The congestion and backlogs on the Trans-Siberian, as well the rising number of accidents, led to accusations against railway workers of sabotage and incompetence, even though the fault lay with the planners in not devoting enough extra resources to the railway. The appointment in 1935 of Stalin’s chief troubleshooter, Lazar Kaganovich (who had overseen the construction of the Moscow Metro and was nicknamed ‘The Locomotive’), as the Communication Commissar was a demonstration of the importance that the railways were accorded throughout this period, but it also spelt trouble for many workers in the industry. Transport delays – particularly on the Trans-Siberian, which was now expected to carry a much heavier load than previously – were an all too visible reflection of the society’s inefficiency, and as J. N. Westwood, the Russian railway historian, suggests, ‘Government and Party remained unconvinced that the railways were working anywhere near their real limit, a conflict that was almost inevitable . . . the two weapons [in government hands] were the purge and the Stakhanovite movement.’18
Kaganovich had more blood on his hands than almost any other of his contemporary Communist leaders, having organized forced grain confiscations during the starvation deliberately brought on by the regime in the early 1930s in Ukraine as a punishment. He was one of those who took the hardest line against the slightly better-off peasants characterized as kulaks (rich peasants, but often misused as a way of identifying those reluctant to hand over grain) by the regime, a group that was almost exterminated under Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture. Tupper rather disingenuously suggests Kaganovich was good for the Trans-Siberian, because he ‘augmented the rolling-stock fleet with more powerful locomotives, large, four-axle freight cars and all-metal passenger coaches’,19 built a huge locomotive repair facility at Novokuznetsk and ensured that workers were better trained, but that is rather in the ‘Mussolini got the trains running on time’ mould. In fact, under Kaganovich (who, incidentally, lived to see the end of communism in 1991 and was subsequently posthumously found guilty of genocide in a court in Kiev) railway workers lived in terror as he organized the arrest of thousands of railway administrators and managers as supposed ‘saboteurs’; they were either executed or sent to the Gulags. Of course, to some extent this had the desired effect, because railway managers were terrified of delaying trains unnecessarily in case they received a knock on the door in the middle of the night, so they strove to keep the system going. Not surprisingly, as a result, the accident rate rose; and even minor mishaps could easily result in the hapless local manager being accused of being a ‘wrecker’ bent on destroying socialist society, the worst possible accusation. Under Kaganovich, too, Stakhanovite efforts were encouraged to improve productivity. Named after a miner who supposedly carved out more than 100 tons of coal in a single shift, which was, in fact, an obvious charade, Stakhanovite efforts were imposed on the railways, but to terrible effect. Specially selected train drivers were set up to ensure their locomotives pulled greater loads, or used less coal per verst, but as Westwood suggests, this usually meant that all the engineer did was ‘drive his engine badly, “thrashing” it so it produced a third more steam per hour’; but while this did increase the speed, it simply meant it ‘raised fuel consumption per horsepower to a much higher rate and brought his fireman [who had to shovel the coal into the fire box] to a state of collapse’.20
Even the relatively neglected passenger services improved in the 1930s, thanks to the investment on the line. By 1936 the Moscow–Vladivostok journey was eight and a half days, a reduction of seventy-two hours on the immediate period after the civil war (and only about forty-eight hours slower than today’s fastest trains on the all-electric line). Freight remained the priority, although in the war the railway was heavily used for troop and prisoner transport, as well as goods.
The Second World War is, in fact, reckoned by some historians to have started not with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, but a few months earlier with a battle in Mongolia, 400 miles south of the Trans-Siberian, and a continuation of the Russo-Japanese struggle over Manchuria. Since the Japanese takeover of Manchuria there had been mounting tension on the Mongolian border between the Japanese Kwantung Army, which occupied Manchuria, and Red Army frontier units. In the summer of 1938 there had been a major skirmish between the Red Army and the Japanese, resulting in a total of 750 deaths at Lake Khasan, near Vladivostok, which the Japanese had lost; but this time, with the tacit backing of the Japanese government, this initial minor confrontation became the far more significant Battle of Khalkhin Gol.
