The Trans-Siberian railway was an 8,400km track that was built upon the desire to unite Russia under a single culture and to strengthen the autocratic rule of the Tsar. The idea of building a railway into Siberia was toyed with in the mid-1870s, mainly proposing short routes into Siberia. The Russo-Turkish War put a halt on the development of any railways as funding was diverted to the war effort. Then 10 years later and after the finances of Russia had recovered from the war, discussions had returned. The proposed ideas however were much grander; a train route spanning the entire continent connecting east to west. This was fueled by a new director and the Tsar’s desire to make sure his autocratic rule reached every corner of his empire. This led to the idea of the Trans-Siberian railway coming to fruition.
Kyle Brett explains.
Construction work on the Eastern Siberian Railway near Khabarovsk, circa 1895.
Origins of the Idea for a Railway
The idea of a railway connecting East and West Russia was proposed in the 1870s to connect Siberia to European Russia. This idea was proposed by an American entrepreneur Perry McDonough Collins, to the Minister of Transport Communications, Konstantin Nikolayevich Posyet. Collins wanted to connect America to Russia via telegraph and proposed a route to do that to Posyet. Posyet liked this idea as he was ambitious to develop the far east, but the state had neither the finances nor the infrastructure to facilitate this project.
The Russian state in the latter half of the 1870s decided that the minerals and political benefits of building a railway into Siberia were beneficial and had decided on a short route from Nizhny Novgorod to Tyumen. Posyet had originally proposed a similar length railway to the north and saw this as the Russian state disregarding his position as Minister of Transportation. None of this would matter in the end because of the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 which shut down all state-sponsored railways. The state diverted a majority of its finances to the war effort, which left Posyet with the satisfaction of not having to build the railway he disagreed with. The unfortunate side effect of this war was that the war spending combined with the poor harvests in the early 1880s hurt the Russian ruble delaying discussions about a Trans-Siberian Railway until 1884.
In 1881 Alexander III would take power from his father Alexander II after he was assassinated by a socialist terrorist group. His father had passed many radically liberal laws and that had made him a target. Alexander III would spend his time as Tsar undoing many of these liberal reforms and reestablishing Autocratic rule over Russia. One of his main focuses was on Siberia and how he could unite and spread Russification and Autocratic rule throughout Russia. Upon hearing Posyet’s proposal for a Trans-Siberian railway stretching from Samara to Vladivostok he decided that was the best way to accomplish his goals.
The Borki Train Disaster
On October 29, 1888, Alexander III and his family were traveling on the Kursk–Kharkov mainline from Crimea to St. Petersburg when a combination of speeding and faulty track line caused the train to derail from the track at a high speed. After the dust had settled Alexander saw that his family was trapped under the collapsed roof of his dining car. He lifted the collapsed roof of his train car allowing his family to escape with none of them injured. In total around 20 people died and around 15 more were injured in the derailment. The trauma from this crash is what caused Alexander’s kidney failure and his eventual death.
The blame for the crash did not go to the railway manager Sergei Witte, but rather to the Russian government. Alexander wanted to close this case as quickly as possible, and this led to Posyet stepping down from his position as Transportation Manager. The man to replace him would be Sergei Witte. Imperial officials had chastised him prior to the crash, telling him that only the lines he manages are slow and all the other lines run at express speed. His response was he would prefer to not bash in the head of the emperor by increasing the speed of his rail lines. This interaction is why he was chosen to replace Posyet as Minister of Transportation.
The Project Begins
In March 1891 the Russian government announced its plan to build a railway that spanned all of Siberia. They broke ground in Vladivostok a few months later and the building of the railway was underway. The head of the project was Sergei Witte who in the years after the Borki Train disaster had risen in popularity in the government, moving his way up the chain of command. In 1892 he was selected to become the Minister of Finance, on top of being the Minister of Transportation. He would use these positions of power to turn the clunky and slow bureaucracy of the Russian government into a well-oiled machine.
His first order of business was to create the Committee for the Siberian Railroad. This committee was created with one goal in mind; to fast-track decisions that would have been slowed by the clunky bureaucracy. It would accomplish these goals by getting approval from a higher power, like the Tsar, and would then go around local administrators to keep the project moving. This ensured that the project would be kept going at a steady pace.
