To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  All these negotiations were carried out in secret, much to Witte’s satisfaction: ‘Not the slightest information penetrated into the press regarding our secret agreement with China.’6 The secrecy was probably just as important to Li as it was to Witte, since the treaty greatly favoured the Russians which was why construction would be affected by the Boxer Rising (1899–1901). Witte, in fact, admitted as much: ‘The terms of the railway concession granted by China were very favourable for Russia.’ The Russians were granted a concession of thirty-six years to run the railway, but even after that it would have been very expensive for the Chinese to reclaim it, with Witte himself admitting that in the thirty-seventh year it would have cost the Chinese 700 million roubles [£70 million] to wrest back control. Despite the appearance that this was part of an expansionist programme by the Russian Empire, Witte insisted this was not the case: ‘Under no circumstances was the Trans-Siberian to serve as a means for territorial expansion,’7 he wrote afterwards. However, even if that were true, the perception of the decision to build the Chinese Eastern Railway would undoubtedly lead Japan to the opposite conclusion. In the event, the railway was the source of no little tension between all three nations and would lead to several disputes and even conflicts.

  The first part of the Trans-Siberian line to see picks wielded after the false start of 1891 was on the outskirts of Chelyabinsk, the easternmost point of the existing railway, about 120 miles south of Yekaterinburg, but now destined to be the gateway to Siberia. The construction arrangements were run along conventional lines, with an engineer being appointed who would then either organize the work himself or, more commonly, bring in contractors. The majority of these contractors were large concerns employing hundreds or even thousands of men, although there were, too, a few small outfits allocated a particular task. This first section – the Western Siberia sector, stretched from Chelyabinsk to the Ob river bank, opposite the town of Novonikolayevsk, which was created in 1893 by the arrival of the railway and named in honour of both the tsar and Saint Nicholas, as a way of hedging bets between religion and monarchy, but is now known by the Soviet-imposed name Novosibirsk. To make the task more manageable, this long section was split into two at Omsk, about halfway along. The man appointed to build the West Siberian Railway was Konstantin Yakovlevich Mikhailovsky, a veteran of the Crimean War and a noble of Ukrainian extraction. He was an accomplished and experienced civil engineer who had built the well-regarded Alexander Bridge over the Volga, which opened in 1880. Mikhailovsky was provided with little more than a map with a thin straight line stretching across the plains for about 900 miles, as Harmon Tupper describes: ‘He was prepared for heavy frost that limited the all-out working season to only four months, but he had not anticipated such a crippling shortage of wagons, carts, horses, barges and steamers.’8 On this Western section, where the land had largely been deforested centuries ago, it was the shortage of wood that created the greatest difficulties, since there was only one usable forest and that was 200 miles east of Chelyabinsk. Consequently, much of the wood had to be imported from distant parts of European Russia, as were the rails and other manufactured parts.

  The other materials were available locally, though often at a high price, but it was the lack of workers, particularly those with skills, that was the greatest source of difficulty for the contractors. Inevitably, the labour demands of the whole enterprise were always going to outstrip the capacity of any local supply. There was little mechanization, which, in truth, had only recently become a regular feature of contemporary European and American railway construction, and consequently, the Committee of the Siberian Railway had estimated that this first stage of construction, involving the Western and Mid-Siberian lines, would require 30,000 navvies for earthworks and a further 50,000 skilled and unskilled labourers for all the other types of work. While on this first section unskilled labour was more readily available than further east, with about eighty per cent being recruited locally, skills were in short supply, as Tupper describes: ‘Even in the relatively well-populated agricultural districts between Chelyabinsk and Omsk, artisans were hard to come by, for the peasant settlers lacked technical skills. In grazing country, nomadic herdsmen refused to leave their cattle, which they prized so highly that it was their custom to inquire politely after the health of one’s beasts rather than that of one’s family.’9 Using local workers had the added disadvantage that they were wont to return home at harvest time, whatever the needs of the railway, creating shortages at just the period when conditions for railway construction were optimal. As a result, Mikhailovsky’s contractors were obliged to seek workers not only from European Russia, but Turkey, Persia and Italy as well.

