To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  All of these matters came within the purview of the Committee. Witte, in effect, by controlling the Committee, thanks to his clever scheming to ensure the right people were appointed to it, effectively ruled Siberia and influenced wider Russian foreign policy: ‘The scope of the Committee of the Siberian Railway was far greater than that of its ancestor [a previous similar railway committee], for it was not limited to railroad construction. Its purview and ambitions continued to expand with Witte at the helm; through it he gained control of the Asian policy of the Empire, at least for a time.’17 Indeed, its specific remit included ‘the arrangements for the general economic welfare of Siberia and for the revival of its commercial intercourse with the Asiatic Continent’.18

  The choice of Nicholas as chairman of the Committee ensured that the line would be built. Witte spent considerable time persuading the tsar that giving such a crucial job to the young man was a good idea. The tsar was dubious, arguing that the tsarevich was still a boy who was not experienced enough to chair such an important committee. Witte, ever the canny operator, suggested that Nicholas’s old tutor, Nikolay Bunge, be made vice-chairman of the committee to advise the young man throughout the difficult process of seeing the project through. The tsar was eventually convinced and agreed to the appointment.

  Nicholas himself was keen. Unlike any of his immediate predecessors, he had visited the Far-Eastern corner of his homeland and was supportive of the idea that the line would unify the nation. ‘Russifying’ Siberia was a way of seeing off the ‘yellow peril’ and the railway would be in the vanguard of that process. As we shall see in chapter 6, these eastern ambitions were to prove extremely dangerous and, thanks to the creation of the Trans-Siberian, bring about a war that almost resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy a dozen years before its eventual downfall. Nicholas, who later as tsar pretty much lost interest in affairs of state and had an almost fatal obsession with detail at the expense of any strategic view, was actually an active and engaged chairman of the committee, and even retained the post when he became tsar on the death of his father two years later. However, he was weak and easily manipulated by Witte, and their good relationship soon soured. Indeed, the future tsar was rather in awe of the genius who was at the heart of everything the Russian government did. Ironically, it was Witte’s abilities as a firm and decisive administrator which made him more suited to rule than the rather dull and ponderous future tsar whom he dominated. Nicholas, once be became tsar, was not in a position to sack Witte, knowing that he was essential to the project. However, ‘Nicholas felt he was a spectator at Witte’s performance, especially in the Far East, where the minister’s powerful presence seemed to thwart Nicholas’s own ambitions. Witte surpassed everyone and Nicholas grew jealous and resentful.’19

  Nevertheless, the structure held firm. The Committee of the Siberian Railway was firmly entrenched, having effectively become responsible for ruling Siberia, and even disputes between the tsar and his key minister could not prevent the progress of the project. There was no stopping it. The army of navvies and engineers needed to drive the iron road through the vastness of Siberia and build the world’s longest railway could now be mobilized.

  FOUR

  INTO THE STEPPE

  The difficulties facing the builders of the Trans-Siberian can hardly be exaggerated. The railway may not have traversed territory that was mountainous like the Alps or the Indian Ghats, nor as barren as the Sudanese desert, through which the British built a railway at almost the same time, but its sheer length and the extreme temperatures endured by the work gangs made its construction an unparalleled feat. To give a measure of the scale, at 5,750 miles it was longer by 2,000 miles than the Canadian transcontinental railway between St John’s, Newfoundland, on the Atlantic and Vancouver in British Columbia on the Pacific, and that had been built in stages. The First Transcontinental in the United States, completed in 1869, was much shorter and required a mere 1,750 miles of new railway when work started in 1863, less than a third of the Trans-Siberian’s length, because the section in the east had already been built. In contrast, if one discounts the already existing section from Moscow to Chelyabinsk, the Trans-Siberian still required more than 4,500 miles of new railway.

  There were more mundane difficulties than the sheer scale of the task. In the steppe neither stone for the ballast nor wood for the sleepers could be procured locally and the rails for the track had to be transported over vast distances from factories in the Urals and European Russia. Massive steel bridges were needed to cross several rivers, and countless smaller ones, mostly made from wood, were needed to ford the vast number of streams and torrents. Much of the land it crossed was swamp, while other parts were permafrost. Worse, the earth was frozen in winter, but quickly became a muddy morass in the spring thaw. While the mountains were not excessively high, several ranges required the construction of long, gently rising curves, since tunnelling, for the most part, was eschewed because of cost constraints. Then, around two-thirds along the route from Moscow, there was the awesome barrier of Lake Baikal, the biggest lake by volume and the deepest in the world, which, stretching nearly 400 miles from north to south and with a mountain range at its southern tip, posed the greatest obstacle for the builders. Labour, too, was a huge issue. Vast swathes of the line went through land that was uninhabited or populated only by nomadic tribes unwilling to engage with the project, so the workers had to be brought in from afar.

