To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  The Soviets, however, were not going to leave it like that. This ‘artery of progress’ was a key part of their plans for the future and they recognized that the Trans-Siberian was their greatest railway.

  TEN

  THE BIG RED RAILWAY

  The greatest irony of the Trans-Siberian Railway is that while it was built at the instigation of an absolute monarch to help consolidate his hold on the Russian Empire, it was in many ways far more in keeping with the type of project upon which his successors, the Bolsheviks, would have embarked. The railway fitted in well with the Communists’ love of grands projets as a way of illustrating their power and competence; and the existence of the Trans-Siberian allowed them to indulge in this habit, with Siberia becoming the location of their main big inter-war schemes. The Bolsheviks made good use of the Trans-Siberian, realizing its importance in exploiting the wealth of Siberia, and they set about both improving the main line and adding numerous branches, as well as later building a second line to the north deep into the Siberian steppe.

  The civil war had demonstrated to the Bolsheviks the Trans-Siberian’s military importance, but they soon found that trains could be used in a rather more subtle way to establish themselves over the furthest corners of the nation they were now trying to control. The enormous size and underdeveloped nature of the country gave rise to great difficulties in trying to spread the message of revolution. The Bolsheviks needed a mobile and reliable system of communication between the centre and the regions, and railways offered an adaptable and relatively cheap solution.

  Following Trotsky’s successful use of an armoured train as a highly mobile military headquarters-cum-rallying point for supporters, the Bolsheviks made widespread use of the railway to promote their propaganda through the medium of agitprop trains (agitpoezda – short for ‘agitational propaganda train’). The idea started with the conversion of a compartment on troop trains into a centre for the distribution of propaganda, such as leaflets, newspapers and posters, and from there the concept of the agit train was born. Instead of just one compartment or even carriage, a whole train was devoted to spreading the Communist message. The first agit train, the V. I. Lenin (its full name was the V. I. Lenin Mobile Military Front Train), which made a trial run from Moscow to Kazan in August 1918, consisted of nine coaches; these included a bookshop, a library, office space and living quarters, with the aim of taking literature, posters, ideas and revolutionary fervour deep into the provinces.

  The train spent two weeks distributing material to units of the Red Army, which were at the time beginning to fight back against Kolchak’s forces. The success of this experiment encouraged Trotsky to immediately order five more agit trains, along with an agitprop steamer for the River Volga, a series of agit lorries for regions without railways, and (for those really hard to reach places in winter) agit sledges. A whole series of agit points (agitpunkty), initially mostly sited at railway junctions, which were both propaganda distribution centres and community halls, were also created, but it was the trains which were ‘altogether more dramatic and, in the short term, more important’.1

  The five new trains developed the original concept even further, often having as many as eighteen coaches, brightly decorated by artists and covered with slogans. They had all the latest mod cons, because the Communists liked to show they were up to date; the carriages were therefore linked by an internal phone system and equipped with a radio for direct contact with Moscow. The trains were also accompanied by the usual bureaucratic baggage, including a political department, an information department and, rather strangely, a complaints office to show that the comrades were listening to the people. One carriage contained a fully functioning printing press, which could quickly produce newspapers covering local news and events. The author of the standard work on early Soviet cinema, Richard Taylor, stresses the vital nature of agit trains in helping the Communists establish themselves across the country, as they were a way of reaching the people directly, avoiding the inefficient old machinery of government: ‘Agit trains were a fast, flexible, more direct and dynamic method of communication with the masses.’2 They had other advantages, too: they created an immediate and powerful government presence in the most remote parts of the nation, since they were staffed by a large crew of more than 100 enthusiastic party workers including specialists who could address particular regional issues, such as improving agricultural production or building cheap housing. Their very mobility, too, was an advantage, as they were seen by the people as ‘direct representatives of supreme power’,3 a novel idea in communities that might not have seen an official presence – other than the police and military – for years or even decades.

  Ever eager to side with modernism, the Bolsheviks soon added a film department to the trains, and these showed agit films (agitki) and newsreels. It was a two-way process as the train’s crew produced their own newsreels from the provinces to go back to the centre, which could then be screened nationally to show the best examples of what was happening across the country. The agitki were short, not least because of the lack of blank film, and each had a key message presented in a strongly visual and simple manner. Lenin himself laid great stress on the importance of newsreel and documentary films to disseminate Bolshevik propaganda; and, given the lack of cinemas in rural areas, the agit trains were a key method of spreading the message.

  Films with agricultural themes were particularly popular. Peasants would stare in awe at how the Revolution could bring relief from the back-breaking toil in their lives, through such innovations as mechanical cream-making machines and hydraulic peat-lifters. Mostly, the films were shown on huge screens in the open air, the images projected through a window in the side of a specially adapted carriage, but there was also a cinema seating 150 people on the train for use in bad weather or for children’s shows. We can get an idea of the vast potential reach of these agit films thanks to the Bolsheviks’ obsession with precise statistics (not always reliable, of course): 22,800 children watched films on the V. I. Lenin in the three months running up to March 1919.

