To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  In fact, the conflict had been misconceived from the start. The existence of the railway proved too much of a temptation for Nicholas, who launched a war that proved disastrous not only to the nation but ultimately to his regime: ‘It defied common sense that Russia would embark on a military campaign – a full-scale war, no less – at the most distant end of its territory, with whole sections of the population disaffected and agitating for far-reaching political change.’18 Witte, in fact, suggested at the time that it had been the hard-line interior minister, Vyacheslav von Plehve, who had advocated the launch of a short sharp war to distract attention from Russia’s internal turmoil and rally the population to a patriotic cause. It was an error made repeatedly throughout history by bellicose politicians. Von Plehve paid the ultimate price for his plan and for other mistakes, such as tacitly encouraging attacks on Jews, when he was blown to pieces by a bomb thrown into his carriage in St Petersburg in July 1904.

  Blaming the railway was to misunderstand what had happened in the war. As the same academics noted with some irony, ‘Russia had been able to transport more than 350,000 troops over thousands of miles and then maintain them in the field over many months, an achievement that would have given satisfaction to an administration with better credentials of efficiency than Russia’s.’19 Leon Trotsky, as we will see in chapter 8, was able to learn from these failings and used the Russian railways, particularly the Trans-Siberian, to great effect. Meanwhile, the Trans-Siberian was returning to normal and benefitting from the improvements its inadequacies highlighted by the war.

  SEVEN

  THE NEW SIBERIA

  While the railway may have been conceived by its principal promoters as an imperialist and military enterprise, the impact on Siberia was no less profound. For all its failings and inadequacies, the Trans-Siberian had a transformative effect on the region, beyond even the expectations of its most ardent supporters. The clearest change was the rapid increase in population, thanks to increased migration from European Russia. The Siberian migration was, according to its chronicler Donald Treadgold, the greatest movement of people in history up to that time, other than the arrival in the United States of vast numbers of Europeans during the nineteenth century. While the increase in Siberia’s population started before the railway was built, the pace of immigration rose dramatically as a result of its construction, and for a decade or so after the completion of the first section in 1896 there was a virtual stampede to settle in Siberia.

  The railway allowed mass travel to Siberia for the first time, opening it up to colonization; it also changed the nature of the region, resulting in the population doubling between 1896 and 1921. As Harmon Tupper concludes, ‘The railway ran at a heavy loss to the Treasury; ordinary passenger trains were late, crowded and dirty beyond belief; the bulk of stationmasters, ticket clerks and train crews were given to slipshod ways and excessive drinking; but in enormous counterweight, the Trans-Siberian opened up the country and brought unparalleled benefits to hundreds of thousands.’1

  Settlement of the region by emigrants from European Russia had always been a key part of the justification for its construction. The fact that the Committee for the Siberian Railway had been given control over the colonization process as part of its remit demonstrated that it was integral to the purpose of building the railway. Apart from construction of the railway itself, colonization occupied most of the Committee’s attention and, indeed, took up most of the rest of its expenditure. The Committee’s resettlement programme was based on a study of how Bismarck had attempted to ‘Germanize’ Prussia’s conquered Polish provinces through colonization. Other experiences of mass colonization in United States and Canada were also scrutinized for the lessons that could be gleaned. It was, in short, ‘demographic engineering on a mass scale’2 and it was devised by Anatoly Kulomzin, whom Witte had put in charge of managing the Committee and was also responsible for ‘auxiliary enterprises’, all the other tasks which the Committee had taken on, of which included the emigration process. Like Witte, Kulomzin came from a minor provincial aristocratic family and was a capable administrator, eager to modernize Russia, while retaining the system of absolute monarchy, and also like Witte, he had a long period at the heart of Russian government. Officially, he was the administrative secretary of the Committee of ministers, equivalent in modern British politics to the post of cabinet secretary. If Witte can be considered the architect of the railway, then Kulomzin was equally the guiding mind behind the resettlement programme.

