The completion of sections of the railway provoked the expected rush. In four of the five years following the opening of the first section in 1896 at least 200,000 migrants came to Siberia, an average of 5,500 per day, a quite astonishing influx and both a logistical and practical nightmare. The railways, with their very limited capacity of a handful of trains per day, as well as the rest of the transport infrastructure, struggled to cope. Another observer, Richard Penrose, travelling in 1901, described how ‘the emigration is now going on faster than ever; all the trains and boats are crowded, and along the rivers many emigrants are seen on rafts floating down to their new homes, with families, horses, hogs and household possessions.’8
Before the advent of the railway, migration had been a slow and perilous process. Generally, the migrants had travelled with their own horses and carts, often loaded with unnecessary belongings, which were retained for sentimental reasons. At night they slept in the open, irrespective of the rain and cold. Despite the establishment of welfare stations, which offered them loans to buy food and provided limited medical facilities, migration was a perilous process. Given the lack of proper equipment and unaware of how far they needed to travel, migrants died in droves, mortality reaching thirty per cent among children and averaging around ten per cent for adults. Many of the survivors – up to a quarter in bad years – found the conditions too harsh and returned.
The railway not only made migration far quicker, but also safer. Mortality fell to one per cent as travelling conditions were so much easier and the migrants’ passage was helped by the establishment of distribution centres for food and medicine at the main stations. It also, ironically, made it easier for ‘returners’, as they were called, to come back to European Russia, whose numbers peaked at 90,000 in 1900, but then the total dropped as Siberian settlements became established and amenities were developed.
Once arrived, the migrants received considerable financial assistance to help establish themselves. New state-run shops provided building materials at cheap rates (oddly, this became one of the few profitable enterprises run by the Committee) and even, in the distant Amur region, livestock and grain to new arrivals. Settlers could also apply for interest-free loans of up to 150 roubles and nearly all took advantage of this facility. As Penrose suggested, ‘the settlers are probably better treated and better cared for than any colonists that ever entered a new country’9 and this was thanks to Kulomzin: ‘Safeguarding the health of migrants en route became Kulomzin’s most persistent concern.’10 The emigrants certainly needed a bit of mollycoddling, since most came with nothing. They tended to sell up quickly, because they were generally in a hurry to leave their previous homes and therefore rarely obtained the full value for their animals and chattels. Most, in any case, had been landless and close to destitution. As Treadgold puts it, ‘the majority of migrants simply took a deep breath and plunged across the Urals.’11 This was another difference with America, where, by and large, it was the more affluent rural migrants who made it out to the West.
While comparisons with the United States are inevitably simplistic, the changes were nevertheless radical and ‘Siberian migration produced a society much more like that of America than was the Russian society from which it stemmed.’12 Moreover, the migration afforded by the railway not only transformed Siberia but had repercussions throughout Russia: ‘Siberian migration resulted in the creation of a new Siberian society, which had a higher level of prosperity and a greater degree of social flexibility than European Russia.’13 The migration led to a new type of peasant who owned a smallholding, a different model from the communal one they left behind. This apparent liberalization by the monarchist regime was a response to the failed 1905 revolution. The relatively progressive politician Pyotr Stolypin, who became prime minister the following year, was anxious to win over the discontented peasantry. Land reforms directed at the remaining peasants in European Russia provided them with more freedom and created for the first time legally independent farmers living on their own land.
Oddly, despite these improvements to the peasants’ conditions in European Russia and the gradual move away from the oppressive and inefficient commune system, the end of the Russo-Japanese War (during which there had been a steady flow of around 800 migrants per week to Siberia) led to a remarkable increase in the rate of migration. A further 3 million emigrants arrived between 1906 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, a rate which peaked in 1908 when an average of 15,000 travelled weekly.14 While most of the migrants throughout this era settled in western and central Siberia, a higher proportion of the later ones settled in the east, as many as a fifth in the peak years.
Not surprisingly, this stream of people led to the transformation of the region; the very look and feel of Siberia changed forever through rapid urbanization and widespread settlement near the railway. This was inevitable given that settlement, with few exceptions, was confined to a swathe of land about 125 miles either side of the tracks. The urban population grew even faster than the overall rate of increase and more than doubled in towns as far apart as Omsk, Chita, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk in the two decades after the opening of the first section of the line in 1896. The population of Tomsk province increased nearly tenfold in this period. Other towns simply developed spontaneously. Jules Legras found himself in Tayga, a junction town east of Tomsk, which, thanks to its location on the line, had sprung up from nothing (with no buildings recorded before 1896) into a bustling settlement of 2,000 souls within a few years of the opening of the railway. Even a sympathetic observer like Legras could not disguise his horror at the squalid and anarchic nature of Tayga, which demonstrated the difficulty of trying to co-ordinate settlement from a capital thousands of miles away: ‘Alcohol is a friend from which the Russian people can never be separated. Naturally, there is neither police nor administration; the town only exists officially since the previous autumn’s census and no order has yet arrived from St Petersburg to organize this ant heap. Meanwhile, theft, debauchery, even murders are regular occurrences in the town of Tayga, which may, in a quarter of a century, overtake Tomsk.’15 He was wrong on that last point, as in 2010 Tayga’s population had only struggled up to 25,000, while Tomsk boasted twenty times that number.