Though notionally independent, Mongolia was effectively a client state of the Soviet Union – just as Manchuria (Manchukuo as it had become) was under the control of Japan – and in May 1939 a border dispute between the two erupted into a brief, full-scale war. A group of Mongolian cavalry roamed into what the Japanese considered Manchurian territory and were attacked by the Kwantung Army. The Red Army responded strongly and created a massive force of 58,000 men under Marshal Georgy Zhukov, backed by 500 tanks and 250 aircraft ready to counterattack. This took a couple of months to assemble because of the distance from the railhead and, amazingly, the Japanese were unaware of this big build-up. When the main attack was launched in late August, the Russians quickly overcame the Japanese and scored a decisive victory. This had a wider significance and altered the likely course of the Second World War, since the Japanese realized that the Red Army was stronger than they had thought, and this meant they did not attack Russia in conjunction with the German invasion on 22 June 1941. Instead, the Japanese turned their attention south rather than north, which ultimately led to the raid on Pearl Harbor.
In 1941, Stalin reacted remarkably quickly by moving troops from the east to the west to face the Germans. He got wind of the attack ten days before and began moving the Red Army on the Trans-Siberian in what Simon Sebag Montefiore called ‘one of the decisive logistical miracles of the war’, with the redeployment of ‘400,000 fresh troops, 1,000 tanks and 1,000 planes across the Eurasian wastes on non-stop trains’.21 The last train left the east on the 17th and the troops deployed behind Moscow secretly.
The Trans-Siberian Railway had a good war. It enjoyed a more peaceful time than in the First World War, since, as a result of the Japanese restraint, it was not subject to any direct military action, but the line was incredibly busy. As Stalin had predicted, the Germans invaded Ukraine, putting the Donbas coal out of reach of the Russians. Therefore, coal had to be supplied from the Kuznets Basin and the coalfields in Kazakhstan at Karaganda, which, fortunately, had been connected with a new line that enabled a large part of the Trans-Siberian to be avoided.
As a result of all this activity on the railway, there was a constant programme of upgrading and continued increases in capacity were achieved by the addition of more loop lines, better signalling and new sections of parallel routes. The purges also stopped, allowing the railway managers to relax, rather than living in constant fear, although many perfectly competent officials had been executed.
Following the German attack in 1941 there was an immediate evacuation of industry in the threatened areas to the east on a series of hundreds of special trains. In a quite remarkable manoeuvre, whole factories were packed up into wagons that were transported to pre-planned locations with great haste. Most of the industry was shifted to western Siberia and Chelyabinsk became the centre for tank production, based on its tractor factory, but some factories were relocated further east. According to one historian, ‘It was arguably the most important feat the Soviets achieved in the Second World War in the sense that it facilitated their eventual victory over Germany. The factories were re-established in a matter of weeks and immediately began to produce vast quantities of war material.’22
The Trans-Siberian was also Stalin’s potential escape route. Extensive preparations were made for the dictator and his leading ministers and officials to evacuate to Kuibyshev (Samara), and trains, with locomotives permanently in steam, were standing ready to tak
e them from Moscow throughout the period when Germany appeared to be about to overrun the capital.
Another, crucial, role of the Trans-Siberian was bringing troops from the Urals and Asia, as well as supplies landed by the Americans at Vladivostok, which did actually get through, unlike those in the First World War, the Soviets proving themselves more efficient at running the railway than their tsarist predecessors. The trains would often return with yet more unfortunates heading for the Gulags, such as those who, according to Tupper,23 were termed ‘socially hostile’ Poles, ‘unreliable’ people from the Baltic states or ‘traitorous’ ethnic minorities who had allegedly collaborated with the Germans. There were, too, hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese prisoners of war, who were sent to the labour camps, of which there were more than one hundred, with some having a less than ten per cent survival rate by the end of the war. Essentially, only those prisoners able to get some type of clerical or administrative job survived – the rest who undertook heavy labour invariably perished of starvation or disease. The way they were treated was actually akin to a form of slow murder, since the prisoners who did not fulfil their quotas were given reduced rations, which in turn made them too weak to carry out their required tasks. Being sent to Siberia under Stalin was a far worse fate than under the tsars. Although the numbers in the Gulags declined after the end of the war and conditions improved slightly, it was not until Stalin’s death in 1953 that most would be closed down and some remained until Gorbachev’s era.