  The difficulties of developing a coherent policy in the context of such a conservative regime were legendary. Kulomzin did not always have it his own way. One potentially large group of emigrants was the family members of Old Believers, an austere and devout breakaway from an arcane schism in the Orthodox Church and so called because it opposed changes to sacred texts promoted by the mainstream church on the basis that inaccuracies in transcription had crept in over the years. Such differences inevitably led to accusations of heresy and sin, resulting in persecution. As a consequence, many Old Believers fled to far-distant corners of the Russian Empire in the late seventeenth century, where they formed the biggest religious groups in many parts of Siberia. Kulomzin wanted to give them the freedom to bring in their co-religionists from across the nation, but the ever-reactionary Orthodox Church managed to block the initiative.

  Kulomzin saw peasant resettlement as the key to binding Siberia with European Russia. Vast amounts were spent on subsidizing the travel of the emigrants, providing them with wood and basic equipment to build homes and on ensuring their welfare. This encouragement of settlement was not born of generosity on the part of the Russian government, but rather was motivated by a desire to see off what was perceived as the ‘yellow peril’, the invasion of Russian territory by China or Japan. To some extent, the ‘peril’ was already there. Various native peoples considered themselves as being under the yoke of the Chinese – rather than the Russian – emperor and about a third of the population of the two most distant provinces was of Chinese or Korean origin. And just over the border to the South there were 300 million Chinese. Therefore, bringing in vast numbers of Russian-speaking newcomers loyal to their Fatherland was the key to Russification. As Steven Marks concludes, ‘The underlying purpose of Kulomzin’s civilizing mission was to strengthen the Russian state’s political control over its territory.’3

  There was a fierce debate in the Committee on what terms the emigrants would be allowed to take over land. While in European Russia the peasants had been emancipated a mere generation before, in Siberia there never had been a serf system. Before the advent of the railway Siberia was peopled largely by nomadic tribes and those who settled were considered ‘state peasants’, since all the land was government-owned. There were consequently no large landowners or nobility, because the rulers – unlike their counterparts in European Russia – had never needed to protect themselves from invaders, and therefore had no need to impose servitude on those who worked the land. Therefore Siberia was, theoretically, a freer society. The aristocrats sitting on the Committee for the Siberian Railway did not exactly relish the prospect of millions of peasants heading for Siberia, where they could lead more independent lives, freed from the shackles of the commune system that effectively kept the peasantry in order throughout Russia. However, the Committee members were desperate to see the land in Siberia populated and took a very detailed interest in the settlement process, both to ensure its success but also to impose their authority. As an aside, the burgeoning but repressed Left, including the Bolsheviks, disliked this move away from the communal system, partly because they were against anything that the tsarist government did, but mainly because they feared it would lead to property relationships and attitudes that would prevent the attainment of some variety of socialism. Indeed, when the Communists came to power, it was the peasants who had done best, establishing the largest holdings, known as kulaks, who were the target of Soviet repression and extermination.

  The Co
mmittee saw the migration process as solving two problems simultaneously. There was a widespread, though wholly misguided, perception that there were simply too many people to live off the available land in European Russia, a feeling reinforced by the famine of 1891–2, which ignored the obvious fact that more equitable distribution of agricultural produce, greater efficiency and less emphasis on exports would have allowed the population to be perfectly adequately fed. The Committee therefore saw migration along the railway as a way of reducing the population of ‘overcrowded’ European Russia and populating the vast lands of Siberia. This was not America, however, where migrants were encouraged and basically there had been a free-for-all once the railways started snaking across the West. There was no equivalent to the Wild West and the frontier spirit accompanied by the massacre of native peoples. Siberia had no cowboys, since cows were used mainly for dairy and slaughtered for local consumption rather than being driven hundreds of miles across prairies. The settlers were far poorer, and because they came from a peasantry that had only recently been freed from centuries of serfdom, they were not imbued with the same entrepreneurial spirit as their American counterparts. They mostly behaved better, too, as they came as families, unlike in America, where the majority of new arrivals were bachelors without womenfolk to damp down their wild spirits. The land, too, was much less fertile and there was little scope for private enterprise, though Kulomzin dreamed of creating in southern Siberia a series of ‘little Americas’, huge areas of grain production akin to those in the American Midwest. He even suggested clearing out the Kazakhs – a people who depended on nomadic grazing – from their land, which he felt was underused, and populating it with settlers, but such visions were impractical and were not eventually attempted.

