Prince Scipione Borghese was one of the competitors in the race organized in 1907 by France’s Le Matin newspaper to prove that cars could go anywhere. When he and his driver, Ettore Guizzardi, reached the eastern shores of Lake Baikal they considered the road to be impassable and were therefore granted permission by the governor general of Irkutsk to use the track bed of the Circum-Baikal, despite the fact that trains would continue running. Fortunately, the sleepers had been laid flush to the surface, rather than protruding upwards, so the track bed actually gave his monstrous car, a 7.4 litre Itala, a reasonable ride. In fact, it was a lot better than he had encountered previously and was testimony to the skill of the railway builders, as he later recorded: ‘The sensation of this motor journey was at first delightful. That superb, even, level, clear road was full of attraction after the ruts, the woods and the ditches of the other.’1 It was, however, perilous: ‘We went across numerous little bridges of the same breadth as the sleepers, without parapets, slung over deep ravines, in the depths of which we could see foaming water through the large spaces between one sleeper and another . . . The car advanced with its left wheels between the rails, and the right wheels on the outside – over the few inches of sleepers.’
In fact, apart from a near encounter with a goods train, he fared better on the railway than on the road, where a bridge collapsed under his car’s weight, plunging it into a torrent. However, after enlisting local help he managed to rescue the vehicle, which was unscathed, and he survived to triumph in the race, which had only four other competitors, reaching Paris on 10 August, precisely two months after leaving Peking (Beijing).
Normal service on the Trans-Siberian resumed two years after the Russo-Japanese War and by the summer of 1907 there were three fast trains every week between Moscow and Vladivostok. The best one was operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits created by Nagelmackers (who had died in 1905) and, while the rolling stock never matched those at the show in Paris, it was far better than on the other two state-run trains de luxe. There was, therefore, a brief golden age of travel on the Trans-Siberian between the two wars when it became the route of choice for diplomats heading for China and merchants travelling to Japan. The company, according to Harmon Tupper, ‘diverted some of its second-best cars to the Siberian run; staffed them with solicitous attendants speaking Russian, French, German and English, provided good foods and wine; and widely publicized the fact that, via the rail route, one could travel from London or Paris to the Extreme Orient in less than half the time and cost of the sea voyage by way of the Suez Canal.’2 That was a crucial point. The Trans-Siberian, for all its faults, offered a far quicker and easier journey than the long boat rides, especially in the summer with the hot tropical sun of the Indian Ocean.
While the Wagons-Lits Company had higher prices than the state trains, it was still a bargain. A Mrs John Clarence Lee, a Philadelphia clergyman’s wife, travelling in 1913, wrote a wonderfully witty account of her journey westwards, reported that the fare for the train from Shanghai to Moscow via a ship from Dalny (Dalian) and Harbin on the Chinese Eastern Railway was £44 8 shillings (£44.40) first class and £32 4 shillings (£32.20) in second class, compared with £30 and £20 on the Russian state train. Her three meals a day in the dining car cost just £1.75. She had been advised by her travel agent not to get off ‘as there was nothing there’, but she ignored him and enjoyed Irkutsk and Lake Baikal.
On the South Manchurian Railway en route to Harbin she found ‘a spotless new Pullman — made in Illinois — with “Sleeping Car” painted in English on the outside. The car is divided into compartments for two, with an individual washbasin of the latest type and hot and cold water. At night one locks the door and opens the window, and it is wonderfully comfortable.’3 At the South Manchurian terminus at Changchun, south of Harbin, where ownership passed from the Japanese to the Russians, she changed to the carriages that would take her through to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian itself. She found the accommodation equally pleasant, with cars upholstered in velvet and a toilet for every two compartments, which each accommodated two people. The railway discipline, too, that had been so lax in the past on the Trans-Siberian seemed to have been sorted out with a clear method of signalling departure, which ensured the unwary were not left behind: ‘Five minutes before departure the bell rings twice, and just before the train starts it rings three times.’4
The fact that most of the passengers on the Trans-Siberian, like Mrs Lee, went to or from China rather than Vladivostok prompted the Russian government to re-examine the possibility of building the Amur Railway. The Russians were rather piqued when The Times suggested that the Trans-Siberian was not a main line to Vladivostok, but rather a trunk line to the China Sea with a branch to Vladivostok. This increased public pressure in eastern Siberia to build the Amur line to redirect enterprise and capital from Manchuria to Siberia. The people of eastern Siberia felt the Chinese Eastern Railway was taking away their livelihood, having become the main form of transport linking Vladivostok with the rest of the world. Rather than coming to eastern Siberia, Russian peasants were settling in Manchuria or remaining on the more accessible land west of Lake Baikal.