  Most of the films were political, with a clear message, portraying graphically the horrors of the tsarist era or the liberating effects of Bolshevism. Some catered for children and general educational topics were also popular. Although the trains travelled round the whole country, Siberia was a particularly frequent recipient of their visits given the remoteness of the region from Moscow. For example, in October 1919, after Kolchak had started retreating, the V. I. Lenin went on a three-month trip along the Western Siberia sector with the specific aim of encouraging the peasants to boost the flow of grain from the region to the cities of European Russia at a time of near famine, caused by the conflict in Ukraine, the nation’s principal bread basket.

  The arrival of the train, signalled in advance by telegraph, became an event of great anticipation and excitement. The local Soviet would plaster the area with posters announcing film shows, meetings and details of the various exhibitions on the train. The trains, like Trotsky’s armoured HQ, would carry motor cars, which went to villages up to twenty-five miles either side of the line, with a stock of books and posters to sell. In many areas of Siberia peasants would never have seen a film before and they suddenly found themselves witnessing realistic moving images of their ‘great leaders’, an experience that must have felt akin to meeting them. For some of the programmes an admission charge was levied, but in parts of Siberia the lack of a cash economy meant that a ticket might be paid for in eggs or other produce.

  For the Bolsheviks the agit trains became a learning process on how to communicate with the masses. When the new regime first sent out the trains, the carriage exteriors had been painted by artists who had – with zealous, revolutionary fervour – produced symbolic motifs in the Futuristic style, which the peasants found baffling. Arthur Ransome, the British author and journalist who was one of the few to be allowed to stay in Russia throughout the Revolution, saw the V. I. Lenin and found that ‘every carriage is de
corated with most striking but not very comprehensible pictures in the brightest colours, and the proletariat was called upon to enjoy what the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to understand. Its pictures are “art for art’s sake”, and cannot have done more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the peasants and the workmen of the country towns.’4 They showed scenes of White outrages and the Reds’ love for the people, but the uninitiated peasant would have found it difficult to take away the intended message, not necessarily being able to distinguish the goodies from the baddies. Soon, however, more realistic and simple imagery replaced the efforts of the Futuristic artists.

  By their nature, agit trains were a transitional measure and the need for them diminished as more permanent workers’ centres sprang up across the country. Their heyday was the 1920s and 1930s, although, astonishingly, some were still being used on a limited scale in Siberia as late as the 1970s, and their importance in ensuring the spread of the Revolution should not be underestimated, as Taylor suggests: ‘The agit trains represented one of the earliest attempts at the creation and manipulation of a mass communications medium for political purposes.’5 Ransome concurred, writing, ‘I doubt if a more effective instrument of propaganda has ever been devised.’6

  Apart from sending propaganda trains up and down the line, there was the rather more serious business of restoring the war-damaged Trans-Siberian back to its peacetime state and then further improving it. Stalin was intent on transforming Russia from an agrarian backwater to an emblematic socialist state that would demonstrate the superiority of communism over capitalism, and Siberia was to play a key role in this ambition. While some mines had operated in Siberia in pre-revolutionary days, the Communists sent in numerous teams of geologists and surveyors to assess what else lay beneath the Siberian steppe, and their discoveries attracted great interest. Siberia seemed to have everything, from relatively obscure metals to vast quantities of basic minerals, such as iron ore and coal. It was ripe for exploitation. Despite the completion of the Trans-Siberian and the vast immigration that ensued, the region remained an economic backwater, contributing less than one per cent of the nation’s output. Its raw materials – and, to a much lesser extent, agricultural produce – were now seen as vital for the Soviets’ wider economic development programme. Given the lack of roads and the difficulties of river transport in the winter, the Trans-Siberian was the only way of moving these minerals and food, which ensured priority was given to repairing and upgrading the line.

  The line was patched up quickly after the war, but cleverly Trotsky, who was given responsibility for the railways in the immediate post-war period (a demonstration of how important they were considered to be by Russia’s new rulers), arranged for improvements to be carried out simultaneously. The numerous damaged bridges, for example, were replaced by stronger and bigger ones, depots were enlarged and a programme of station rebuilding began. Although money was always scarce, the Soviet government ensured substantial resources were invested into the Trans-Siberian to ensure its efficient functioning, but evidence of the war damage remained apparent for many years. Two American women passengers on the Trans-Siberian, Helen Wilson and Elsie Mitchell, travelling in 1927 – five years after the end of the civil war – noted that all the bridges had been repaired, but that while some new rolling stock had been introduced on to the line, there was still a shortage of locomotives and carriages: ‘On the sidings and in the repair yards of every large town may still be seen such a collection of battered and war-damaged engines and freight and passenger cars, broken, splintered, burned, shot to pieces, as fairly baffles description.’7

  Apart from repairing the line and the railway structures, the Soviet regime needed to re-establish rules for travellers. During the war the Trans-Siberian had effectively become a free railway, with guards often not bothering to collect fares, but pocketing a bribe instead, and passengers travelling illegally: sitting on the buffers or on the roof (since most sections had no tunnels) was a frequent method of obtaining a free ride. In fact, one passenger as late as the 1960s saw people still travelling on the buffers of the steam locomotives that had not yet been phased out.