The Second World War had demonstrated yet again the vital nature of the Trans-Siberian to Russia’s Asian interests, and to its overall defence needs. As well as continuing improvements to the railway (most notably electrification), in the immediate post-war period consideration turned again to building a parallel line and that project would offer challenges that were even greater than those faced by the line’s original builders.
ELEVEN
THE OTHER TRANS-SIBERIAN
Even at times of war, the Trans-Siberian has been work in progress, always needing improvements, major repairs and extra capacity. Therefore, as Russia was waging a war for its very existence in the east, ways of improving the worst bottlenecks on the Trans-Siberian were being developed. Consequently, in western Siberia there was continued investment to reduce journey times and upgrade the track in recognition of the importance of keeping the line working to full capacity to serve the industry that had been relocated there. Even further east improvements were being made, notably on the difficult 110-mile-long Circum-Baikal Railway around the lake, where work began to improve the track in 1940. The line had been doubled just before the First World War, but remained a slow railway because of the sharp curves, the ever-present risk of landslides and the primitive nature of the equipment. The war led to delays in this improvement scheme and then a change in plan. Rather than trying to improve the existing line, it was decided to by-pass it by building a new alignment further away from the lake. A shorter route, which already had a single-track line, was developed into a double-track electric railway through the mountains between Irkutsk and Slyudyanka. When this was completed in 1949 it was used by all the Trans-Siberian trains, and the section of the old line from Irkutsk to the lake along the Angara was dismantled in conjunction with a hydro-electric project, which led to a rise in the river level. The lakeside route was retained but with only one train per day and consequently the villages along the railway, which mostly could be reached only by the line and had been developed for railway workers, deteriorated markedly. The second track was removed in the 1980s, but because of the interest from tourists the line was saved, much to the relief of the villagers, and it has become a key local attraction.
A far bigger construction project – the longest individual scheme of the whole railway – was also being developed in the immediate post-war period. After their defeat at the hands of the joint Mongol and Soviet forces at the outset of the conflict in the summer of 1939, the Japanese avoided conflict with Russia during the course of the Second World War. In fact, it turned out to be the other way around when Russia – knowing that Japan’s imminent defeat was likely, as Stalin had been tipped off about the dropping of the Hiroshima atomic bomb on 6 August 1945 – launched an attack on Manchuria, eager to regain its hold on that part of China. Therefore, bizarrely, both the first and last battles of the war played out in and around the Trans-Siberian Railway. The attacks against the dispirited Japanese forces in the brief war which ended in early September allowed the Russians to regain control of the Chinese Eastern Railway and to help the Chinese Communist and Nationalist (the Kuomintang) armies rid China of the Japanese invaders. After the defeat of Japan, the Communists’ People’s Liberation Army used Manchuria as a safe haven from which to launch the revolution, which eventually succeeded in 1949 when the Nationalists were forced to flee to the island of Taiwan.
The Chinese Eastern Railway, incidentally, was handed over by the Russians free of charge to their then allies, the new communist regime in China, allowing Russia to divest itself of a railway that had caused its various rulers nothing but trouble for half a century. Now known as the Trans-Manchurian, it continues via Harbin through to Beijing, and is well used as a link between China and Russia for passengers including many Western tourists, few of whom will be aware of its troubled history and freight. The route is popular as it avoids going through Mongolia, the other route to Beijing from Moscow. There is still, however, the need for a change of gauge at the border between the two countries.