Haphazard developments like Tayga were commonplace, given the inability of the authorities to control the growth of settlements in Siberia, but in other towns, particularly the large ones, there was an element of planning. Several garden cities or areas designed to similar standards were built, based on the movement pioneered around the same time by Ebenezer Howard in the United Kingdom. Howard believed in well-laid-out towns with gardens for everyone and green space around the residential area, together with industry for the workers. At Kuznetsk, on a branch line, a garden city was laid out to a clearly defined plan with nine different types of one-storey houses for railway employees, two-storey dwellings for bachelors, a brick factory and a four-storey building for railway management. Other garden cities were built in Omsk and Tomsk based on Howard’s ideas, which also had a profound impact on later developments in Siberian town planning in Novosibirsk and Kemorovo, which is on a branch line near Novosibirsk.
No fewer than twenty-three settlements were officially declared towns in the first decade after the line was completed and the original towns expanded rapidly, even though, for the most part, the stations were often some distance away from the line, because of the policy of keeping costs down by not building right up to them if that required expensive embankments or bridges. The fastest-growing was Novonikolayevsk (now Novosibirsk), which expanded from a population of just 764 in 1893, to 26,000 by 1905 and more than 100,000 at the time of the Revolution. No less than a third of the land in the town, which, as we have seen, owed its very existence to the line, was taken up by railway facilities. Most of it was destroyed by fire in 1909, partly because the railway blocked the way to the river, the main source of water to douse the flames. Dubbed the ‘American City’, because it was laid out in blocks like
US cities, after the fire Novonikolayevsk was designed to a fixed plan with, for example, two-storey primary schools at every junction of main roads.
The nature of other towns changed, too. In the large ones, the first multi-storey buildings appeared, often built as offices for the railway management or for the technical schools that were essential to train people to work on the railway. The railway resulted in the introduction of a new style of architecture, based more on plainer Russian designs than the more ornate traditional Siberian vernacular. Siberia was undoubtedly becoming more like the rest of Russia, as William Oliver Greener described: ‘The neat railway settlements, composed of large immigrant homes, schools, picturesque churches – built out of the Alexander III memorial fund [created in honour of the tsar’s father] – substantial and commodious dwellings, the mills, stores and station buildings are not properly representative of Siberia but of the new better free colonies the Russian State is doing its utmost to plant all over the fertile regions of Northern Asia.’16
Because of their distance from the towns and the importance of the line to the local economy, the railway effectively pulled the towns towards the tracks. Generally, the railway occupied huge amounts of land at the periphery of these cities where it was cheap, and as this became developed it meant many towns were split between two separate centres. In the new towns, housing and offices for the railway workers set the pattern for future development. In some places, town planning did suffer somewhat because of the demands of the railway, which, given it had the backing of the government and the tsar, were not negotiable. Vast swathes of land, up to 750 acres, were designated for railway purposes, preventing other facilities from being built near the station.
There was, too, military intent in the way that developments built up around the stations, since, as we see in the next chapter, the generals realized that the railway was the key to controlling the wider region. Near the major stations an area would be zoned for barracks, which were built on a grand scale, far larger than would be necessary on a day-to-day basis. If the railway brought in the military, it also ensured God was present. Kulomzin allocated 150,000 roubles to build chapels and churches at the main stations and this was supplemented by the Alexander III memorial fund. By 1903 nearly 200 churches had been built or were under construction, as well as almost as many parish schools. Settlements on the railway without a place of worship could benefit from the church carriages introduced on the line from 1896, which were large enough to hold seventy worshippers. That was a use of the railway which the Communists would later imitate for their own form of propaganda. All these facilities were provided so readily by a normally parsimonious government because Kulomzin believed they were essential to the project to Russify and, indeed civilize, Siberia. On his visits to the region before the completion of the railway he had found a lack of schools and churches, which he felt contributed to what he saw as the absence of civilization and culture in the region.
Overall, Kulomzin’s view that the railway was the key to transforming Siberia was borne out, because by the beginning of the First World War the region had changed irreversibly. At the risk of sounding like a Soviet propaganda team boasting about its five-year plan, the numbers were impressive. Thanks to the influx of the five million migrants in the twenty years running up to the war, the area of land under cultivation more than doubled, the number of livestock more than tripled to reach thirty-eight million, and both wheat and rye production were booming. The amount of butter produced in the region increased fivefold in the ten years to 1904, reaching two million puds (the Russian unit which weighs just over 36 lb), which created a profitable export market to Britain, Denmark and Germany.
