To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  Class distinctions had been officially done away with by the Communists. Well, sort of. There were, in fact, two distinct levels of comfort, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, but the communist ideology would not allow them to be called ‘first’ and ‘second’ (the same is true of twenty-first-century Britain with its ‘first’ and ‘standard’!). And as the Communists became more dictatorial and lost any sense of their original purpose, a classic example of elitism was established. The Lux Blue Express, an unpublicized fast train, was introduced in May 1933 – on May Day itself, Workers’ Day in the Soviet Union, an irony surely lost on the Soviet leaders – and it was reserved exclusively for the nomenklatura: party leaders, senior politicians, military commanders and, of course, their spouses. The facilities made the luxury of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits appear second rate, as they were decidedly seven star, rather than five. On Stalin’s explicit orders the carriages had been soundproofed, using special insulation involving layers of felt, lead and wood, in order that the noise of the wheels could not be heard; while before every trip the conductor passed through the train spraying eau de cologne and putting flowers on the tables. Luxuries unavailable to the masses were laid out for free on the tables, including American cigarettes, expensive chocolates, the best caviar and fruit. Stalin’s mahogany-lined carriage had two bedrooms, and behind it was an identical dummy car for his bodyguards, so that no one knew in which one he slept. Every station was closed when the train went through and priority was always given to the Lux Blue Express (a decidedly odd choice of name for Communist leaders); ordinary citizens were not even allowed near the station when the train was due. It was used throughout the year, except in winter, and travelled between various summer resorts, and occasionally to Moscow, but its existence was never officially recognized.

  Even though the Amur Bridge at Khabarovsk was restored by 1925, many trains continued to use the Chinese Eastern Railway. That route remained, of course, a shorter way of reaching Vladivostok, but the railway continued to be a source of trouble for Russia. There were constant disputes between the various parties involved, which included not just Japan and China, as well as Russia, but various warlords and bandits who were not controlled by Beijing. The Japanese had never really accepted Russia’s right to share the railway with the Chinese, following the 1904–5 war, but Russia managed to continue to exploit the weakness of Chinese central government to maintain its hold over the line. In fact, it had done more than that. Despite its defeat in that conflict, the tsarist government had blatantly used the Chinese Eastern Railway as a way of creating a mini-state in Manchuria. The railway administration had effectively become the government of Manchuria. The remit of its ‘Civil Administration Department’ extended far beyond what might normally be expected of a railway management. It was responsible not only for local land taxes, but also levies on alcohol and tobacco, and controlled the police, law courts and local municipal councils. The department spent millions of roubles on churches and schools, and even issued passports and employed diplomatic agents. It was, in short, a state within a state. As the former head of the railway, Chin-Chun Wang later wrote, ‘The General Manager of the railway appeared to the people much more like a viceroy of the province than a railway executive.’13 He quoted an English visitor who felt the officials were so focussed on the political and strategic aspects of the railway that they had neglected its commercial potential.

  Since all this expenditure, together with the original cost of the railway, remained on the railway’s books, it had built up a quite staggering debt of 850 million roubles by the time of the Revolution. The overthrow of the monarchy meant this subsidy had dried up and the railway took to issuing its own currency to pay suppliers and its workers. However, since these were denoted in the rouble, which was plunging rapidly due to the hyperinflation caused by the Revolution, there were numerous protests and strikes against the railway administration. In early 1919, to ensure the line kept running, because it was the only through route to Vladivostok while the bridge was out of action, the railway, like the Trans-Siberian, became the responsibility of the Allies under the Inter-Railway Agreement, with the Chinese overseeing its operation and security. During this period the Allies’ Technical Board, which had been granted considerable sums, spent an estimated $5 million dollars on maintaining and improving the line. When the Board was dissolved following the departure of the Allied forces, an agreement was signed in October 1920 between Russia and China to create a new board, half Russian and half Chinese, to run the railway. The currency for the railway was changed to the more stable Chinese silver dollar, which immediately damped down the unrest and hostility towards the railway. Nevertheless, the situation remained unstable, a feature, indeed, of the whole lifetime of the Chinese Eastern Railway until after the Second World War. The Japanese still had designs on it. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed after the Russo-Japanese War, they had retained control of the South Manchuria Railway up to Changchun, a point halfway between Mukden and Harbin, and had also built a branch line through to Korea. The importance of these lines, combined with the complex diplomatic arrangements between the three nations and the fall-out from the Russian Revolution, meant the situation was never stable and always likely to blow up into a dispute or even a war.