  The work was onerous, but conditions were far better than for the poor serfs who had built the Nikolayev Railway between St Petersburg and Moscow half a century before. In the summer most of the labourers simply camped out in tents, but in winter, when there were far fewer labourers in the gangs, since work was confined to bridge and station construction and other secondary tasks, they were housed in portable log cabins or covered railway wagons. Hours were long during the brief summer. From May to August the men were expected to work from 5 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., an exhausting fourteen and a half-hour day, broken only by an unusually generous lunch break of an hour and a half. In the winter the working hours were confined to daylight, but since the line is surprisingly far south – virtually all of the line is within five degrees of the latitude of London and much of it is actually south of that – it meant seven or eight hours were the minimum even in deepest winter, although the cold and the snow were limiting factors to laying track. The schedule was six days a week, and while holidays were respected, when they fell on a weekday, time had to be made up the following Sunday, effectively obviating any advantage. Food was basic, usually a meat or fish stew at lunchtime, served from a huge iron kettle, often with a vegetable side dish, and doled out with the help of wooden spoons, which each worker kept in his boots. Dinner was thin gruel and bread with a small amount of butter or lard, and a little wine was given out on holidays. The standard obviously varied from contractor to contractor, with some (particularly on the Ussuri line) serving inedible food that led to complaints and even revolts, but broadly the fare seems to have been fairly good. It was not, however, free. The cost was deducted from the wages, but even then the men were left with reasonable amounts, since good pay was essential to attract sufficient numbers of workers. According to a contemporary source, ‘unskilled workers in western Siberia, for instance, earned up to eight times more on the Trans-Siberian than they normally had earned as farm hands in the employ of old settlers’.10 Skilled workers fared even better. Masons, most of whom were Italian, could earn up to 100 roubles (around £10) per month by working hard, an excellent wage at the time.

  It was, inevitably, dangerous work. The death rate, for which the best estimate is two per cent, may be shocking in today’s terms, but compared favourably with other contemporary massive projects, such as construction of the (never completed) Cape to Cairo railway or the digging of the Panama Canal, when at times it reached thirty per cent. The estimate, however, could be either an underestimate or, equally, an overestimate, as it was subject to inaccuracy in either direction. On the one hand, the Soviet historians who documented the story of the construction of the line after the Revolution tended to exaggerate the harshness of the conditions for their own political ends, seeking to portray the evil regime of the tsar as negatively as possible. Then again, unscrupulous paymasters were tempted not to report the death or disappearance of a worker so they could pocket the wages; and, moreover, contractors did not necessarily report all accidents, since it made them look bad.

  The conditions at times were almost unimaginably tough. Working on the swampy sections, often knee- or even waist-deep in mud, was not only onerous but risky. Mosquitoes were a constant menace and source of disease during the hot months, although the line was too far north for malaria. Apart from the occasional outbreak of
cholera – and, later, on the Chinese section, plague – there were none of the terrible epidemics characteristic of similar projects undertaken in the tropics.

  The most perilous task was building the bridges, especially in winter, as the men had to perch high above the river or the surrounding embankment, with no safety equipment and open to the elements. A contemporary observer, L. Lodian, found that there was a curious way of estimating likely casualties: for every million roubles spent, the contractors reckoned on one death. Consequently, as typically a large bridge would cost four million roubles, there would be an expected four fatalities. Lodian remarked that in private conversations the death toll on the bridges seemed to be greater, more like three or four deaths per million roubles spent, but that was too embarrassing for the authorities to acknowledge. He suggested the cause of the high toll was that the steeplejacks on the bridges ‘would allow their body temperature to run down more than they were aware, with the result that some of them would make a slip or find they could not get their numbed fingers to grasp a support in time, and down they would go’.11 The ever-phlegmatic Russian peasants would see such accidents as a matter of course.

