To encourage foreign travellers and to help them while away the interminable hours once on board, the Russian government produced a 500-page Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, which was available in French, English and German as well as Russian. Full of photographs and tables, it set out a rosy picture of Russian rural life, describing the various people on the lands crossed by the train in sufficient detail to satisfy the most fastidious anthropology student and all in a slightly stiff, if grammatically precise, translation. There was, too, a surfeit of material on animals both domestic and wild. The Kirgiz horse, for example, ‘is endowed with an unpromising exterior, but has inestimable qualities. The thoroughbred possesses the following characteristic marks: a middle height (about 2 arshins); a short back (12 vershoks), a well-proportioned, muscular and expressive head . . . ’ and so on.11 Meanwhile, the Kirgiz people hunted wolves by chasing them down, ‘and after a race of 15 versts, the wolf is run down exhausted’ and despatched with a stick or whip.
The guide also demonstrated that the Russian obsession with detailed figures for grain harvests and factory production predated the Soviet era. There were endless tables providing a host of statistics, such as the weight of goods (in puds, the Russian measure which is around 36 lb) imported into Vladivostok and Nikolaevsk, the number of horses, cattle, sheep and other farm animals in the various districts around Chita, and the acreage sown in each of the districts around Tyumen, precisely the kind of thing Eric Newby in his book The Big Red Train Ride describes having to bear on his numerous tours of Soviet collective farms. It was born precisely of the same desperate drive rooted in the Russian soul to demonstrate that whatever the Europeans could do, they could do just as well or even better. Given the length and occasional tedium of the journey, presumably the guide must have been a useful soporific when passengers retired for the night and found sleep troublesome as they were rocked by the bumpy track.
The best train was reserved for the tsar. According to a contemporary account, it ‘surpasses in magnificence the train de luxe lately built for the German Emperor. It is a palace on wheels.’12 There was at the time a kind of silent competition between Europe’s royal families over which would have the most luxuriously appointed train. It seems the tsar won with what was, in effect, a luxury hotel on wheels: ‘The walls of the drawing room are covered with pale rose silk, while the royal bedchamber is hung with light-blue satin, the furniture being covered with cretonne of the same colour. Each of the sleeping salons has a bedchamber attached, as well as a dining room upholstered with chamois leather.’ There was a nursery, complete with a playroom for the children with ‘fair-like, swinging cots’. Best of all, the train had its own ‘palatial’ cattle carriage. Apparently, the tsar’s medical advisers recommended that milk from the same cow was better for his daughters, so along for the ride were two Holstein cows.13
In fact, the other de luxe travellers fared much less well than the tsar and even rather below the expectations raised by the Paris Universelle exhibition. There was only one de luxe train a week, leaving Moscow for Irkutsk on Saturday evening, while routine services departed daily at 3 p.m. Because the de luxe did not stop at so many stations, it took only nine days, two faster than the daily trains, but Nagelmackers had rather pulled the wool over the eyes of his Russian partners by using standard coaching stock for the Trans-Siberian – adapted for Russia’s wider gauge, of course – rather than the elegant stock that had been on show in Paris. Oliver Ready, an Englishman who travelled on the line in 1902, paid £34 10s (£34.50 or around £3,600 at 2013 prices) for the whole journey from Moscow through to Port Arthur and then a boat to Shanghai, but that suggests the promotional rates promulgated in Paris had crept upwards. Nor did the facilities on the train live up to the hype, but were akin to other first-class accommodation in Europe, rather than the ‘fit for royals’ standard that had been promised. However, Ready, in an account published soon after his trip, had few complaints, although he found the dining car ‘far too small’ and was annoyed that he had ‘to wait far too long for meals’.14 Nevertheless, he found that on the whole journey, ‘the food on the train was good’ and it was supplemented, at times, by ‘the most delicious milk and cream I have ever tasted [which] were brought in bottles by women and girls for sale to passengers at very cheap rates’.15
Another early passenger, Harry de Windt, travelling in 1901 was even more positive: ‘This train was truly an ambulant palace of luxury. An excellent restaurant, a library, pianos, baths, and last, but not least, a spacious and well-furnished compartment with every comfort, electric and otherwise (and without fellow travellers), rendered this first étape of our great land journey one to recall in after days with a longing regret.’16 For de Windt – who noted that the military element on the train were busy cheating a hapless Jewish fellow out of his money at whist – it was one long party. No one, he said, knew what time of day it was, because they all kept to St Petersburg time, but nor did anyone care: ‘Our piano is a godsend and most Russian women are born musicians. So after déjeuner we join the fair sex, who beguile the hours with Glinka and Tchaikovsky until they can play and sing no more.’17 Yet, in contrast, another early traveller, Michael Myers Shoemaker, complained that the piano was only used as repository for dirty dishes and that the library confined itself to Russian novels and a few dog-eared French and German books. These days, the on-board service of meals is at appropriate local times, but the timetable is expressed in Moscow time and consequently all station clocks show the time in the capital, which has been known to catch out the unwary traveller.