  The Communists imposed new rules to ensure that fares began to be collected again. All the takings, however, were paid into the transport ministry’s accounts, which meant that the railway’s economics were obscure, to say the least, and its losses could not be assessed. Train services stuttered back into life after the civil war, although passenger traffic, which had virtually ceased during the conflict, was restored at a much less frequent level than in 1913. By 1924 there were just three trains weekly between Moscow and Vladivostok, which went via Perm and the Chinese Eastern Railway (as partisans had blown up two of the spans of the bridge at Khabarovsk) and took 12 days – far longer than before the war. By 1927 that was reduced to just two weekly passenger journeys between the two ends of the line, one via the Amur Railway and Khabarovsk (the bridge having been repaired), the other via Harbin, although there were more trains running on intermediate routes, connecting the main cities of Siberia. The coaches operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits had been confiscated, but were still running on the line, although Junius B. Wood, the European correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, who crossed Siberia on the train in the summer of 1926, found them to be in a poor state with cracked windows, broken wood panels and torn carpets. The dining car fare was grim, too: ‘At 3.30 p.m. a plate of soup appeared – greasy hot water poured over cold pieces of fish that had been cooked earlier in bulk. The next course was pre-cooked cauliflower warmed with a sauce of unknown texture. Roast veal, cooked weeks earlier and now dry and hard, smothered in warm brown gravy, without vegetables, was the main course.’8 (It was not that much different on some of the trains when I travelled on the line in 2012.) At least there was a dining car, though Wood might have been better without it. Another traveller, Malcolm Burr, who went on the Trans-Siberian a couple of years later, found that he could purchase far more appetizing food at the stations from peasant sellers, whose small businesses had not yet been made illegal by the Communists. Indeed, Burr was surprised by the extent of this enterprise and his description is not dissimilar to the list of fare available on the pre-war wagons-lits, but now on sale off the train: ‘The station markets were allotted a substantial area on the platforms, arranged in crescent-shaped buildings open at the front; behind the counter were peasants selling their goods classified in groups; at one end large stacks of bread, black, brown and white, kolachi or rolls and great loaves in abundance and variety and all excellent; another group would be selling bottles carefully labelled “boiled milk”,’ although a fellow passenger, a doctor, counselled against drinking it, because of the risk of typhus. Yet more sellers offered honey in jugs made from birch bark; others had a range of fish, including ‘smoked sterlet [sturgeon], perch, pike and ide or burbot, the latter a rich and juicy fish, also keta, the dog salmon of the Pacific’. Finally, there were ‘great cauldrons . . . with cutlets, tongues, whole chickens and ducks and game, as hazel hen, hares, blackcock and capercaillie’, as well as eggs, fruit and enormous water melons. As Burr suggests, ‘all this abundance seemed strange and unexpected in the land of famine’,9 where, just a few years previously, crop failure and government sequestration had led to millions of deaths through hunger in Ukraine and the Volga region.

  Ordinary Russian travellers struggled to obtain a ticket for the trains, since there were very few services, because of the priority given to freight and the overall lack of capacity due to war damage. Wood describes how ‘half an hour before the train arrives, the ticket office opens, usually a round hole in the wall no larger than a saucer and the riot starts’. (This strange custom of opening a ticket office only briefly before the arrival of the train was actually the norm at the time across much of Continental Europe and still prevails in some areas.) Wood noted at one station there were 200 people who wanted to travel, many of whom had slept overnight in the station
in the hope of being ahead of the queue, but there were perhaps a maximum of forty places on the train. Worse, all but a handful of these were allocated to passengers with a government pass or who had paid a bribe: ‘The first five who have stood patiently in line for hours get the surplus places, and the cashier slams his window and turns down the others as coldly as a pay-car passes a wayside tramp.’10 At least, according to the two American women, the fortunate ticket holders invariably squeezed on to the trains: ‘The trains are inevitably jammed . . . and in due course everybody – or nearly everybody – succeeds in getting on, breathless, exhausted but triumphant.’11

  The crowding on the trains of the Trans-Siberian, and indeed elsewhere on the rail network, was a direct result of the Soviet regime’s emphasis on freight, rather than passenger traffic, since it was the railway’s ability to carry massive amounts of goods that was seen as its value to the economy. Stalin, who came to power following Lenin’s death in 1924 (after being in de facto control for much of the period since Lenin’s stroke in the spring of 1922), embarked on a crash programme to develop the country, focussing on making the nation militarily, industrially and financially self-sufficient. The economic policy was delivered through five-year plans, setting out production targets for every area of the economy. The emphasis of the first plan, launched in 1928, was on heavy industrial, rather than consumer, goods – a policy that would last until well after the Second World War. The passengers on the Trans-Siberian were no different from any other consumers in Soviet Russia and to buy a ticket they had to join a queue, which, of course, was a custom that became characteristic of the Communist system. As Harmon Tupper puts it, ‘It was obvious that the Soviet government cared nothing then about the betterment of passenger service.’12 For the Trans-Siberian itself, however, the emphasis on heavy industry was unequivocally beneficial, since Stalin realized it needed considerable investment to fulfil its function as the catalyst for Siberian development.