There were always minders. Every Western traveller of the postwar period mentions them, usually smartly dressed men travelling in the next compartment or following their prey around towns. There were, too, detailed restrictions on taking photographs – bridges, stations, railway structures, goods trains, even rivers and lakes, all were the subject of bans (‘Nyet fotograf’ was the constant refrain), although, of course, the Intourist (the state tourist agency) guides who invariably accompanied all Western tourists often turned a blind eye. Individual travel was almost impossible and tourists had to book through Intourist or notionally independent operators such as Progressive Tours, which had permanent advertisements in the Communist Party paper, the Morning Star. The high rouble, which was officially on a par with the pound (but was far lower at black-market rates), made everything prohibitively expensive, although there was precious little to buy.
Eric Newby, who travelled in the mid-1970s, played games with his minders, trying to dodge them whenever possible to take photographs and see places where technically he was not allowed to go. He was travelling with a photographer, Otto, who waged a constant war with the authorities. Newby tells the story of one hilarious confrontation at Omsk: ‘The big scene, which should have been played in bathing costumes with horizontal stripes, with what was, presumably, the deputy female stationmaster, a person of uncertain age who was wearing a terrible grey skirt, which made her look as if she was embedded in concrete.’ A virtual battle ensued and the fierce lady managed to get her hand in front of Otto’s camera and ‘the other under his chin, shoving his head back for the final neck-break – what she was doing with her knee was not clear.’3 All to stop the poor fellow taking a picture of the station frontage, which was covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. Otto was subsequently arrested a few times, but he led a charmed life and was always released in time to return to the train. The tours in those days generally included visits to places such as ‘the Banner of Lenin collective farm’ and (Newby’s particular bête noire) wire-making factories, a regional speciality according to him.
The locals themselves could be kindly, nevertheless. Deborah Manley tells a story of a woman in her seventies who got off at a small station, only for the train to move off without warning. While the men she was talking to managed to get back on, she could not. She found a group of babushkas who gave her tea and ‘after four hours, many smiles and much tea, a little car came across the vacant Russian landscape. She bade farewell to the babushkas and climbed into the little car with the men.’4 They drove her to an aerodrome, where a small plane flew her across the steppe; on arrival she was met by another car with two men who put her back on the Trans-Siberian.
The Soviets’ paranoia over photography was universal, but was heightened by the fact that the railway was being used to deploy rail-based mobile missile systems, which clearly they did not want photographed. These are relatively ordinary looking trains, which carry a missile that can be deployed quickly. The advantage over silo-based systems is obvious, as trains can travel as much as six hundred and twenty miles in a day, making them very difficult to target. The only tell-tale pointer from the air was that these trains required three locomotives to haul them, because they were so heavy. Several systems were tried from the late 1960s onwards, but it was only in 1987, after several failures, that the Soviets had developed rail-borne launchers for the SS-24 missile. These were nuclear-armed rockets with a payload equivalent to 550,000 tonnes of TNT and capable of reaching the United States from the eastern Trans-Siberian with their range of 6,000 miles. They were not widely tested, however. In Engines of War, I wrote: ‘Apparently only one test missile was ever fired from a rail-based launcher and, according to Russian news sources, it reached its target in Kamchatka, in eastern Russia, without the US spy satellites being able to ascertain the whereabouts of the train from which it had been launched.’5
At their peak there were thirty-five (some reports suggest fifty-six) of these launchers with each train having up to three, and while many were deployed in Ukraine, some were also hidden along the Trans-Siberian, which, of course, offered the advantage of proximity to the United States. The difficulty was that the line was mostly electrified by the 1980s – except for the Amur Railway – and consequently the overhead wiring made it difficult to allow for the firing of the missiles. That would have had to take place in special sidings, but it was not an insuperable obstacle. With the end of the Cold War, and various missile treaties, the trains were eventually scrapped in 2003 in favour of road-based or silo-fired missiles, but they have not been forgotten. Early in 2013 there was some discussion in military circles that the Russians might restart manufacturing rail-based nuclear missiles, having retained the technology. One of the bases of these trains was at Krasnoyarsk on the Trans-Siberian, but the site was reported to have been in ruins. The likelihood of recommencing such an arms race seems remote, unless there is a remarkable change in the global political scene.
The Khrushchev era was a boom time for the railway. The Russian economy was growing steadily and the line was carrying more agricultural produce and industrial goods. Branches were being spun off to make greater use of the main line. The most significant development, however, was containerization, and the line started carrying containers between Western Europe and the Far East in 1967. This was another sign of desperation from the Soviets. Previously they had been reluctant to trade with the West, but now they were intent on obtaining hard currency to pay for vital imports. In 1971 a highly profitable flow of containers from Japan was devised between Nakhodka and the Baltic states. For a time in the 1970s and 1980s Nakhodka replaced Vladivostok, which was fifty miles west and had been turned over to military use, as the terminus of the Trans-Siberian. By the mid-1980s the railway was carrying more than 100,000 containers per year, an important source of hard currency for the Soviet Union. As ever, though, when examining Soviet achievements, the figures may have been massaged somewhat, because administrators always had to be seen to achieve their targets, under pain of being dismissed – or, worse, accused of sabotage.
