For a general account of the history of Russia at the time of the construction of the line and its early history up to 1924, Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (Penguin Books, 1998) is peerless. There is also a compelling description of Siberia before the Trans-Siberian and the story of the Decembrists in Christine Sutherland’s The Princess of Siberia (1984, reprinted by Quartet 2001).
There are numerous fabulous gobbets of information in The Trans-Siberian Railway: A Traveller’s Anthology (Century Hutchinson, 1988), edited by Deborah Manley, a book well worth taking on the journey. And for those who do go, the best guide to the Trans-Siberian is undoubtedly Bryn Thomas’s The Trans-Siberian Handbook (Trailblazer, eighth edition, 2012), which has the most detailed route outline and a good history. The Lonely Planet guide, The Trans-Siberian Railway (Lonely Planet Publications, fourth edition, 2012), is very thorough, too.
NOTES
ONE: A Slow Embrace
1 There are different estimates depending on whether the distance is being measured as the crow flies, or on the original railway line, or on the present line after various curves had been cut out.
2 J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (George Unwin & Allen, 1964), p. 19.
3 Harmon Tupper, To the Great Ocean: Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway (Secker & Warburg, 1965), p. 14.
4 Ibid., p. 15.
5 Harry de Windt, From Pekin to Calais by Land (1899; available free online).
6 Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 24.
7 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 8.
8 Ibid., p. 9.
9 One of these involves a change of two hours.
10 Tupper, To the Great Ocean., p. 7.
11 Ibid., p. 138.
12 Quoted in ibid., p. 159.
13 Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 21.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 26.
16 Richard Mowbray Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842–1855 (Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 1.
17 Referred to in chapter 1 of my previous book Fire & Steam: How the Railways Transformed Britain (Atlantic Books, 2007).
18 Quoted in Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 28.
19 Ibid., p. 33.
20 See my previous book, Engines of War: How Wars were Won and Lost on the Railways (Atlantic Books, 2010).
21 Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 32.
22 Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, p. 451.
23 The Times, 10 October 1865.
24 Highlighted in my previous book The Great Railway Revolution (Atlantic Books, 2012).
25 Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, p. 475.
26 Ibid., p. 5.
27 Ibid., p. 6.
28 See my previous book, Engines of War, for an account of the role of this railway.
29 Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 41.
30 Ibid., p. 64.
31 Quoted in ibid., p. 65.
TWO: Holding on to Siberia
1 Eric Newby, The Big Red Train Ride (Penguin Books, 1980), p. 62.
2 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 39.
3 Ibid., p. 40.
4 Ibid., p. 43.
5 Perry McDonough Collins, Siberian Journey: Down the Amur to the Pacific, 1856–1857 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), p. 84.
6 The first was one John Ledyard in the eighteenth century.
7 Marks, Road to Power, p. 46.
8 Ibid, p 49.
9 Ibid., p. 50.
10 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
11 Ibid., p. 33.
12 See my previous book, Engines of War.
13 Marks, Road to Power, p. 39.
14 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 69.
15 Marks, Road to Power, p. 68.
16 Ibid., p. 94.
17 Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 14.
18 Ibid., p. 81.
19 While the total length is 5,750, most of the section east of the Urals had already been built.
20 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 71.
THREE: Witte’s Breakthrough
1 Then called Tiflis.
2 Sergei Witte (ed. Avram Yarmolinsky), The Memoirs of Count Witte (Garden City, 1921), p. 16 (available as a reprint).
3 Ibid., p. 17.
4 Ibid., p. 32.
5 Although technically Witte already had a title.
6 Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, p. 35.
7 Ibid., p. 52.
8 Von Laue, Sergei Witte, p. 77.
9 Ibid., p. 78.
10 Marks, Road to Power, p. 125.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 126.
13 Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, p. 52.
14 Marks, Road to Power, p. 128.
15 Newby, The Big Red Train Ride, p. 68.
16 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 83.
17 Marks, Road to Power, p. 133.
18 Quoted in A. I. Dmitriev-Mamonov and A. F. Zdziarski (eds), Guide to the Great Siberian Railway (1900; David and Charles, 1971), p. 66.
19 Marks, Road to Power, p. 139.
FOUR: Into the Steppe
1 Marks, Road to Power, p. 176.
2 Ibid.
3 See my previous book, The Great Railway Revolution.
4 Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, p. 86.
5 Ibid., p. 89.
6 Ibid., p. 94.
7 Ibid., p. 87.
8 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 101.
9 Ibid.
10 Marks, Road to Power, p. 184.
11 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 115.
12 Cassier’s Magazine, an Engineering Monthly, Volume XVIII (May 1900), p. 33.
13 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 175.
14 Ibid., p. 106.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 112.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 113.