  The 1920 agreement, setting out joint control by the Chinese and Russians, was effectively ratified in 1924, following further negotiations, but such an unusual arrangement to run a railway was always going to be questioned by one of the parties involved. Crucially, the arrangement specifically excluded the Japanese, who were concerned that this threatened their interest over South Manchuria, not least because the Soviet government appeared no less imperialist in design than its predecessor. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the 1924 contract, they set about undermining the Chinese position on the railway – which, incidentally, was a vast enterprise with 16,500 workers, 500 locomotives and 11,000 freight wagons. Russia wanted to retain control of Manchuria, and, as Tupper sums it up, ‘Under Soviet Rule, the Chinese Eastern became a Russian state on China’s soil.’14 Except that now, not only did Russia have its own schools, churches and even museums, but there was a political imperative. Communist cells sprang up under the protection of the railway management and were busy spreading the socialist message among the local Chinese population. Although under the 1924 agreement staffing on the railway was supposed to be equally divided between Chinese and Russian workers, gradually the Chinese were being pushed out and Russian dominance was being established.

  Matters came to a head when the Japanese, who were intent on extending their sphere of influence beyond Southern Manchuria, assassinated the local warlord, Zhang Zuolin, placing a bomb under his train carriage, and replaced him with his son, Zhang Xueliang, who they thought would be more compliant, but who, in fact, also fought against the Japanese takeover of Manchuria. Zhang Xueliang was also resentful of the Russian presence in Manchuria and effectively confiscated the railway in July 1929 and arrested many Russian officials. Stalin, in response, sent large numbers of troops to the Chinese border and Zhang Xueliang buckled under the pressure, reinstating the joint running of the railway.

  However, when two years later the Japanese launched a successful attack against the Chinese that culminated in the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo, which incorporated Manchuria and some other Chinese territory, it became clear that the arrangement was unworkable. The Russians still ran the trains and managed the railway, but there were frequent raids by bandits, who had both criminal and political motives, which resulted in several Western travellers being kidnapped or robbed. The Japanese were increasingly putting pressure on the Russians to cede control of the line, and demanded, for example, free transport for their troops and the freedom to determine train movements for their convenience. An attempt by the League of Nations to bring the line under the control of a multinational body, comprised of the main European powers, was rejected by Japan, which clearly had only one objective in mind: t
he total control of the region.

  By 1934 there seemed only two possible choices for the Kremlin: either Russia would have to launch a war against Japan or sell the railway. Stalin, who did not want a war, given the weakness of Russian forces and his desire to concentrate resources on rapid industrialization, decided to negotiate a sale with the Japanese. Eventually a price of nearly $50 million was agreed. It was quite a windfall for the Soviets for a line that had been problematic for Russia ever since its conception and would remain so for its new owners, until its takeover by the Chinese following their revolution in 1949. Moreover, the Russians once again started causing trouble over the railway almost as soon as the sale was carried through, and the fraught relationship between Japan and Russia continued until the outbreak of the Second World War when they were on opposite sides.

  Given the troubles on the Chinese Eastern Railway, in 1933 Stalin ordered the doubling of the track on the 1,700 miles of the Amur Railway between Ulan-Ude (literally Red Uda, previously called Verkhneudinsk) and Khabarovsk, employing a massive workforce of more than 10,000.