  The steel bridges over the larger rivers were based on designs which Russian engineers had copied on journeys to the United States, where many had travelled to learn bridge-engineering skills; and the results, functional rather than elegant, bore faithful resemblance to their American counterparts, not least because some were supplied in kit form by the United States. The bridge piers had to be particularly strong to withstand the pressure from the rivers in the spring when the smallest meandering stream mutates into a fierce torrent, bearing huge ice floes that would demolish any lesser structures. Many were fitted with special guards to divert the ice away from the support. Siberia’s major rivers are immense, wide and fast-flowing, and consequently the bridges spanning them were the last part of the railway to be completed. While the rest of the railway was designed to minimal standards with little attention being paid to the long-term effects of skimping on materials, the bridges were made of far sterner stuff and no risks were taken with them. On completion of the longer ones, four locomotives together with a heavily laden wagon each were sent halfway across the span and stationed there for two hours to assess the stresses and bends.

  God, too, was called upon. Before opening to regular traffic, the major bridges were always blessed in a grand ceremony overseen by the local priests. The entrance of the bridge was adorned with a little shrine celebrating a popular saint at which trains slowed down to give passengers the opportunity to throw a few small coins in the bowl provided for the purpose in order to guarantee safe passage. Consequently, thanks to the skill of the engineers – and possibly divine intervention – the bridges have held firm during the whole history of the line, while, ironically, the priests would have done better blessing other sections of the railway, which were subject to frequent fatal accidents in the first few years of operation, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  Bridges could not be avoided, but tunnels were. There are still, today, very few on the line, although some have been created to reduce the mileage. Lodian travelled 2,000 miles eastwards along the line before encountering one. Indeed, initially there were no tunnels on the whole line west of Lake Baikal: ‘The Russian railway engineer will sooner blow up a small mountain than make a tunnel, leaving a yawning chasm between the rocks; for tunnels, like houses, always have something the matter with them.’12 Tunnels were expensive and difficult to build, and it is only on the Circum-Baikal line, built a few years later than the main sections of the railway, where there is a concentration of them.

  Further east, the make-up of the workforce was very different. Nicholas Mezheninov, who was the engineer in charge of the second main section, the Mid-Siberian Railway, where work started in 1893, faced even greater difficulties recruiting sufficient labour than his counterpart Mikhailovsky. Consequently, in the absence of any local contractors, Mezheninov organized most of the labour directly. Here the line traversed principally primeval forest, the endless taiga, with very little human habitation, fewer than one person per square mile, and previously accessible only by river, as the route did not follow the old post road. Most of the workers were brought in from European Russia, but Mezheninov realized that there still would not be enough and decided to take the risk of recruiting from the only major source of labour available: the convicts and exiles who had been sent to Siberia. It proved an excellent decision. From a prison in Irkutsk, the terminus of the Mid-Siberian section, a group of 1,500 prisoners were requisitioned to fell trees and build earthworks and the wooden bridges used to ford small streams. For the prisoners there was a great incentive in addition to the meagre pay of twenty-five kopeks per day (one quarter of a rouble, which did, at least, cover the luxuries they craved, such as tobacco and sugar, and the illegal vodka sold by the guards): for every eight months a prisoner worked on the line, his sentence was reduced by a year. Even better, for the political prisoners, who were always treated in a different way, two years were knocked off for every one they worked on the line. Later, too, the prisoners’ wages, which were only around a third of the level paid to free labourers, were increased to the same rate, an incentive that greatly improved their productivity. Escape into the taiga offered only the prospect of an early death and consequently there were few runaways and most of the prisoners proved to be exemplary workers. There was, too, a clever punishment regime to deter offenders. Prisoners were divided into an artel, groups organized tightly for self-protection and, indeed, self-policing. It was a point of honour that a member should not escape and if they did all the prisoners belonging to that artel were punished. The convicts were understandably more frightened by their colleagues than by the guards.