  Russia was a police state where to take a long train journey required an internal passport (it still does) and consequently there was no question of allowing in all-comers. There was a fear among the major landowners in European Russia that if Siberia mopped up all the available labour, there would be none available to till and harvest their fields. Kulomzin and Witte recognized, however, that, despite restrictions, many peasants would come to Siberia in the hope of bettering themselves on the newly opened-up lands. Although they had been released from serfdom in 1861, the Russian peasantry in the late nineteenth century still led a very restricted life, being attached to a local commune made up of elders who dictated most aspects of their lives, such as allocating land and administering the law. The more adventurous, therefore, saw Siberia not only as an opportunity to make new lives for themselves, but to break free from this oppressive communal system that had prevailed in rural Russia since time immemorial. It was the quest for land and freedom which drove this vast army of emigrants, and they found both. As Treadgold sums it up, ‘For millions of peasants, freedom was not to be found in their native village, and the opportunity to seek it even thousands of miles away compelled them to uproot themselves and risk everything for its sake.’4

  Prior to the building of the railway, migration was a haphazard process not controlled by the authorities. Despite the requirement that every rail traveller had to obtain not only their internal passport but specific permission to travel from the local police, in practice many simply upped sticks without permission. Technically, too, the arrivals were supposed to register with their new settlements, but their attempts to do so were often lost in the bureaucracy and they simply did not bother, although that left them in fear of their legal status. Concerned at the prospect of hordes of landless peasants roaming around the Siberian countryside, the Committee decided to try to regulate the emigration process and effectively became a kind of welfare organization by providing comprehensive support both before and after the migrants’ arrival in order to help them travel and settle. Each family was allocated forty acres of land with access to the forest and pasture. Around 100 such plots formed an enclosure and the housing tended to be concentrated in the centre to form a closely knit village. An extra incentive for the migrants was that their earnings for the first decade would be tax-free. In order to boost the supply of land, extensive and expensive projects were undertaken to drain swamps and to irrigate dry areas of steppe. Vast swathes of land were expropriated from the traditional nomadic people and allocated for peasant resettlement.

  Millions of brochures extolling the advantages of life in Siberia were distributed to attract families to the region. Kulomzin, though, also ensured that the information given to emigrants – who, of course, were mostly illiterate and would need literature to be read to them – dispelled various myths of the ‘streets paved with gold’ type. There was, of course, plenty of gold and silver in the hills, but the emigrants were unlikely to get their hands on it. Rumours, too, abounded of the fantastic fertility of the Siberian soil, so Kulomzin’s pamphlets presented a more realistic view of what productivity could be achieved. The material was, in fact, not unlike the publicity put out by the more responsible train companies in the United States, seeking to attract the right type of migrant following the completion of the rival transcontinental lines.

  In order to make it easier for families to settle – indeed, sometimes whole villages moved en bloc – the Committee organized transport for family scouts to come to Siberia on their own to decide on a location and to make advance preparations, before returning to fetch their families. Such was the eagerness of the authorities to populate Siberia that the flow of migrants actually started intensifying while the first section of the railway was being constructed. They arrived at the end of the existing line at Tyumen, where they awaited river transport further east. The Committee did everything to help them, organizing transport on rafts for the river journey for both the settlers and their farm animals. The start of the construction of the railway immediately stimulated the expected sharp increase in migration and until the end of the century there was no let-up, either, in the numbers of exiles and prisoners being sent to Siberia. While previously the emigration had not been controlled, since the internal-passport requirements were difficult to enforce in the vast lands of Siberia, the building of the railway had the effect of regularizing the emigration process. The attempts to regulate the flow did not always work. Peasants were, quite literally, clamouring to come to Siberia and the slow, grinding Russian bureaucracy could not keep pace, with the result that many families, and even at times whole villages, simply upped sticks and headed east, after hastily selling their animals and any chattels they could not take with them.

