technology, that during the assembly of the marble blocks some secret mixture was used containing fresh chicken eggs. As proof, Alexander Khobta, ethnographer of the Circum-Baikal Railroad, recounts how an excavation of the floor reportedly turned up remains of those very eggs, although it could be that the eggshells were merely tossed there by some Slyudyanka buffet cook. In any event, the originality of the Slyudyanka station is intimately connected with the history of the Trans-Siberian Railway's construction.

regular service between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok was inaugurated in 1903. At that time, the Great Siberian Way went from west to east, effecting international communication between Europe and Asia. The "Russian Steel Belt" unified town and country to the glory of the Great Empire. Such were the rave reviews at the time, although they did not tell the whole truth: there remained a small section of the route, at its very heart, where there were no rails.

This place, with its extremely difficult terrain, was along the southern shore of Lake Baikal. There had been a delay in the conquest of this region, splitting the great railway in two. Passengers rode to Port Baikal station, then transferred to a steamboat, which took them across the lake, where they disembarked at Tankhoy station, where they again boarded a train that took them east through Ulan-Ude and into China. Connecting the two segments of the Trans-Siberian, and thus the epic creation of an unbroken rail line across the entire country, only occurred with the completion of the Circum-Baikal Railroad.

This took place on September 13, 1904, at Maritui station, at a ceremonial connection of the last rails of the Trans-Siberian, attended by V.M. Savrimovich, head of the Circum-Baikal's construction, M.I. Khilkov,[2] Minister of Communications, as well as the engineers, technicians and workers. Finishing work continued for another year, yet transport began
"…of worker trains and freight cars on a scale such that it would not interfere with the finishing work." Thus, 2011 is the 107th anniversary of the first train riding the rails of the Circum-Baikal Railway.

Railway workers call it the "Krugobaikalka," or, as tour guides call it, "the golden buckle on Russia's steel belt" (золотая пряжка на стальном поясе России). No matter what it is called, this segment of the Trans-Siberian is unique in every way. In all, it is 260 kilometers long. The eastern portion (170 km) was not such a complex undertaking; it was primarily the 90 western kilometers that were the stumbling block in every sense of the word. All 90 kilometers had to be carved out of solid rock, curving along the coast, where there were almost no ledges, inlets, or any sort of flat place at all.

This cherished section begins at Slyudyanka Station. And it was pride of victory over those 90 kilometers, more difficult than anywhere else along the 7000 kilometer path of the Trans-Siberian, that led to Slyudyanka Station becoming a monument. Its construction, like that of the entire Circum-Baikal Railroad, was made possible by foreigners.

There were some 50 bids in the 1901 tender for carrying out the especially difficult tunneling work, among them foreign firms, including the American company Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill Company. In the end, the Americans did not participate, but Italian brigades were invited to work alongside Russian contractors.

The Italian engineers and expert tunnel builders turned out to be irreplaceable, because, in contrast to the Russian workers, they already had experience laying rails through mountains, in the Alps. The idea of using marble instead of bricks for the construction of the station also must be credited to the Italians, but it was also a rational solution, since there was no brick factory anywhere near, and the marble was there for the taking in the neighboring mountains.

The Italians, notably, did not disappear from Siberia without a trace after the railway construction was completed. Several of them were "captured" by Siberians, got married and lived on at Baikal. Others were not so lucky.

Winter 1903. Jean Domenico Brovedani fell under the ice of Baikal; he could not swim and died there. He was pulled from the icy water in front of his comrades, shocked by the tragedy. Among them was his friend and relative, Luigi Tramontin. Shattered by Domenico's death, he immediately left for Moscow, to work with Pietro Collino on the Museum of Fine Arts.[3]

In memory of the work of foreigners, one of the retaining walls along the Krugobaikalka is called "Italian."

They may have had Alpine experience, yet the foreign workers were leaving behind Mediterranean comfort for a wide array of physical discomforts and technical difficulties connected to the extreme variance in temperature. In summer Baikal can be searingly hot, in the winter frigidly cold, and from September to May severe and unpredictable winds howl. Despite all this, construction, which began in earnest in 1901, went on continuously. The contractors worked under unusually extreme circumstances: drilling went on around the clock, with rests only on Sundays and holidays. In winter, when the temperature dropped to -15º Celsius, work continued in specially-constructed, so-called teplyaks ("warm chambers"), used to pre-heat the equipment and construction materials. Originally, the route was to be finished in 1905, but due to the outbreak of war with Japan in 1904, the Russian government accelerated work, having concluded that the Baikal gap in the Trans-Siberian was a strategic weakness.

There were several technical innovations used in the construction of the Krugobaikalka. For example, it was the first time that electric devices were used in railroad construction — for drilling, for lifting building materials, for lighting the workspace. Yet this was merely an experiment on two sections of the line. In general, the majority of the construction work was done in the traditional manner, with bare hands, kerosene lamps, picks and explosives (each kilometer of line used on average an entire train wagon full of explosive). Indeed, the 100-year-old line's completion — with its many reinforced tunnels — at a tempo roughly comparable to modern standards, seems hardly believable.