Some of the other early passengers had rather more profound complaints. The pastor Francis Clark, who had travelled in what he felt was cattle class earlier in his trip, continued westwards in June 1900 on one of the first trains de luxe to depart from Irkutsk and was haughtily dismissive of Russian efforts to operate luxury train services: ‘It was luxurious, indeed, compared with the fourth-class emigrant train on which we had just been journeying, but it is still many degrees behind the best American trains.’18 The train consisted of the Russian wood-burning locomotive, a baggage carriage in which there was, oddly, a bath tub, and then a dining carriage divided into two sections – one with small tables for two or four people, and the other with observation windows and easy chairs for the smokers. There were two set meals a day, a two-course lunch at 1 p.m. at one rouble and a dinner at 6 p.m. for a rouble and a quarter, while à la carte food was available all day from a rather limited menu. The rest of the train was made up of two second-class sleeper cars and one first-class sleeper, although Clark could discern no difference between them. In fact, Clark was pleased with his compartment. Each one, he noted, accommodated either two or four people, ‘with a window, a table, and a wide and very comfortable berth for each person’. The cars were ‘handsomely carpeted and upholstered in blue plush, covered, for the sake of protection, with red striped denim’, and, with plenty of space for baggage and many convenient hooks for clothes, ‘one could make himself as comfortable and have almost as much room as in an ocean steamer’s cabin’. Indeed, rather contradicting himself, he wrote that ‘this arrangement is far superior to America’s more promiscuous and public Pullman sleeping car’, which at the time were open plan, as demonstrated in the famous Marilyn Monroe film Some Like It Hot.
Annette Meakin, too, compared it favourably with her experience of the Canadian Pacific, as, feeling ill, she ‘retired to my bed for three days’ and was left in peace. In contrast, she said, ‘had I taken ill on the highly praised Canadian Pacific, I might never have lived to tell the tale. Every morning I should have been forced to rise at an early hour and sit upright for the rest of the weary day on the seat into which my bed had been transformed.’19 She likened the Russian trip to a kind of ‘“Liberty Hall” where you can shut your door and sleep all day if you prefer it, or eat and drink, and smoke and play cards if you like that better’.20 She was particularly impressed with the little electric reading light, and the bells which on o
ne side summoned the servant to clean the room and on the other a waiter to provide food. There was, she noted, none of the hurry and rush that characterized rail travel in Europe and North America.
Clark also reckoned the cost was around a quarter of what he would have paid for a trip across America, a shorter distance, in a Pullman. It was, though, far slower, 14 mph on average including stops and at one point, for a couple of miles, a Siberian ‘cowboy’ raced alongside Clark’s train, easily keeping pace until ‘he pulled up with a careless wave of his hat, as though he did not consider it worth while to race any longer with so slow a rival’.
Clark was offered a bath in the baggage car, but baulked at the cost of a rouble and a half. He also complained at the absence of English books in the library, apart from ‘two or three fifth-rate novels in paper covers, evidently contributed by previous travellers’. Although de Windt, travelling in January, liked Siberia and its whiteness, which he found ‘a smiling land of promise and plenty, even under its limitless mantle of snow’, the landscape was just too ‘dreary’ and monotonous to recommend to tourists. Nevertheless, they came in substantial numbers and mostly reported back favourably on their experience.
These conflicting reports by early travellers suggest that there was much variation between trains on the Trans-Siberian. Some of these passengers were fortunate to enjoy their journeys on services that were well-managed and kept clean, while on others clearly the staff could not be bothered to carry out their duties properly. One suspects that the seventy-five cents charged for Pastor Clark’s bath was a neat little scam on behalf of the crew, as no one else mentions having to pay. Moreover, as explained above, while some of the trains were provided by Nagelmackers, others were operated by the Russian state railway, which varied in standard. In fact, it was ever thus. When I travelled on the line in 2012 the experience was similar, very much dependent on the particular staff on duty and the ‘culture’ created by the train manager. Moreover, I discovered that the trains which operated the Rossya service, which, westwards, was denoted Train No. 1 (and eastwards No. 2) and ran the whole route from Vladivostok to Moscow, were fitted out to a much higher standard, with TVs in every compartment and softer upholstery for the bunks, than the ‘local’ trains which covered only part of the line.
Finding the right type of worker in these early days was not easy. Siberia had little industry and consequently few people – apart from the government officials largely recruited from European Russia – had any experience of working for a wage, let alone in a huge organization like the Russian state railway. The Trans-Siberian needed huge numbers of people. In 1902 the railway had 14,700 employees and, incidentally, 750 locomotives and 550 passenger carriages, much of it second-hand stock commandeered from existing lines in western Russia.