Nevertheless, the container traffic on the Trans-Siberian was a boost to the Soviet Union, a crucial link across the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. The railway was able to carry this traffic economically because the railway was not run on conventional commercial grounds. It was heavily subsidized by the regime in order to garner this fruitful source of hard currency. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this traffic has increased further.
The story of the Trans-Siberian Railway has been one of continuous change. Conceived initially largely for military purposes, it was the location for many battles in the civil war, resulting in a huge loss of life. The forced industrialization driven by Stalin put an enormous strain on the railway and changed its nature. It was no longer a winding, substandard railway, but rather a modern, heavily used freight line.
That is, indeed, the impression travellers will receive today. It is only by travelling on the line that one becomes aware of the vast scale of both the railway and the nation it serves. When my partner Deborah Maby and I travelled on the line from Vladivostok to Moscow in 2012, the first leg of our journey up to Ulan-Ude took two and a half days, longer than we had ever spent on a single rail journey – and that brought us a mere third of the way.
The railway is big in every sense. The track, of course, is slightly wider than in Europe, which allows for the carriages to be that bit broader, but more importantly, the loading gauge – the overall envelope that the carriages cannot exceed – is bigger, adding to the sense of scale. On every section the goods trains trundle by in the opposite direction every few minutes, far more frequently than those carrying passengers. Every significant station has numerous platforms, many of which have freight trains standing idle which, apart from preventing passengers walking across the tracks, make them feel rather like interlopers.
The railway is predominantly a freight railway, even though it is, of course, the passengers and the
ir needs that give the Trans-Siberian its unique purpose. Make no mistake, the Trans-Siberian remains Siberia’s lifeline. Driving across the vast steppe is still too much of a marathon for most, as well as being dangerous, given Russia’s huge road death toll (28,000 in 2012). Moreover, the road between Chita and Khabarovsk remained unpaved until recently and parts are still unfinished, despite major improvements carried out since the collapse of communism. As mentioned previously, the very existence of the line squeezed out road development and consequently the railway reinforced its own indispensability. Airports are still relatively few and far between in Siberia, and domestic flights are infrequent and expensive. Therefore, the railway remains the main way for local people to get around, and the trains are heavily used, even in a quiet month like November, when we travelled along the line.
There remain different standards of train. The best is the Rossiya, the daily service is train No. 1 from Vladivostok to Moscow, and No. 2 in the other direction. There is TV in every compartment; the beds are softer; the samovars at the end of each coach are more modern; and the toilets do not flush directly onto the tracks. Like the other trains it still has three classes: an open coach (platskartny) with around fifty beds for the cheapest tickets; and then two entirely similar compartments for first and second class, the only difference being that first class has two beds (both lower bunks) and second has four.
The other trains, running on part of the line, tend to use older stock and are also generally cheaper than the prestigious Rossiya. Just as it always has, the train runs on Moscow time. Clocks in major stations show Moscow time and unwary passengers must be careful to make sure they realize that the departure time is also not given in local time. Fortunately, though, the old habit of serving meals by Moscow time has gone.
Harmon Tupper’s 1965 assessment of the Trans-Siberian was fair. It was, he says, ‘built by a relatively poor and backward nation under the severest adversities ever encountered in railway construction. For all its frailty, it bound Siberia inseparably to the motherland and kept the eastern regions within a European rather than Oriental Civilization.’6 That poses an interesting question. Russia was at a crossroads when it belatedly started building railways – did it want to be part of Europe or an Asian power? The vacillations over the construction of the Trans-Siberian (discussed in chapter 2) focussed on this very question. The decision to go ahead set Russia decidedly along a path of looking eastwards, a choice that was to have momentous implications. Without the Trans-Siberian to transport the raw materials needed for its industrialization drive between the wars, Russia might not have been strong enough to resist the Nazi attack that started in June 1941, especially as the line was also vital in enabling much industrial production to be shifted eastwards in the build-up to the conflict and the transfer of the Far-Eastern armies to return to defend Moscow. Then, looking at the post-war period, assuming the outcome of the Second World War had been the same, Russia without the Trans-Siberian – possibly without Siberia, as a result – would have been a very different country, and might, by now, have joined the European Union. The building of the BAM can be seen as a crazy last throw of the dice by a regime still trying to prove that it was great, only to founder on the impossibility of the task. Therefore, while the Trans-Siberian itself helped to bring down the monarchy by stimulating the tsarist regime’s Manchurian adventure, the second Trans-Siberian, the BAM, helped to expose the myths of communism.
The Trans-Siberian may have been born of controversy and doubt, but unlike the BAM it has proved its worth, despite the many good reasons not to build it cited in the first paragraph of this book. It has opened up a whole region of Russia and undoubtedly improved the lives of many people in the region, including incomers; and it has attracted millions of visitors to an area whose very name evokes extreme cold and imprisonment in Gulags. The Trans-Siberian is, quite simply, the best thing that ever happened to Siberia, a region that has not been blessed with many other happy events throughout its history.