19 Cited in my earlier books Fire & Steam and The Great Railway Revolution.
20 It is, though, barely a 15-minute walk across the river from the station, as I discovered on my trip on the Trans-Siberian in November 2012.
21 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 183.
22 Soon after renamed Sir William Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., which eventually became part of Vickers Armstrong.
23 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 228.
24 Ivan V. Nevzgodine, ‘The Impact of the TS Railway on the Architecture and Urban Planning of Siberian Cities’, in Ralf Roth and Marie Noelle Polino (eds), The City and the Railway in Europe (Ashgarth, 2003), p. 85.
25 Ibid., p. 87.
26 Martin Page, The Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), p. 169.
27 Felix Patrikeef and Harold Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War (Routledge, 2007), p. 3.
28 Quoted in Nevzgodine, ‘The Impact of the TS Railway’, p. 86.
29 Patrikeef and Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War, p. 45.
30 Ibid.
31 Marks, Road to Power, p. 189.
32 Ibid.
33 From Pushechnikov’s account of his work on the line, quoted in Marks, Road to Power, p. 190.
34 Ibid., p. 189.
35 Ibid., p. 130.
FIVE: Travels and Travails
1 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 245.
2 William Oliver Greener in Deborah Manley (ed.), The Trans-Siberian Railway: A Traveller’s Anthology (Century, 1988), p. 60.
3 Ibid., p. 63.
4 Dmitriev-Mamonov and Zdziarski, Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, p. 76.
5 Arnot Reid, From Peking to Petersburg (Edward Arnold, 1899; BiblioLife, 2009), p. 184.
6 Ibid., p. 194. Indeed, I found similar stalls at some stations when I travelled on the line in 2012.
7 This and following references: Rob
ert L. Jefferson, Roughing it in Siberia (Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1897; available in reprint), pp. 104–9.
8 This and subsequent quotes, from Tupper, To the Great Ocean, pp. 253ff.
9 The scrolls have been recently restored for display by the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
10 Page, The Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains, p. 164.
11 Dmitriev-Mamonov and Zdziarski, Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, p. 164.
12 All these are quoted in Page, The Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains, p. 183.
13 This was not unique. The American magnate Jay Gould also used to take a cow with him on his own train – see my previous book The Great Railway Revolution, p. 188.
14 Oliver G. Ready, Through Siberia and Manchuria by Rail (1904; available online at Project Gutenberg), p. 3.
15 Ibid., p. 5.
16 Harry de Windt, ‘A Cure for Insomniacs’, quoted in Manley (ed.), The Trans-Siberian Railway, p. 42.
17 Ibid., p. 42.
18 This and subsequent quotes from Francis E. Clark in Manley (ed.), The Trans-Siberian Railway, p. 82.
19 Annette M. B. Meakin, A Ribbon of Iron (Archibald Constable & Co., 1901; BiblioLife, 2009), p. 21.
20 Ibid.
21 Marks, Road to Power, p. 186.
22 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 252.
23 Marks, Road to Power, p. 187.
24 Ibid., p. 191.
25 Chin-Chun Wang, ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 122, The Far East, (November 1925), pp. 57–69.
SIX: Casus Belli
1 Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, p. 102.
2 Wang, ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’.
3 Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, p. 110.
4 Accounts vary between 3,000 and 5,000.
5 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 330.
6 Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, p. 124.
7 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 341.
8 Cassell’s History of the Russo-Japanese War, Vol. 1 (Cassell, 1905), p. 67.
9 Quoted in Patrikeef and Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War, p. 51.
10 In contrast, the Japanese organized huge feeding stations for their troops on trains heading for the war.
11 Quoted in Patrikeef and Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War, p. 70.
12 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 338.
13 Ibid., p. 337.
14 See my previous book, Engines of War, for a longer development of this theory.
15 Patrikeef and Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War, p. 93.
16 Maurice Baring, With the Russians in Manchuria (Methuen, 1906), p. 184.
17 Patrikeef and Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War, p. 84.
18 Ibid., p. 16.
19 Ibid., p. 117.
SEVEN: The New Siberia
1 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 356.
2 Marks, Road to Power, p. 154.
3 Steven Marks, ‘Conquering the Great East: Kulomzin, Peasant Resettlement and the Creation of Modern Siberia’, in Rediscovering Russia in Asia, Siberia and the Far East (M. E. Sharp, Inc., 1995), p. 28.
4 Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 239.
5 Both quotes from James Simpson, cited in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 264.
6 Jules Legras, En Sibérie (Armand Colin, 1899, but available online), p. 89 (my translation).
7 Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration, p. 145.
8 R. A. F. Penrose, Jr, The Last Stand of the Old Siberia (William F. Fell, Co., 1922), p. 106 (available free online).
9 Ibid., p. 110.
10 Marks, ‘Conquering the Great East’, p. 30.
11 Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration, p. 95.