The previously thriving steamers on the Amur river had lost much of their business and the local merchants complained that most of their trade had gone to Manchuria. Therefore, the overall economic impact of the Trans-Siberian on eastern Siberia had not lived up to its billing, and, in fact, could even be considered as negative. Vladivostok itself, which was supposed to have been the great beneficiary of the railway, was suffering, too. Despite the defeat by Japan, the Russians had retained their naval base at Port Arthur rather than moving it to Vladivostok and it was Harbin, at the junction of the two railways, that became the boom town. In fact, it had developed into the nearest equivalent of a frontier town in the American West, a veritable melting pot of races and cultures. Little more than a village before the arrival of the railway, it was now a bustling Russian town in Manchuria. A pair of visitors after the Russo-Japanese War were amazed that Harbin appeared to have been taken over by the Russians, despite the fact that it was technically still part of China: ‘The police are largely Russian. Harbin is so Russian that they dare to hang printed notices in hotels telling you to lodge your Russian passport for inspection at the Russian police station before you have unpacked your trunks. The colossal impertinence of the thing.’5 Harbin was not only the administrative headquarters of the Chinese Eastern Railway, but also housed numerous other enterprises which employed vast numbers of Russians, including various mills, military barracks and a distillery that produced three million gallons of vodka a year (or, as Tupper elaborates, thirty gallons for every inhabitant, although one hopes that much was for export). Another visitor, Daniel de Menocal, a banker, recalled his visit to Harbin in 1909, where, in the hotel, he found a scene that he describes as being out of a Western with ‘a milling gang of bearded, husky, half-drunken and fully drunken, noisy Russians in circulation from the bar to the billiard table . . . There were Buryats who were half-Russian, half-Mongol, some Japanese and mixing with these frenetic groups some women, big tough creatures.’6 The railway and its associated development had brought prosperity, however, and the streets were full of well-dressed wealthy people from across Asia, along with native men and women, equally well turned out in their local costume. Although clearly under Russian control, there was a cosmopolitan air of affluence and self confidence in the crowds that thronged the centre of Harbin.
The Russification of Manchuria and Harbin, rather than Siberia and Vladivostok, was not only galling for the eastern Siberians, but also presented a risk to the Russian government. The peace with Japan was fragile. A trio of treaties were signed with Japan in the years following the Russo-Japanese War, largely in an attempt to establish the ground rules for their respective imperial ambitions, but it was an uneasy relationship with mistrust on both sides, and the need to avoid antagonizing the Japanese was the keystone to Russia’s Asian poli
cy. As Witte wryly put it, ‘In the far east, it is no longer we who play first violin but Japan.’7 Reducing dependence on the Chinese Eastern Railway, which always threatened to be a catalyst for trouble in Russo-Japanese relations, was therefore essential for Russian foreign policy. Moreover, given that the Trans-Siberian had been built partly for military purposes, it could no longer fulfil that role unless it ran through all the way on Russian soil. Under the peace treaty, signed in Portsmouth, to end the Russo-Japanese War, the Russians were banned from using the Chinese Eastern Railway to carry their army. Just to make matters worse, the Chinese were beginning to flex their muscles over the Russians’ continued presence in Manchuria, calling it, with no little accuracy, an invasion.
Yet again, the construction of a railway became a military goal. The issue of whether to build it became a huge political controversy in the (slightly) more democratic corridors of power in St Petersburg. The supporters of the railway won the argument and the construction of the Amur Railway became the centrepiece of a more aggressive policy in the east. It would allow the construction of military bases in Transbaikalia, the strengthening of the Pacific Fleet with better support facilities at Vladivostok and the establishment of a fleet to patrol the Amur river, which forms the border with China.