  Further east, on the Transbaikal, which ran from Lake Baikal to Chita, and the Ussuri between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, the use of convicts was even more widespread and necessary. The native people, who formed the majority of the local population and were mostly nomadic hunters, were not interested in working on the railway and all other attempts to find workers foundered. Chinese contractors agreed to provide 15,000 labourers from China, shipping them in when the water of the Golden Horn – the part of the Pacific near Vladivostok – melted in the spring, and taking them back to their homeland in December, just before it froze over again. It seemed a perfect arrangement, since work on the line had to stop in the midst of winter when the earth became frozen; but, oddly, unlike on the first American Transcontinental, where the Central Pacific was virtually saved by hiring a large number of Chinese labourers who proved to be remarkably effective workers despite initial doubts about their size and strength, on the Ussuri they proved to be unsuitable for railway construction. They were unreliable, refusing to work in the rain because they suffered in the damp climate, and their terror of the local tigers, while understandable, caused disruption. According to Harmon Tupper, this fear meant that as soon as there was ‘the slightest hint of a tiger in the vicinity, they stampeded in squealing hysteria and huddled in camp until driven out by the labour contractors’ musclemen’.13 While that description may have an element of racial stereotyping, the poor progress on the line compared with the other sections is testimony to the inadequacy of the local labour force.

  Troops, too, proved to be unwilling railway construction workers. Orest Vyazemsky, who had the contract to carry out the construction of the line, commandeered several thousand soldiers to work alongside the prisoners, but they considered it menial labour beneath their dignity and conducted what in the days of strong unions and weak managements would have been called a ‘work to rule’, backed by their officers, who condoned their inactivity.

  Consequently, the prisoners provided the core of the workforce on the Ussuri section. There had been some hesitation about using convict labour on the Ussuri because of a bad experience in 1891, during the brief period when construction had started, following the tsarevich’s initial ceremonial stone-laying.
The government had sent from Odessa to Vladivostok a shipload of 600 convicts sentenced to hard labour to build the Ussuri Railway, rather than serve their sentence on the prison island of Sakhalin; but while their performance had been satisfactory, they were not properly guarded and many escaped into Vladivostok and neighbouring towns, where they were held responsible for an increase in robberies and murders. When work restarted in 1892 under Vyazemsky, the Committee of the Siberian Railway was more careful, requiring the local regional governors who were responsible for the prisoners to weed out those who were known recidivists or had committed severe crimes. Overall, at the peak, about 13,500 prisoners and exiles were employed on the railway, perhaps twenty per cent of the total workforce, and, because they had no alternative, they were a stable core, unlike many of the free hired labourers who would disappear at harvest time or when they simply baulked at the conditions. Research carried out after the completion of the line showed that just over a quarter of the workforce were foreign, mostly Chinese, and just over a third came from European Russia, which, given the use of prisoners, meant that less than twenty per cent of the labour was provided locally by free workers.

  Given the difficulties, the pace of progress was really remarkable. On the Western Siberia sector, Mikhailovsky shrugged off all the supply and labour shortages and managed to reach the west bank of the Irtysh river, opposite Omsk, 500 miles from his starting point, within two years. Mikhailovsky was very much a hands-on manager, travelling up and down stretches that were already built in a converted first-class carriage in which he lived. He was often accompanied by his eighteen-year-old daughter Eugenia and her friend Vera Pokrovskaya, who actually lived long enough to tell Tupper personally that Mikhailovsky was ‘a steady worker and a strict disciplinarian’,14 necessary requirements for all the head engineers. Tupper’s description of the work was therefore firsthand: ‘In the field, logs for ties [sleepers] were tediously hand-sawn by two-man teams, which worked a saw back and forth through a horizontally propped-up tree trunk. A few horse-drawn excavating machines had been imported from the United States, but for the most part soil for earthworks was extracted with picks and shovels, then carried in barrows, often wheelless, along a plank.’15 As for the shovels, ‘some were entirely of wood and lacked even a strip of tin on the digging edge’, while a thick piece of wood with a stick driven into it served as a sledgehammer to break up the soil that was mostly still frozen. The supports for the countless small wooden bridges, which were made of wood, were pounded into the ground by a big boulder hauled by a pulley held by a tripod of trees tied together, like the tepees of Native Americans. These bridges were built quickly and barely held up progress, but where longer spans were necessary a team of workers would proceed by boat and continue clearing the path ahead, while another group stayed behind to build the crossing.