Witte, as Finance Minister, also had a great way to finance the building of the railway; he could raise taxes as high as the project demanded. As a result, he neglected his position as finance minister, disregarding complaints, and concerns from the peasantry as he was laser-focused on building the railway. Alexander would also turn a blind eye to these affairs as Witte got results which were good enough for him to not intervene.
The Material Cost of the Largest Railway
The Committee for the Siberian Railway had a massive challenge in solving the problem of how to get this immense amount of materials to the far reaches of Siberia. Their solution was to utilize rivers to Transport the materials to the building sites. Many of the rivers would not support the size of the boats used to move the materials. The Committee decided that the rivers were to be widened and strengthened to accommodate these boats. There was a lot of special attention placed upon Lake Baikal because of its immense size, being the deepest lake in the world, and because it would also be used to Transport materials in the near future. They surveyed weather conditions, all the port facilities on the lake, and how the ice formed on the lake to better understand how to utilize the lake for material Transportation.
Production of the railway parts was originally to be done in Siberia for convenience. Witte soon discovered that Siberia had nowhere enough infrastructure to accommodate a project of that size. The production was outsourced to Western Russia, the UK, and Poland. This meant that it took longer for the materials to arrive at the rail lines as they had to travel as far as the UK to make it into deep Siberia.
The Labor committed to the project was also quite immense, estimated by the Committee for the Siberian Railway at anywhere between 57,000 to 80,000 workers that migrated to Siberia to assist in the building. Much of the labor was from Russia, but some of it came from China. There was a good amount of convict labor utilized as well. These convicts were not treated fairly, however, and would be harassed by their leaders routinely. As for bad conditions, many of the laborers would sleep on the cold ground right up until the ground would freeze. Then when it got too cold the Committee would send people out to build mud huts for people to live in. This, as one can imagine, led to many deaths from the harsh elements. It also made it hard for laborers to do complex tasks like building bridges and utilizing dynamite to make way for tracks to be placed.
The Final Stretch
Through all the harsh conditions by 1898, the track was mostly complete. The track began in Moscow, ran to Lake Baikal then a 4-hour ferry ride across the Lake to the next station which was in Ulan-Ude. From here the train went straight through Chinese Manchuria to Vladivostok. To solve the problem of the rail line going through China a different route from Ulan-Ude to Vladivostok was built along the Amur River. This rail line did not leave Russian territory and allowed for passage to Vladivostok without the need of entering Chinese territory in the event of a territory dispute. The desire to keep the railway in Russia resulted in the Amur River route being completed in 1904.
Then in 1904 development of the Railway would hasten with the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. The Circum Baikal route around the lake was still being brainstormed, some ideas had been played around with getting around the treacherous terrain that surrounds the lake, but nothing definitive had come to fruition. With the outbreak of the war, the need to utilize the railway to move troops and supplies around lake Baikal became apparent. The only way to circumnavigate the lake was with 2 steam ships that took 4 hours to cross Lake Baikal. However, the 2 steamships, one a freight car hauler and one a passenger vessel, were not enough to accommodate the large amount of movement needed to move an army across Russia. The ships were also stuck when the water froze over, rendering them useless. Some solutions to this problem were presented, the most popular being sledges that towed supplies to the Ulan-Ude station on the other side of the lake. There were attempts to build a track straight on the ice, but the first attempt to put a locomotive on the ice caused it to go straight through, plunging into the depths of the lake. This further reinforced sledges as the solution to the problem.
The terrain on the shores of Lake Baikal was treacherous to build a track onto. It was rocky and rigid and had cliffs that were very dangerous to work on. The original plan was to make tunnels through the rocks to the other side, but when it was decided it would take around 30 tunnels to have a place to lay track it was decided that the track would be built along the shore. To make enough progress to lay track along the rocky terrain in one day it took an entire cart of dynamite. This ground down progress to an extremely slow pace, even with the hastening of progress from the Russo-Japanese War. The track, however, was eventually completed in 1905, finally connecting East and West Russia and completing the largest Railway in the world.
What do you think of the Trans-Siberian Railway? Let us know below.
Sources
Marks, Steven G. Road to power: The Trans-Siberian railroad and the colonization of Asian Russia: 1850-1917. Cornell University Press, 1991.
Tupper, Harmon. To the Great Ocean: Siberia and the Trans-Siberian railway. Brown & Company, 1965.