  There was, in short, nothing easy about the undertaking. In order to rationalize the construction so that the contracts were not unmanageable, the railway was divided into three major sections – the Western, Mid-Siberian and Far Eastern lines. Each of these was further subdivided. The Western and Mid-Siberian were both split into two separate projects in order to speed up construction. The Western comprised Chelyabinsk–Omsk and Omsk to the River Ob, while the Mid-Siberian Railway was divided at the Yenisei river with a section from the Ob and to Krasnoyarsk and then from the other side of the river to Irkutsk. The big bridge crossings over the wide, meandering rivers, such as the Ob and the Yenisei, were left until last, along with the Circum-Baikal, the most difficult part of the route along the mountainous southern shore of Lake Baikal. Consequently it was envisaged that steamers would take the traffic across the lake in summer, while in winter tracks were to be laid across it. The Amur Railway was then to run from the shores of Lake Baikal to the embankment of the Amur river at Khabarovsk; while the easternmost section, the Ussuri Railway, was to go from the other side of the river southwards to Vladivostok. Speed was of the essence and in the east construction on the Ussuri started – or rather restarted – from Vladivostok simultaneously in 1892 with work getting under way on the Western railway. The following year, building the Mid-Siberian began, too, which meant progress was being made across the whole region. In effect, these were all separate but massive railway projects, each of which individually was comparable to the American or Canadian transcontinentals and each posing a different set of difficulties, given the changes in terrain, the varying levels of settlement and the peculiarities of the local climate. Overall, the task was on a far greater scale than any previous or, indeed, subsequent railway project in the world.

  All of these projects were overseen by the Committee of the Siberian Railway back in St Petersburg. It would make the key decisions over, for example, the decision of whether a lengthy bridge should be made of steel or wood; finalizing the route, such as the choice of which bank of the Angara river the railway should run along between Irkutsk and Lake Baikal; when work should start on a particular section; and crucially, of course, allocating budgets. However, given the time needed to communicate decisions and the remoteness of the construction sites, it was the chief engineers and their contractors who made all the day-to-day decisions.

  The survey work undertaken before construction began had been cursory in the extreme. There was no attempt to select an optimum route, but instead a four-verst belt was haphazardly drawn on the map by the admini
stration in St Petersburg and consequently the surveyors in the field examined only this small swathe, irrespective of whether it appeared suitable. The process was made even more arbitrary by the fact that there were no proper maps of Siberia, which meant the St Petersburg bureaucrats had little information on which to base their route. Given the inadequacies of the cartography covering this vast region, there were many instances where moving the line a few miles in either direction would have provided a far better alignment. According to Steven Marks, ‘some members of the Russian Technical Society suspected that even after construction had begun as much as half of the route had not been surveyed in any fashion’.1 Apparently, on one section of the Ussuri Railway, the survey was carried out by an unqualified local man, accompanied by his two sons and a Mongolian-speaking guide. It was no wonder that this proved to be the most difficult section to build. The Technical Society, one of Russia’s leading scientific organizations at the time, pressed for detailed surveys of the whole line to be carried out, backed by scientific evidence. To no avail. The government was in too much of a hurry for such nonsense and, moreover, the ‘government engineers denied the incompleteness of their surveys and investigations’.2 Instead, they pointed out that to build the perfect railway would take a century and they wanted to ensure it was done in a decade. Ultimately this muddling through was probably appropriate for the resources available to the government and proved sensible, even if, undoubtedly, much money was wasted by lack of proper preparation.

  The same military and political imperatives which dictated the speed of progress also helped determine the route. The railway was all about getting to the Pacific as quickly and easily as possible, and therefore little attention was paid either to technical factors or to local interests. In fact, this philosophy of getting the job done as quickly as possible had dictated the way the First American Transcontinental railway had been built in the 1860s, except that there it was money and greed which determined the need for speedy construction, since the line was built by private interests supported by huge government grants.3

  The most bizarre decision concerning the route was that it bypassed Tomsk, the biggest city in central Siberia. The oft-repeated legend is that the surveyors asked unsuccessfully for a bribe from the local authorities to bring the line nearer the city. In fact, the more likely explanation is that they made the decision on geological grounds, because Tomsk is situated in the taiga (virgin forest), surrounded by swamplands created by the flood plain of the huge River Ob, and it would have required a long and expensive construction project to reach the city. A branch line was later built connecting the city with the main line and Tomsk was given the consolation prize of being the administrative headquarters for the Siberian Railway. Several other Siberian towns were bypassed in this way by lesser distances, as the surveyors and the builders chose the path of least resistance. The traditional siting of towns on hilltops or on river bends made it difficult for the railway to gain easy access and in several places there was a river between the station and the town.

  The other major decision on the route was to have far greater consequences. Instead of remaining in Russian territory and keeping to the north of the Amur river, it was decided to take a more southerly approach to Vladivostok, through Manchuria, part of China. There were a couple of obvious technical advantages to building what became the Chinese Eastern Railway. It reduced the overall length by 514 versts, more than ten per cent of the entire railway, and, moreover, its supporters argued that the cost per verst would be less, because it traversed easier railway terrain, although as we will see in chapter 6 this did not prove to be the case. However, while technical reasons were put forward to explain the change, the decision was rooted in grubbier political considerations. The notion of building the Trans-Siberian through Chinese territory was, in fact, almost as old as plans for the railway itself. The diehard Russian imperialists had always seen the railway as an opportunity to establish control over the Chinese, confirming Muravyev’s land grab mentioned in chapter 2, which they argued would be advantageous from a military point of view either to protect against an attack or to launch one.