Butter trains became one of the regular features of the line. The butter was transported in refrigerator cars, distinctive because they were painted white, and whole trains could be seen running up and down the line. The trade was huge: ‘In the early summer peak period about a dozen trains, each of 25 cars, were despatched each week.’17 This vast agricultural produce of Siberia was not only for export. Soon, the whole of Russia was enjoying the fruits of Siberia’s greater productivity. By 1911 half the meat eaten in the two biggest cities, Moscow and St Petersburg, was delivered by rail from Siberia. It was not only food. Huge mineral wealth, such as coal, oil, silver and gold, was beginning to be tapped, although much of it was not discovered until the later stages of the Soviet era.
While the decision to build the railway had been controversial, now, of course, there was no doubt that it had become essential to the well-being of the region. By facilitating the mass emigration, the Trans-Siberian had created its own demand. It was not profitable, especially since millions of roubles would be spent on completing its tracks through Russian soil (as we shall see in the next chapter), but it was heavily used and the hugely increased population of Siberia was utterly dependent on its efficient functioning. The railway brought them all the supplies that could not be found locally and distributed their excess produce to the rest of Russia. While eastern Siberia was still dependent on imported grain supplies from further west, western and central Siberia began to send produce for western Russia. In fact, this caused concerns among producers there and they had to be protected by a mechanism known as the Chelyabinsk tariff break, which artificially raised the price of transporting grain on the line for long distances between Siberia and western Russia.18
The Trans-Siberian laid the foundations for the economic and industrial development of the region. From being a dumping ground for exiles and penal colonies, Siberia now became part of Russia with the Urals no longer representing a barrier between two different worlds, although industrial development was slower than Witte had hoped. The line, though, definitely did not live up to the hype portrayed in the Guide to the Great Siberian Railway given to tourists, which also would not have been out of place in a Soviet propaganda sheet: ‘The rapid increase in the profits of the Great Siberian Railway, connected with the general economic growth of Siberia, strikingly illustrates the effect produced upon civilization and commerce by this great work, which will serve as a monument to the reign of the Tsar Pacificator and to the Russian Slavonic nation, which is destined to propagate Christianity and civilization in the east of Asia.’19 There were, of course, no profits, even if takings exceeded early expectations, because the constant need for repairs and investment meant the railway represented a continuous drain on government resources. However, as mentioned before, no clear accounts were ever available, since the railways’ finances were blended into overall government figures. Quietly, in November 1905, the Committee for the Siberian Railway was abolished, its work done. There was still, however, the task of completing the all-Russian route and bringing the line up to a standard to cope with ever-increasing demand.
EIGHT
RUSSIA ALL THE WAY
While ostensibly the Trans-Siberian opened fully in 1903 with the completion of the Circum-Baikal Railway which meant the iron road finally linked Moscow with the Pacific Ocean, in reality it was still work in progress. As we have seen, improvements went hand in hand with the construction process and did not cease when a section of line opened. Indeed, with the demands first of war and then of the huge numbers of migrants, the need to boost capacity was all too obvious, and there was, too, the thorny issue of trying to avoid having to go through Manchuria.
Therefore, within a couple of years of the end of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, work began on a project to double the tracks on the busiest section of the railway, from Omsk to just beyond Chita, which encompassed virtually all the Russian part of the railway. The scheme almost entailed the construction of a new railway, given that the original embankments and cuttings had been so narrow, and a few bridges remained single-track until much later. The work took eight years and was completed just after the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. By then, the timetable for the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok on the fastest train – still via the Chinese Eastern Railway – had been speede
d up to nine days. Tokyo, therefore, which was connected by a fast steamer service, was just twelve days away from St Petersburg (which was hastily renamed Petrograd at the start of the First World War, as its original name sounded too German). It was not only the main line that saw improvements. The impact of the Trans-Siberian was far more limited than the government had envisaged, being confined to a swathe stretching for the most part barely 125 miles either side of the line. In order to extend its usefulness, branch lines were constructed, mostly by private companies, principally to service mines, but also to carry agricultural produce from the hinterland. Nevertheless, by and large, the impact of the railway did not extend far into the steppe.
The need for such a major expansion in capacity reflected not only the heavy use of the line by both freight and passenger traffic, but also one of its indirect effects: the efforts to improve the road across Siberia – a project that had been mooted in the late nineteenth century – had been abandoned once the decision to construct the line was taken. Consequently everything had to go by rail. The lack of a road was highlighted by the most bizarre use ever made of the trackbed: to help an Italian aristocrat win the Peking to Paris road race.
To the Edge of the World Page 17