Witte, out of government now, saw the building of the railway as yet another act of aggression and suggested instead that the defence of the Chinese Eastern Railway should be strengthened, although, of course, that reflected his own role in the initial decision to go through Manchuria. He was ignored by what he called the ‘war party’, in which he included the tsar as well as other senior government figures. It was, therefore, the political and military imperative dictated by these concerns, rather than any consideration of the needs of local merchants, that determined the decision to build the Amur Railway. And it proved to be an expensive one.
The assessment by the men who had surveyed the route in the 1890s had been correct. This would not be an easy railway to build. The route was determined by the need to be sufficiently far from the border to afford protection from potential attack from the Manchurian side of the Amur river, whose path the tracks largely followed, but also, on the other hand, the desire to remain in the south, where conditions were more likely to stimulate economic development and population growth. Formal approval was given by the Duma in 1907 and work started the following spring under the control of Nikolai K. Schaffhausen-Schönberg och Schaufuss, who, despite his remarkable German aristocratic name, was nevertheless Russian. The new line branched off the Transbaikal thirty miles west of Sretensk and followed a curve parallel to the river for 1,200 miles, reaching Khabarovsk and crossing the Amur over the longest bridge, stretching nearly a mile and a half, of the whole Trans-Siberian.
It was another epic achievement. The usual problems of labour shortage, harsh conditions and difficult terrain were exacerbated by the fact that most of the line had to be built on permafrost, as the original surveyors in the 1890s had predicted. The problem with permafrost is that, despite its name, it is not actually permanent. While a few feet or yards down there is, indeed, a layer of permanently frozen soil, the immediate surface thaws in summer just enough to cause problems with the track. Consequently embankments collapsed and landslides filled cuttings, and like on the Transbaikal, water was a permanent problem. In the summer, floods washed away the track bed and ballast, while in winter the shortage of water meant there was great difficulty in keeping locomotives functioning.
Just to make the project even more difficult for the engineers, this was the least populated and coldest part of Siberia, and the route went through an unforgiving series of forests, swamps, marshy plains and mountains. Although the line was to be built as a single-track railway, the lessons of the need for increased capacity had been learnt and sufficient space was allowed on the bridges and tunnels to allow for double-tracking the line in the future. While the greater part of the other sections of the railway in eastern Siberia had been built by Asian labour, this time the government insisted on a virtually all-Russian workforce, because it was seeking to ensure the vast resources it was putting into the project stayed in the country. Therefore, more than 15,000 labourers were brought in from European Russia and western Siberia to supplement the smaller number of available locals and convicts, while, as an exception, the mountainous terrain required the employment of expert tunnellers from Italy. This emphasis on Russian labour did not arise solely from economic considerations, but was part of the rationale for building the line in the first place with the idea of using it to strengthen Russia’s control over Siberia. Despite the failings of the Trans-Siberian – or, rather, precisely because of them – there was an even greater desire to see off the threat from the Chinese once and for all through this final link of an entirely Russian railway to the Pacific.