  Despite this, the original route drawn up in 1891 envisaged the Amur Railway running from Lake Baikal through the Shilka and Amur valleys to Khabarovsk, where it would meet the Ussuri line up from Vladivostok. This Transbaikal route, however, would have to traverse unpromising railway territory, as preliminary surveys completed in 1894 revealed that much of the 1,200-mile Amur Railway passed through hills and river valleys that would require expensive high embankments and cuttings. More than 100 bridges would be needed, including a lengthy mile-and-a-half crossing of the Amur at Khabarovsk. Consequently, the line was going to cost about 90,000 roubles per verst, double that of the Western sections. There were other difficulties, too. The road needed to supply the construction was so poor that virtually everything would have to be transported by river; there was an acute shortage of water in winter; and much of the track would have to be laid on permafrost, a technique about which there were still grave doubts. In truth, however, these obstacles added up to a compelling excuse for building the line through Manchuria, rather than conclusively proving that the Amur Railway was not a feasible option, as demonstrated by the fact it was actually built a couple of decades later.

  Witte, in his memoirs, rather disingenuously suggests that since construction of the Trans-Siberian was at that time reaching Transbaikalia, there was a discussion about which route it should take heading east and that he ‘conceived the idea of building the railway straight across Chinese territory, principally Mongolia and Northern Manchuria, on toward Vladivostok’.4 The notion that Witte had just suddenly dreamt up the plan of sending the tracks through Manchuria is a classic example of a politician rewriting history. Building a line through another country’s territory was rare in the annals of railway history and, clearly, such a major step would not have been mooted, let alone considered seriously, unless a lot of groundwork had been covered in advance. In fact, diplomatic considerations between the three major powers in the region – Japan, China and Russia – were at the heart of the decision. Tension had built up between the weak Chinese Empire and the Japanese for much of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and this had exploded into a brief war in 1894, which was won easily by Japan. As part of the reparations, China had to pay a vast sum, which Witte arranged to be met with a loan from French bankers and which he also pledged Russia would indemnify.

  As an expression of gratitude for Russia’s benevolence in arranging and guaranteeing this loan for reparations, the Chinese sent Li Hongzhang, a very senior politician who had led the army during the fighting, as its representative to the coronation of Nicholas II. Witte, informed that Li was arriving by way of the Suez Canal, machinated to ensure that he was not met by any European politicians during the trip, so that they could negotiate the terms for the railway through Manchuria on his arrival in St Petersburg. Witte despatched an envoy, Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, to intercept Li at the canal. There was no shortage of princes in tsarist Russia and, in truth, Ukhtomsky was a pretty minor one, but nonetheless his rank made him a suitable greeter for the Chinese aristocrat and he proved successful in steering Li to St Petersburg before any English or German diplomats could seek him out.

  Witte describes a hilarious and fruitless initial encounter with the Chinese grandee, where both sit drinking tea and then Li smokes his pipe, lit by a coterie of attendants, and the conversation never gets beyond the level of repeatedly expressing interest in the health of each other’s emperor and their families, with ‘no attempt to talk business’. At the second and subsequent meetings, however, an arrangement that was hugely advantageous to Russia was negotiated. Witte stressed how in the recent war with Japan, the Russians had sent troops, but due to the lack of a railway line, they reached the front only once the war was over. In the future, a railway through Manchuria would enable Russia to make military interventions far more quickly and help protect Chinese intere
sts. He even went so far as to say that ‘Japan was likely to assume a favourable attitude towards the railway, for it would link her with Western Europe, whose civilization she had adopted’,5 a suggestion that would later prove to be completely unfounded. Indeed, since part of the treaty envisaged mutual support in the event of an attack from Japan, that claim had very little credibility even at the time it was made.

  Witte was certainly the consummate diplomat and his strategy worked. The Chinese granted the Russians permission to build the tracks in what was pretty much a straight line from Chita, 250 miles east of the lake, to Vladivostok, but Li refused to allow the railway to be built directly by the government. Instead, a scheme was devised whereby the line would be built by a supposedly private company, the Eastern Chinese Railway Corporation, which was, as Witte points out in his memoirs, ‘completely in the hands of the government’; and, even better, since it was nominally a private corporation, ‘within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance’ – in other words, Witte’s very own bailiwick. China agreed to cede a strip wide enough for the construction and operation of the railway, as well as land for sidings, depots and stations on which, remarkably, the railway would have its own police force able to exercise ‘full and untrammelled authority’, even though it was on foreign territory. For their part, the Chinese insisted the Russians were not to go south of the line of the railway, a requirement to which Witte readily agreed, although this pledge was, in fact, broken almost as soon as construction started.