Indeed, it was harder to find suitable staff to operate the railway than it had been to build it. Most of the recruits were of poor quality. The prospect of living in remote Siberia was not an enticing one for railway employees in western Russia. It was not only the remoteness and harsh climate of Siberia; the scarcity of consumer goods, the high cost of living and, in the early stages, the lack of schools were added deterrents. As a result only the least well-qualified railway workers or those with poor employment records moved eastwards. Even the higher wages that were on offer could not attract sufficient competent employees.
The native peoples, many of whom led nomadic lives, were not interested in paid employment and consequently there was only a small pool of potential local labour: ‘From its own small population, Siberia offered a contingent of illiterate or half-educated exiles and former convicts.’21 So desperate were the railways that many of the watchmen hired to guard property at night had been sent to Siberia in the first place for robbery. Others who were given jobs that required them to deal with passengers had committed violent crimes, while murderers and rapists were employed on track maintenance work.
The railways did not help the situation by making life difficult for those they did manage to recruit. There was no mechanical signalling system in the early days and consequently each section of track was guarded from small log cabins up to a couple of miles apart. The signaller would come out at the approach of a train and, standing to attention because every train represented the supreme authority of the tsar, unfurl a green flag – or hold up a lantern at night – to show that the section was clear. One can only imagine what life was like for the signallers in these remote parts of the railway, who would have to trudge miles along the track to take up their posts or return home.
As for brakemen on the freight trains, the railway did not provide brake vans to accommodate them. According to L. Lodian, the railway journalist, the men had to hold on to whatever was available: ‘The poor train-hands huddle up in their sheepskins, settle down on their perches and try to get the best shelter they can from the icy blasts of 20 to 40 degrees below zero. They can’t even get a nap – so cold is it. So they can only yearn for the next station, when they can get a chance of rushing in for a warming and some hot tea.’22 Their salary, according to Lodian, was just twenty-eight roubles per month (£2.80), which, he reckoned, was barely enough to live on.
It was not surprising, therefore, that many of the new recruits, faced with the extremes of the climate and the prevalence of disease, did not stay long in the job, with the result that there was a constant shortage of labour. On some parts of the railway there was an eighty-seven per cent annual turnover, representing an almost total change of staff every year.
Nor was it surprising that corruption thrived in these conditions. It was, in any case, endemic in Russia and all kinds of scams quickly developed on the Trans-Siberian. The need to bribe officials to carry out their jobs was universal and indeed institutionalized: ‘Bribes were demanded and given openly, usually with receipts indicating they had been paid. They were mandatory for hiring, for transfers, for raises, to prevent imposition of penalties and for hauling freight.’23 And then there was theft. All stores were prone to go missing, but coal was particularly vulnerable. One estimate suggests that only twenty per cent of the coal stored at Omsk was actually consumed by locomotives, with the rest sold by railway workers to boost their wages. Thanks to black market sales, local institutions such as schools and even the city’s government buildings were heated with the railway’s coal.
The ineffectiveness of the management contributed greatly to this situation. According to Steven Marks, ‘the railroad’s management was centralized to an absurd degree.’24 The Western part of the railway up to Irkutsk was administered from Tomsk and the eastern part from Khabarovsk, but the local officials were granted precious little authority. The legendary bureaucracy – another endemic Russian trait, like corruption – was made worse by the strict oversight of every decision, even small requests for extra money, by the Committee of the Siberian Railroad sitting at the other end of this vast nation in St Petersburg. For example, every grant made to employees hurt in an accident or the families of those killed was considered by the Committee, even though the payments amounted at most to a few hundred roubles.
Despite the dubious origins of many of the railway workers, travelling through Siberia on the newly built railway was not actually hazardous, since even the train crashes mostly involved freight trains and those killed were inveriably railway workers. The very name Siberia elicited unwarranted fears and guides like Baedeker’s recommended travelling with a revolver, but this was unnecessary and, indeed, could be a source of danger. Baedeker, in fact, seemed to do everything possible to put people off travelling on the line. The guide suggested bringing all kinds of equipment which was, in fact, available on the trains, such as towels, soap and even ‘a portable India-rubber bathtub’. To avoid suspicion from the police, only novels should be taken and any political books avoided. Hotels were said to be prohibitively expensive and thieves lurked around every corner. In fact, while care clearly had to be taken, these early travellers reported mostly extreme kindness from their fellow p
assengers and rarely spoke of any fears of attacks.
Moreover, travel along the Trans-Siberian was soon going to get easier. All the early travellers aiming to reach Vladivostok had to take two boat journeys, one across Lake Baikal, the other on the rivers from Sretensk to Khabarovsk. The two remaining links that would provide a through railway via Manchuria – the Chinese Eastern Railway and the Circum-Baikal round the southern side of the lake – were envisaged to be built within a few years, but both proved troublesome. Indeed, the Chinese Eastern Railway was, according to one analyst, ‘primarily the cause of the Russo-Japanese War and was instrumental in bringing about the Russian Revolution’.25 Quite a claim for a modest single-track railway just over a thousand miles long.
To the Edge of the World Page 13