  Indeed, the Trans-Siberian was the beneficiary of much investment in the interwar period. The emphasis on heavy industry in western Siberia was at the heart of the strategy for the first five-year plan. The region had everything Stalin wanted and combined his two obsessions: a fear that the Soviet Union would be invaded from the west, and the need for rapid industrialization. Western Siberia possessed ‘the best known reserves of non-ferrous metals in the country, the best and most accessible reserves of coking coal outside the Donbas [the Donets Basin in Ukraine], many other useful minerals, good agricultural land, and plentiful waterpower resources’.15 Best of all, unlike Ukraine where steel production had been concentrated before, all these factories were far away from Russia’s vulnerable border with the West, where all kinds of potential capitalist enemies lurked. The very remoteness of western Siberia was a great asset, but inevitably put an enormous strain on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  The plan required the construction of enormous steel and iron plants in the Urals, which would be fed by coal from the Kuznetsk basin (also known as Kuzbas), near the present city of Novokuznetsk (which was renamed Stalinsk in the 1930s), just under 300 miles south of Tomsk. The mineral wealth uncovered by the Soviet geologists in the Urals was indeed staggering, with a vast array of ores, including iron, copper and bauxite; however, the coal to fire the huge blast furnaces built by the Soviets had to come from the basin 1,300 miles away, with only the Trans-Siberian as a realistic connection between the two. No matter. Stalin had decreed it and it would happen, even though throughout the 1930s the railway struggled to cope. Moreover, the pressure on the line was intensified by the Soviets’ dislike of railways wasting resources by carrying empty wagons; and the other aspect of Stalin’s scheme, the construction of the enormous iron and steel works at Magnitogorsk, near Chelyabinsk, solved this dilemma. The town was the site of the biggest known iron deposits in the world, the Magnitnaya Mountain, parts of which were almost pure iron; and consequently the Trans-Siberian hopper wagons carried iron ore from the Urals east to Novokuznetsk, while returning to the Urals with coking coal for the plant at Magnitogorsk. This required the construction of a 250-mile branch line to connect Magnitogorsk with Chelyabinsk; and later a new line was built to reduce the distance between the Urals and the Kuznetsk Basin. To add to the increased loads being carried on the railway, a massive tractor plant was built at Chelyabinsk that would play a key role in the Second World War. Moreover, the Trans-Siberian hauled coal from a new field at Karaganda in what is now Kazakhstan, which was also connected by a branch line in the early 1930s. Given the intense use of the line, the Soviets had considered the idea of building a second line parallel to the existing one, but in the end decided on a programme of improvements, upgrading the Western section of the Trans-Siberian into a Sverhmagistralizatsia – a super trunk line. Thanks to these improvements the capacity of the line was tripled in this period, with better signalling, the doubling of sections of the track, faster line speeds and heavier rails. Electrification, too, was begun, a process that would take thirty years to reach Irkutsk, 2,600 miles away from Moscow. While this investment certainly helped, the sheer volume of traffic inevitably resulted in hold-ups and delays, especially during the winter.

  The biggest railway project of the period was the construction of a line linking Siberia with Turkestan, known as Turksib, which inevitably put yet further pressure on the Western part of the Trans-Siberian. This was another grandiose project, a near thousand-mile railway that had been started under the last tsar, but work had been halted by the First World War. A section had opened in 1915 between Novosibirsk and Semipalatinsk and then in 1926 the Communists restarted construction on the Turksib, which was completed through to Tashkent four years later. The Turksib was built to allow the export of grain and wood from Siberia, but it also enabled the region to be turned over to cotton production, as part of the Soviet obsession with concentrating particular crops or industries in a specific area.

  To sum up all this rapid Soviet enterprise, focussed on industrialization of this part of Siberia, the Trans-Siberian – and particularly the West Siberian Railway – assumed the role that Witte had envisaged for it as the catalyst for the development of the region. As well as shuttling coal and iron ore between the Urals and the Kuznets Basin, the railway carried petroleum, industrial and agricultural machinery, grain and timber, and all kinds of foodstuffs intended for European Russia. Most available money for transport investment had been channelled towards the railways and consequently the roads were still inadequate to transport these heavy loads.