Despite their 1945 victory the Soviet regime remained wary of Japanese strength. What if the Japanese launched an attack on the Amur section of the Trans-Siberian, as well as establishing control of the Chinese Eastern Railway? Vladivostok would be cut off and Russia could find itself chased out of Siberia. This paranoid thought process led the Soviets to look at the construction of a new line well north of the existing Trans-Siberian, where it would be not only less vulnerable to attack (always a consideration in Stalin’s mind), but would also open further vast swathes of Siberia and its natural resources that were previously too far from the railway to be exploited.1
That was the strategy behind the start of construction of the 2,300-mile-long2 Baikal Amur Railway, known always by its acronym BAM (Baikal Amur Magistral or Baikal Amur Mainline), a project that dwarfed any of the sections of the existing Trans-Siberian in both difficulty and cost. It was in the long line of Soviet megaprojects, such as the industrial combines mentioned in the previous chapter, and other schemes like the successful space programme, the Virgin Lands Campaign to boost the use of land (another failure), and the madcap idea (fortunately abandoned) to reverse the flow of several Siberian rivers. The BAM, though a mere railway line using tried-and-tested technology, was actually more ambitious in scale than any of these other projects because of the difficulties and inaccessibility of the terrain, which proved to be a far greater obstacle than for the earlier sections of the Trans-Siberian. The authors of a guide to the BAM are not exaggerating when they say ‘constructing the BAM and the BAM zone was the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken by the Soviet Union and probably by any country in the world. It devoured the same gigantic amount of resources as were used to conquer space in the 1950s and 1960s.’3 Indeed, it took three attempts and more than half a century to complete a line that became emblematic of Soviet aspirations, but which has forever been mired in controversy and played no little part in the widespread disillusion in the communist ideal of the younger generation of Soviet citizens.
The idea behind the scheme was to provide an alternative route to the Pacific to the existing Trans-Siberian, running parallel between 400 and 600 miles to the north, leaving the main line at Tayshet, a town created by the railway and famous only for its role as a transit camp for Gulag prisoners and for its deadly creosote factory, described in detail by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. The route crosses the Angara river on a dam at Bratsk, runs north of lake Baikal through the town of Severobaika
lsk, a mountainous region that required several lengthy tunnels, traverses the Amur at Komsomolsk-na-Amure and reaches the ocean at Sovetskaya Gavan, more than 500 miles north of Vladivostok.
The first attempt to build the line was made in the 1930s when the Soviet Government, worried about events in Manchuria, passed a secret decree to construct a new line, but contained no details of the route other than the two termini, Tayshet and Sovetskaya Gavan. An extensive survey was undertaken and plans for the railway were announced in the second five-year plan, which covered 1933 to 1937. It was ‘streets paved with gold’ propaganda. The Plan concentrated on the economic rather than military advantages, saying the BAM ‘will traverse little investigated regions of eastern Siberia and bring to life an enormous new territory and its colossal riches – amber, gold, coal – and also make possible the cultivation of great tracts of land suitable for agriculture’.4 A major survey was embarked upon, but many of the poor geologists soon became victims of a purge when the authorities decided that the work had not been carried out properly; several were executed, while others ended up in the construction gangs.
In the second half of the 1930s a series of Gulags was created along the proposed route known as BAMLag (BAM Corrective Labour Camps). For most of the estimated 400,000 prisoners sent there between 1932 and 1941 (when Russia was attacked by Germany and the internal deportations ended for a while) this was a death sentence. Russians knew that being sent to the BAM meant they were unlikely to ever return. BAMLag, the organization which ran these camps, was created specifically to ensure there was a constant pool of labour to build the line. It grew rapidly to run dozens of camps, but ironically, and perhaps inevitably, its leadership was purged in 1940 (and sent to work on the railway) and it was absorbed into the wider Gulag administration. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the prisoners received insufficient rations to carry out the hard labour they were expected to undertake and therefore they were systematically starved. In the BAMLag camps a particularly sadistic form of five different types of ‘cauldron’ was operated, ranging from a meal three times a day to thin soup and 300g of bread daily. Good workers started on the top rations, but since these were insufficient for them to carry out their allotted task, they would gradually be allocated to the cauldrons providing less and less food, yet still expected to work as hard. There was only one likely result.
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