trans-siberian

Seven days and seven nights…
 

That’s how long a Trans-Siberian train takes to leave Moscow’s Yaroslavsky station and arrive at the port of Vladivostok 5,770 miles and eight time zones away on the Pacific ocean. 

 

How and why did Russia build the longest railway in the world and what did it change?

 

Russia began to expand into Siberia in the 16th century, enticed by valuable furs. For the next 300 years or so this vast, mysterious region of tall forest, tundra and empty steppe remained an uncharted, inaccessible wilderness. 

 

Apart from the inmates of its labour camps the only inhabitants were reindeer herders, banished political dissidents, fugitives from justice, strange religious sects, escaped convicts, fur trappers, fortune-seeking gold prospectors and murderous footpads. 

 

A popular refrain in Russia’s lawless, freedom-loving wild east was “God is in His heaven and the Tsar is far away.” 

 

While rail networks were spreading through Europe Russian ministers spent years debating how to build and pay for a railway crossing an unimaginable distance to bring order to Siberia. 

 

When work finally began in1891 at the eastern end of the line the engineers in charge faced a lack of roads, wide fast-flowing rivers crossing the route, stubborn undergrowth, patches of permafrost, and towering heaps of snow that turned into squelching mud in spring and steep troughs in summer. 

 

Bridge builders had to be brought in from Italy, peasant labourers came from China and prisoners were offered reduced sentences to work on the line. 

 

Everything was done by hand using tools and wheelbarrows made of wood. One winter rails were frozen in place on Lake Baikal to carry trains across with supplies. Somehow the whole line was completed by 1916.

 

Even before the last gap was closed, prosperous dairy farms sprang up alongside the railway’s route. Its approach alarmed the Japanese who declared war and won. 

 

During the 1917 Russian revolution a Trans-Siberian train took the deposed Tsar Nicholas ll, his wife and their five children to a house in the Urals where a drunken execution squad was to extinguish the Romanov dynasty in an erratic hail of bullets. 

 

Heavily armoured trains clashed on Trans-Siberian rails in civil war battles between Trotsky’s Red Army and fanatical monarchist Cossacks. In Soviet times the Trans-Siberian spawned noxious industrial towns and carried millions of Stalin’s opponents to their doom in his gulag. 

 

Today endless container trains lumber along the line bringing goods from China and the Far East to Europe faster than shipping can. And the Trans-Siberian is still a vital lifeline for Siberian travellers, as well as an ever powerful magnet for railway and Russia buffs.

 

If you are either of those and eventually get to embark on your longed for journey take the book with you as a useful addition. Or stay at home and read it for fresh insights into the notoriously perplexing country that is Russia. 

 

Along the way you will come across some little known stories and meet a colourful cast of characters. Chief among them is the scandal-hit finance minister Sergei Witte who drove the project through and his powerful accomplice, the larger than life, tuba-playing Tsar Alexander III.

 

This edition features many colour illustrations including some of the magical images produced by Sergei Prokudin Gorski, inventor of a three-plate colour process. 

 

In the early 20th century he documented the length and breadth of the Russian empire travelling in a mobile darkroom railway carriage laid on by the last Tsar. 

 

The entire Prokudin Gorski photographic collection is held at the American Library of Congress. View it online  for a fascinating detour.