There have been downsides, too, most notably the role of the Trans-Siberian in various conflicts. It not only stimulated a war, but played vital roles in the two world wars, and even, as mentioned above, featured in the Cold War. This is hardly surprising. The railway was always conceived as having a military purpose and, indeed, that was the prime reason in many of its promoters’ eyes for building it in the first place.
The Trans-Siberian has always been a creature of the state. As a result, resources have rarely been skimped because the various regimes – be they tsarist, communist or proto-democratic – have always recognized its importance in holding together this vast nation. Given that the enormous scale of the enterprise means that it is very difficult for the railway to pay its way given the inevitable requirements of maintenance and renewal, state support has been essential and forthcoming. The Trans-Siberian has never suffered the indignities of bankruptcy and penury that was the fate of many of its Victorian equivalents built by the private sector. However, while economically the line has probably never been a paying proposition, it is coming closer to it now, thanks to the carriage of containers. According to a recent report, ‘The Trans-Siberian is capable of transporting 100 million tonnes of freight a year, but is almost saturated.’7 At last, after 110 years, the railway is beginning to fulfil its potential and the section between Omsk and Novosibirsk is reputed to have the greatest flow of freight of any line in the world.
When I started researching this book, I was aware that this was an exceptional railway, because of the amazing engineering that went into building it. I realized that it was the lifeblood of its region and I knew that it had been the focus of numerous wars. However, I was unaware that it is so much more than that and that its impact extends far beyond Siberia. There can be no other railway that has had such a profound influence on the history of not only the nation in which it was built, but that of the world. The Trans-Siberian is well known as the longest railway in the world. It is less well understood that it was the railway line that did most to create today’s geopolitical system. It is a heavy burden for a humble iron road.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This list is just a short taster to further reading, focussing mostly on my sources for this book. There are, in fact, few books in English on the Trans-Siberian, and no modern history, apart from short accounts in the various guides. The main general account is almost fifty years old: To the Great Ocean by Harmon Tupper (Secker and Warburg, 1965), a lovely, eccentric mix of history and anecdote.
Many of the books on the Trans-Siberian describe the author’s journey, and there is a concentration on early accounts soon after construction, when travel on the line was quite an adventure. Among the good ones are Annette M. B. Meakin’s A Ribbon of Iron (BiblioLife, 2009), Arnot Reid’s From Peking to Petersburg (BiblioLife, 2009), and Robert L. Jefferson’s Roughing it in Siberia (Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1987), all of which are available from various sources as modern reprints. From that early period, too, there is the official Guide to the Great Siberian Railway 1900 (edited by A. I. Dmitriev-Mamanov and A. F. Zdziarski), which was reprinted by David & Charles in 1971. Peter Fleming wrote up his diary of a trip in 1934 some years later as To Peking: A Forgotten Journey from Moscow to Manchuria (1952, reprinted by Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2009). Most recently there is Eric Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), a hilarious account of a bleak journey at the height of communism, dodging the minders and being treated to huge banquets.
The best account of the politics leading up to the decision to build the line and the role of the various players is Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Cornell University Press, 1991) by Steven G. Marks, a truly ground-breaking work. The principal advocate of the line, Sergei Witte, wrote some revealing Memoirs of Count Witte (available as a modern reprint), while Theodore H. Von Laue’s Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (Columbia University Press, 1963) explains his wider polic
ies, which were an enormous influence on the final years of the tsarist regime.
The Russo-Japanese War is covered well by Railways and the Russo-Japanese War (Routledge, 2007) by Felix Patrikeeff and Harold Shukman, and there is a useful little handbook on the war, The Russo-Japanese War 1904–5 (Osprey, 2002) by Geoffrey Jukes.
There is a reasonably copious literature on the story of the Trans-Siberian during the Russian Civil War that followed the First World War. Peter Fleming’s The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (1963, reprinted by Birlinn 2001) shows that had he turned his talents to fiction, Fleming would have been the equal of his brother Ian. The American point of view is given in When the United States Invaded Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), and a thorough account of the Japanese role and the politics behind it is given in the academic but excellent Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1922 (Lexington, 2011) by Paul E. Dunscomb.
On the Baikal Amur Magistral or BAM, the feisty septuagenarian Dervla Murphy’s account of her journey with a bicycle along the line in Through Siberia by Accident (John Murray, 2005) interweaves history with her tribulations on the trip. There is a detailed account of the role of the Young Communists in the building of the line in Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of the BAM and Late Soviet Socialism by Christopher J. Ward (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). The thorough account of the history of the line and the wider environment in the Siberian BAM guide (Trailblazer, second edition 2001) by Athol Yates and Nicholas Zvegintzov is particularly enlightening.
The literature in English on Russian railways is not copious, either, and is generally aimed at the trainspotter end of the spectrum. There are two books by J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (George Allen & Unwin, 1964) and Soviet Railways Today (Ian Allan, 1963), both of which have useful background. For early Russian railway history there is Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1845–1855, while Russian Steam Locomotives (1960, reprinted by David & Charles, 1968) by H. M. Fleming and J. H. Price needs no explanation.
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