Therefore, it was a much more overtly colonial project than the construction of the previous sections. The labourers themselves, brought in from the rest of Russia, were seen as potential settlers, and in order to attract new arrivals facilities were built simultaneously with the railway, rather than cobbled together later as an afterthought. By the time the line was completed in 1916, ‘stretch after stretch of hitherto unusable terrain had been cleared for new settlers. In arid areas, wellholes had been sunk through perennially frozen layers of bedrock, gravel, sand, silt, clay organic material and ice, not infrequently to a depth of more than 350 feet before reaching water beneath the permafrost floor.’8 Construction was somewhat more mechanized than for previous sections and steam-powered excavators were used to drain vast swathes of marshes and turn them into arable fields. Nevertheless, the bulk of the work was still carried out by navvies wielding pickaxes and shovels, helped by the occasional use of dynamite. Even before the railway was completed, villages had sprung up in forest clearings and carefully planned towns had been laid out. Supply roads were built to permanent – rather than temporary – standards, postal services were established and churches were provided, an ornate mobile carriage serving those communities without one. J. N. Westwood, the historian of Russian railways, rather cynically notes: ‘Much publicity was given to the building of the churches for the railwaymen; the new gaols were probably a better investment, although less advertised.’9 That was not entirely fair, because the facilities created along with the railway were built to a high standard and were intended to ensure that settlers were attracted to eastern Siberia. The polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who visited the line in 1913, was impressed to find a series of hospitals and clinics erected along the railway and found ‘the wards, operating rooms, baths, etc., . . . light, clean and well arranged’, while the schoolrooms were ‘large and airy [and] the children looked happy; it could not be seen that the climate had done them any harm’.10 This was, therefore, not so much a railway construction project as the creation of a new part of Russia, and there is no little irony in the fact that it was precisely this sort of social engineering that was at the heart of Soviet thinking after the Revolution.
Other than tunnel and bridge work, progress on the railway was only possible for the four months from June to October, and consequently the labourers brought in from the rest of Russia were despatched back home in the autumn to save money. Nevertheless, the total cost of the railway exceeded 400 million roubles (£40 million), although, once again, money seemed to be no barrier. The higher cost per mile (£30,000) in comparison with the other sections of the Trans-Siberian was due not only to the difficult conditions in this remotest part of Russia, but also to the decision to build an alignment formation suitable for subsequent doubling of the tracks as well as the provision of a wide range of extra facilities that were included in the budget.
Once the government had decided to go ahead, there was no stopping the project, whatever the cost or the difficulties of construction. It was, proportionately, the worst drain on government resources of all the various projects that made up the Trans-Siberian, given that, at the time, the total annual budget of
the Russian government was around three billion roubles. In other words, a seventh of one year’s annual income was spent on building a line that was at the furthest end of the Russian Empire and which had little economic use at a time when the country was constantly teetering on the edge of revolution. As Steven Marks puts it, ‘St Petersburg fixed its attention on building this railroad without regard for local conditions, costs or predictions of its negligible impact, because of the perception that it was a matter of safeguarding the Empire.’11
The enormous sums of money spent on these Far East ventures certainly contributed to opposition to the tsarist regime. It is not mere idle speculation to suggest that had these vast resources been put to a more practical use in an effort to head off the revolutionary mood by offering the masses at least some hope of improving their lot, the history of Russia – and, indeed, the world in the twentieth century – might have been very different. Even if that is fanciful, the Trans-Siberian certainly was about to play a significant role in the civil war that followed the Revolution, and, in different circumstances, could have led to a completely different outcome. As Tupper notes with acuity, ‘The Trans-Siberian is inseparable from the history of this bloodshed.’12
NINE
THE BATTLE FOR THE TRANS-SIBERIAN
Almost as soon as the Amur Railway was completed Siberia was thrown into chaos by the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath. The Trans-Siberian had not covered itself in glory during the First World War, which Russia was caught up in right from the beginning in 1914. Or rather, those managing the railway had yet again failed to exploit its potential in wartime. The Allies, keen to keep the Germans and Austro-Hungarians engaged in the east, had sought to resupply the Russians through Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian, since sending goods through the Western Front, which stretched from Belgium to Switzerland, was obviously impossible and the Baltic was patrolled by German submarines. However, in one of its final acts of monumental incompetence, the tsarist government had failed to ensure that the railway was able to carry these supplies. Apart from the overall lack of capacity, the main problem was caused by a blockage at Tomsk in western Siberia, where production had vastly increased at a coal mine, resulting in fifteen extra coal trains a day, leaving few paths for trains coming from the east. Moreover, the Trans-Siberian was still operated by primitive methods that limited the potential to put on extra trains. Unlike in most of Europe, locomotives were still fuelled by hand – in other words, coal was shovelled up from the ground into their tenders, rather than fed by gravity from hoppers above – and they also took a long time to take in water because of the standard design of Russian locomotives, which were fitted with small-bore pipes. These kinds of details were vital to improve the efficiency, and therefore capacity, of the line.
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