Despite such obstacles and the primitive equipment at his disposal (including shovels of plain wood “without even a strip of tin on the digging edge”585), by March 1896 Mikhailovsky had built a great stone-piered steel bridge over the Irtysh (which still stands) and carried his track all the way from Chelyabinsk to the Ob.
The central portion – from the Ob to Irkutsk – was supervised by Nikolai Mezheninov, “a plumpish railway veteran with a small, pointed gray beard, bushy eyebrows, and thinning hair en brosse.”586 Laid largely through mountainous taiga, where wolves and bears abounded but human habitation was scarce, its six thousand rails had to be brought in from England by way of the Kara Sea, then up the Yenisey to Krasnoyarsk. From December until July, permafrost gripped the ground to a depth of six feet, and then dissolved into a swamp. Since local manpower was lacking, convicts were requisitioned from Alexandrovsk Prison northwest of Irkutsk, and an incentive system was tried, counting eight months’ work as a year at hard labor and reducing periods of exile. To help build some of the more substantial bridges (over a hundred were required on this section alone), Italian stonemasons were enlisted from Milan. Winter construction on the bridges was particularly hazardous, with a routine calculation of three to four deaths for every million rubles spent, and before the great seven-spanned steel bridge over the Yenisey was complete numerous workmen had slipped to their death from the icy spans. Recessed alcoves were later built into either end where icons (above a receptacle for contributions) were placed to allay the wayfarer’s fears.
To expedite the transportation of supplies, various waterways were deepened, widened, dredged, and blasted free of obstructions, but to avoid the expense of tunnels and cuttings, the line followed a meandering path. In carrying the final section over the mountains to Irkutsk, Mezheninov took remarkable risks in his perfunctory construction of embankments, and in the dramatic gradients and curves. But like Mikhailovsky he completed his task well ahead of schedule (if not within the estimated cost), so that by August 1898, Russia had a Trans-Siberian Railway that went all the way to Irkutsk.
The Transbaikal portion – from Mysovsk on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to Sretensk – was variously delayed by floods and other calamities, and when construction was finally attempted, dynamite had to be used just to open the frozen ground. Encounters with the twisting torrent of the Angara River required fifty bridges over ravines and tributary streams, while the loop around the southern tip of Lake Baikal, almost inaccessibly recessed by overhanging cliffs, was to prove one of the most difficult in railway engineering history. Still, good progress had been made on the line throughout until July 1897, when
mountain torrents and extraordinary heavy downpours flooded the whole river system from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal fto Sretensk and beyond. Rampaging waters demolished embankments and retaining walls and overturned locomotives and other rolling stock. Entire settlements were obliterated at uncounted loss of life. More than two hundred and thirty miles of track were damaged in the Ingoda and Shilka valleys. Near Sretensk, the Shilka undermined a mountain flank and released a landslide that buried newly laid track under tons of earth. Fifteen bridges vanished without trace, while two others were wrecked irreparably. West of Verkhneudinsk, the surging Selenga River swept away great piles of lumber stored on its banks for pier caissons of a future steel bridge.587
Another three years were required to repair all the damage done.
Farther east the problems seemed to mount. On the Ussuri line – from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok – sub-Arctic cold in winter and torrential rains at the onslaught of spring frustrated construction, horses perished from anthrax, men from fever and disease. From time to time, Manchurian outlaws also beleaguered the railway campsites, despite the posting of Cossack guards. Nevertheless, under chief engineer Orest Vyazemsky, regiments of soldiers impressed into service as navvies, three thousand convicts from Sakhalin (granted reduced sentences in return for their labor), and fifteen thousand coolies brought in by sea from North China every spring “cleared a path through dense forests choked with undergrowth and vines, built access roads, drained broad swamps, and blasted cuttings” through basalt cliffs.588 By November 1897, the easternmost portion of the great Trans-Siberian was done.
In the process, Khabarovsk had been transformed from an insignificant hamlet into an important military town; Blagoveshchensk (“Annunciation”), founded in 1858, had acquired a population of twenty thousand, tree-lined streets, and official buildings of whitewashed brick; and Vladivostok had begun to live up to its name – “Lord of the East.” In 1885, it had been a mean frontier town with a population of about 13,000 Russians, Chinese, and Koreans. By 1897, when the Ussuri line opened, that had grown to 30,000, with “frowning earthworks, huge barracks, and bustling warehouses. From dawn to sunset,” wrote a visitor, “the low green hills around the harbor swarm with white-clad soldiers at work on the fortifications. Snake-like torpedo-boats glide noiselessly in all directions, and wicked-looking guns of modern and deadly type peer out of the most unlikely places, for defensive precautions are being carried on with a restless persistence that must eventually crown Vladivostok Queen of Fortresses in the Far East.”589 Many of its buildings were of brick and stone, and in spite of the fact that over the doorway of the railway station it was dolefully printed in old Russian characters: vladivostok to petersburg, 9877 versts (about 6,250 miles), within a few years the city would boast wide paved streets, electric lights, telegraph wires, and railway trains running down to the wharves.
Only the long Amur Valley section and that around Lake Baikal’s southern rim remained to be built. But time was of the essence. By the mid-1890s, a number of colonial powers had begun to consider how China might be divided up into colonies or spheres of influence, after the fashion of Africa. The Pacific had already, in a more general way, been parceled out. Australia and New Zealand belonged to the British, who, with the Germans and French, had “snapped up little chains of islands stretching from New Guinea to Pitcairn.”590 Sakhalin belonged to the Russians, the Kuriles to Japan. The United States was in full possession of Wake, Midway, Honolulu, and Hawaii, and was about to annex the Philippines (in 1898) from Spain. But China was an enormously more appetizing prize. Acting to stake their own claim to the region before a completed Trans-Siberian Railway facilitated the movement of Russian troops and arms to the Far East, in the summer of 1894 the Japanese had attacked and defeated China over their competing claims on Korea, and by the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) forced China to agree to a large indemnity, and to cede both the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and the Liaotung Peninsula, with the ice-free port of Port Arthur at its tip. Germany, France, and Russia united at once to pressure Japan to divest itself of its territorial gains in return for an enlarged indemnity.