Along the entire route between Port Baikal and Tankhoy there was but one village, the ancient settlement at Kultuk. There were thus very few local residents, and prisoners and forced Siberian migrants were brought in to do much of the work. The conditions were especially difficult, working tied to steep cliffs with hemp ropes, ever at risk of falling to one's death. And of course at that time there was never enough warm housing for workers. According to official data, some 200 persons died before the end of 1903. Yet there were none of the sort of atrocities that subsequently became notorious during Stalinist construction projects. Commoners who wanted to earn extra money — in particular "un-passported" persons, who were in the majority in Siberia — were eager to work on the Krugobaikalka.

the rail line's uniqueness derives from the combination of the Baikal landscape with the huge number of man-made structures. Even the most interesting of these engineered objects would not be nearly as intriguing, were they not "installed" in this severe topography. Tunnels gape from the rock like mysterious apertures, arched stone viaducts recall grand medieval structures, and retaining walls cover fully a third of the entire line, serving as a sort of artificial clothing for the natural landscape. In all, 39 tunnels were carved from the rock, in lengths from 31 to 778 meters. The rest of the line passes along shelves hewed from the rock walls and 39 artificial galleries attached to the tunnels to protect them from cave-ins. In total, there are some 280 retaining walls and 470 additional structures, such as bridges, viaducts and culverts.

In order to maintain all of this, and also because of the many difficulties of keeping open a rail line that runs through rock, the buildings in the runs between stations — for inspectors, repair workers and security — are considerably more frequent than at other places along the Trans-Siberian.

Nearly all of the stations on the Krugobaikalka had automatic water supply systems installed. At Slyudyanka Station a rather beautiful water tower has been preserved, created in modern style with gothic motifs.

krugobaikalka — a tiny appendix in the middle of a massive rail line, an arc bending about the lake's lower extremity — evoked an unbelievable number of complications, debates, and financial and physical expenditures. As a result, there is no doubt that this, the most impenetrable and beautiful section of this huge railroad, is a sacral place that contains the very essence of the Trans-Siberian, the secret footlocker where its invisible heart is concealed.

Unfortunately, the hand of the chronicler never reach this secret segment of the railway. Pre-revolutionary descriptions of the rail line end at the shores of Baikal, in Irkutsk. Today, relying on later memoirs and the tales of ethnographers, we can only gain an approximate picture of what it was like to ride the Krugobaikalka at its onset. When the locomotive traveled along the shore, passengers stepped out onto open platforms, in order to take in the views. Then the car entered a tunnel, and there was not just the rumbling of the train cars, but also the frightened and ecstatic screams of those who had not had time to leave the platform, after all the tunnel was dark and rather scary to those not used to it. Add to this the fact that the train, not unlike an amusement park attraction, was constantly rising and falling with the topography. Emerging into the light, the passengers would be covered with soot from the coal-burning locomotive. At the stations, they would run to the hot water urns, where for a kopek you could always get hot water and warm up with some tea.

In the middle of the twentieth century, with the construction of the back-up line from Irkutsk to Slyudyanka, the Krugobaikalka lost its previous significance. The eastern part of the line, which includes just one tunnel, is still part of the main Trans-Siberian route, but the main difficult section, from Slyudyanka to Port Baikal, became a dead-end branch. Today it is little-used. Twice-weekly a singular train — going by the name Peredacha or Motanya[4] — travels between Slyudyanka and Baikal. There are also special, comfortable electric trains for tourists that run from Irkutsk to Slyudyanka and then onto the Krugobaikalka, for those who wish to visit the old line. Such a trip is rather interesting, because the tunnels and stone galleries — the most impressive part of the trip — were created according to individual plans and were not renovated in subsequent years, thus they preserve the original idea and character of early twentieth century architecture. In addition, nearly all the tunnels are built in the Belgian manner and have so-called "Suram profiles" — nearly circular profiles that are, simply put, horseshoe-shaped. Thus, while each differs in detail, due to this or that aspect of the topography, they all resemble one another more generally, like chords and scales that combine into a grand hymn to the railway art.

Local tour guides will tell you that there are some 150 architectural monuments along the route, but the most famous of these, of course, is Slyudyanka Station, the only train station in the world built from Baikal marble. RL

The author thanks railroad historians Alexander Khobta and Alexei Vulfov for their help researching this story.

[1] For example, see the passage from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Part 2, Chapter 6, where a major confrontation takes place at a station-side event.[back]

[2] Fragment from Elvira Kamenshchikova's book, Italians on the Shores of Baikal.[back]

[3] Khilkov's bust stands in front of Slyudyanka Station.[back]

[4] Peredacha — a train that goes back and forth between two neighboring stations, transferring its rail cars
(peredacha means "transfer"). Motanya — an ancient word used for small suburban trains.
This is what locals call the tourist train.[back]