  Not surprisingly, given all this activity, the population of the region soared; and its very character was transformed further with a huge increase in the urban population, mostly by immigration from rural areas of Siberia to the jobs created in the vast factory and mining complexes, but also with a considerable influx from European Russia. In the dozen years running up to the outbreak of the Second World War, the population tripled in Novosibirsk (previously Novonikolayevsk) and Sverdlovsk (previously Yekaterinburg), while Novokuznetsk went from being a tiny town of just 3,900 souls to a city of 170,000. Even further east, the numbers living in the major cities such as Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude and Khabarovsk also increased dramatically.

  These population rises, together with the lack of passenger services, explain the huge queues of people struggling to get on the trains at ticket offices. At least in some towns they were better catered for as they waited. Despite the obvious disregard for passenger services, much emphasis was placed on improving stations, perhaps as a kind of unconscious recognition that queues and waiting were going to be the lot of rail travellers for a long time. More likely, they were yet another opportunity for the Communists to show off how much they cared for the people with architecture designed to demonstrate their power, in the same way, ironically, that private train companies had done across the world since the mid-nineteenth century. The most splendid of these stations was at Novosibirsk, the boom town of Siberia, beside the massive Ob river and almost precisely a third of the way along the line to Vladivostok. It was at the heart of the industrialization of Siberia and consequently needed a grand station – the biggest in the country – to match the vision. Designed by Nikolai Voloshinov, it is a traditional classical building with a huge arch, slightly off-centre, over the main entrance, which is reached by a wide bridge that is at a level above the platforms, allowing passengers to descend stairs to reach their trains. In the front is a huge piazza that enables the building, painted in traditional Siberian light blue, to be viewed in its full splendour from afar.

  Towards the end of the 1920s and throughout the 1930s there was, however, one major source of increase in passenger numbers: unwilling ones, carried in freight wagons and guarded heavily. These were the vast numbers of prisoners being sent to Siberia being punished by Stalin’s increasingly repressive regime. The exile system had been abandoned when the
Trans-Siberian was originally completed, since Siberia was being populated with willing immigrants. However, it was restarted on a far bigger scale under the Communists, because Stalin’s push for rapid development required a vast pool of cheap or free labour; the creation of labour camps – Gulags (Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh Lagerei or Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps) – suited his purpose. They were located at the extreme ends of the nation, the Arctic Circle, the Central Asian south and, mostly, Siberia. Stalin’s increasing intolerance of any opposition and his constant purges ensured there was a constant flow of new prisoners – the lucky ones (although many considered themselves the unlucky ones) who escaped firing squads. The Gulags therefore served a joint purpose, as both a tool of repression of any elements hostile to the regime and as a pool of labour to produce the heavy industrial goods that Stalin saw as the key to rapid development. It was, effectively, a slave-labour system and it did not take much to end up in the camps. While initially there was some intention to send only criminals and anti-revolutionaries to the Gulags, by the mid-1930s criminality was no longer relevant to the possibility of being sent there. The authors of a book on the forced-labour camps cite a few examples: ‘A woman cook failed to salt the dinner; she was prosecuted . . . A kolkhoz [collective farm] worker took a horse and went about his business; the horse was stolen; the kolkhoz worker was prosecuted . . . A one-eyed foal was born in a kolkhoz and was killed and eaten; the chairman of the kolkhoz was prosecuted for “failure to protect” the young horse’,16 and so on. And they conclude: ‘The overwhelming majority of the camp inmates was composed of national and social elements which in the usual sense of the word could never be considered offenders.’17 Mortality rates in the terrible conditions of the Gulags were usually between twenty and thirty per cent annually, although they reached fifty per cent. The level of terror intensified across Russia in the mid-1930s. Whereas arbitrary arrests, executions and exile to labour camps had been a feature of post-revolutionary society right from the beginning, in the years running up to the Second World War they became so commonplace that victims were normally quite unsurprised when it was their turn to get the knock on the door.