12 Ibid., p. 7.
13 Ibid.
14 Since fewer arrived in winter, there were periods when the weekly flow reached 25,000.
15 Legras, En Sibérie, p. 89 (my translation).
16 Greener in Manley (ed.), The Trans-Siberian Railway, p. 63.
17 Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 123.
18 It worked by notionally breaking the journey into two, so that the cheaper tariff for produce carried long distances did not kick in.
19 Dmitriev-Mamonov and Zdziarski, Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, p. 79.
EIGHT: Russia all the Way
1 Borghese is quoted in Newby, The Big Red Train Ride, p. 190.
2 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 347.
3 Mrs John Clarence Lee, Across Siberia Alone (John Lane Company, The Bodley Head, 1914), p. 42 (available free online).
4 Ibid., p. 54.
5 From R. L. Wright and Bassett Digby, Through Siberia: An Empire in the Making (Hurst & Blackett, 1913), cited in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 348.
6 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 349.
7 Quoted by Steven Marks in ‘The Burden of the Far East: The Amur Railroad Question in Russia, 1906–1916’, in Sibirica: The Journal of Siberian Studies, Volume 1, Number 1 (1993/4), p. 11.
8 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 370.
9 Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 115.
10 Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 371.
11 Marks, ‘The Burden of the Far East’, p. 18.
12 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 372.
NINE: The Battle for the Trans-Siberian
1 Carl J. Richard, When the United States Invaded Russia: Woodrow Wilson’s Siberian Disaster (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2013), p. 18.
2 Now Brest, Belarus. There were in fact two treaties of the same name, the other one involving Ukraine and the Central Powers.
3 R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (1934; Pan Books, 2002), p. 252.
4 Richard, When the United States Invaded Russia, p. 31.
5 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (1996; Penguin Books, 1998), p. 577.
6 Accounts differ as to whether he was fatally injured or not; as they do, too, over whether the Hungarian assailant was lynched or simply beaten to death.
7 Paul E. Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention (Lexington Books, 2011), p. 50.
8 Richard, When the United States Invaded Russia, p. 46.
9 Peter Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (1963; Birlinn 2001), p. 31.
10 Richard, When the United States Invaded Russia, p. 55.
11 Ibid., p. 88.
12 Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 651.
13 William S. Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure (1931; Peter Smith Publishers, 1941, and available online), p. 90.
14 Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention, p. 93.
15 Cited by Richard, When the United States Invaded Russia, p. 151.
16 Ibid, p. 151.
17 Ibid., p. 153.
18 Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, p. 146.
19 Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure, p. 341.
20 Five of whom are buried in Vladivostok.
21 Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, p. 92.
22 Four of whom are buried in Vladivostok.
23 General Budberg, quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 586.
24 Ibid., p. 652.
25 Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, p. 120.
26 Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure, p. 321.
27 Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 658.
28 Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure, p. 301.
29 Leon Trotsky, My Life (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), p. 326; and available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/1930-lif.pdf.
30 Ibid., p. 325.
31 Ibid., p. 326.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, p. 156.
35 There were platinum and silver, too.
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36 Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, p. 166.
37 Ibid., p. 169.
38 Ibid., p. 170.
TEN: The Big Red Railway
1 Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 52.
2 Ibid., p. 54.
3 Ibid.
4 Arthur Ransome, The Crisis in Russia (1921; available free online via Authorama).
5 Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, p. 63.
6 Ransome, The Crisis in Russia.
7 From Helen Wilson and Elsie Mitchell, Vagabonding at Fifty (Coward-McCann, 1930), quoted in Manley (ed.), The Trans-Siberian Railway, p. 123.
8 From Junius B. Wood, Incredible Siberia (Dial Press, 1928), quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 408.
9 All these quotes from Malcolm Burr’s ‘No Dining Car’ (1930), in Manley (ed.), The Trans-Siberian Railway, pp. 183–4.
10 From Wood, Incredible Siberia, p. 407.
11 From Wilson and Mitchell, Vagabonding at Fifty, p. 123.
12 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 409.
13 Wang, ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’.
14 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p 426.
15 Robert N. North, Transport in Western Siberia: Tsarist and Soviet Development (University of British Columbia Press, 1979), p. 116.
16 David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour in the Soviet Union (Hollis and Carter, 1947), p. 239.
17 Ibid., p. 238.
18 J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (George Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 235.
19 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 407.
20 Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, p. 236.
21 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Phoenix, 2007), p. 356.
22 Thomas Morgan on Suite101.com website.
23 Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 411.
ELEVEN: The Other Trans-Siberian
To the Edge of the World Page 28