  When the railway was completed, the Committee provided subsidies for people to reach Chelyabinsk, where there was a camp for prospective migrants, and then grants of up to fifty roubles – and 100 roubles for those travelling beyond Lake Baikal – to purchase their train tickets. In fact, later the rules were changed so the whole family was given a discount instead of receiving a grant and, consequently, by the end of the century migrants were paying just fifteen roubles (around £1.50) for their fare, which partly explains why the railway required substantial subsidy during the early years. The scouts, sent by families and communes, paid only a quarter of the regular third-class fare. As support during the journey, the Committee set up a network of posts offering medical facilities and the inevitable samovar dispensing hot tea. Food was provided cheaply to adults and free for children. The only attraction lacking was the Empress Maria Feodorovna (Nicholas II’s mother) herself dispensing tea – a rumour about her presence at a feeding station was widespread among the migrants.

  However, some early migrants, attracted by the rather premature opening of the West Siberian Railway in 1896, suffered from the line’s inadequacies. An early traveller, James Simpson, describes how the lack of capacity on the line led to vast numbers of migrants being stuck in boxcars so long that they had to be detrained into hastily erected camps. He found ‘cholera, typhus and other loathsome enemies of mankind had walked – were walking – at their ease amongst them – thirty per cent had died’. The poor migrants lived in crude tents next to water-fille
d trenches, which bred the clouds of mosquitoes that filled the air. Simpson, however, was moved by the late-evening singing ‘of one of those soft, weird, minor melodies that are the priceless possession of the Russian folk. And when the dying strains of the song soared to a high-pitched note held by the female voices, while the men prolonged it an octave lower, it seemed like some sad musical interrogation. Why had they left Poltava [their village] to die on the Siberian steppe?’5

  Travelling itself could, indeed, be perilous. Apart from the numerous accidents and derailments in the early years, the migrants often failed to understand the dangers of train travel. Russian wagons are higher than in Europe with more space underneath and when, as happened frequently (and still does), they were parked on a track in the middle of a station, the travellers would think nothing of crawling underneath to save walking the long way round the front or back of the train. Numerous unlucky individuals perished when the train unexpectedly started. Others died when they tried to clamber up on to moving freight trains, like the hoboes of the United States, or travelled on the roof of passenger coaches for a free – if cold and perilous – ride.

  Later, as the urgent improvements to the line instigated by Prince Khilkov took effect, the journey became smoother. Kulomzin ensured that the facilities provided to the migrants were rapidly improved, too. The work on the ground was carried out by a dedicated series of enlightened administrators, who belied the general view in the West of Russians as a harsh and uncaring race with little concern for the lower orders. Jules Legras, a French observer of the migration, for example, singled out Peter Arkhipov, the official in charge of the Chelyabinsk and Tyumen migration points (a function he carried out for fifteen years) for particular praise: ‘One only has to listen to him talking for a few minutes to understand that he devotes himself to his difficult tasks as a work of charity and devotion.’6 Treadgold describes the multi-tasking role of one of Arkhipov’s colleagues, Andrei Stankevich, who supervised the passage of migrants as they arrived at the western staging points: ‘He was always on the road, inspecting migrant points . . . [His] daily routine required him to give instructions to subordinates, plan the furnishing of land, water, wood and grain, act as architect, agronomist, surveyor of provisions to the settlers, [and] get along with the provincial governors.’7 Clearly these officials went well beyond their remit of simply administering the migration and made great efforts to reduce the suffering of huge numbers of people who had embarked on this journey in to the unknown.