Whereas the Trans-Siberian in its eastern stretches had relied heavily on the use of low-paid Chinese and Korean labor, Asians this time were deliberately excluded, as Russian laborers were brought in at great expense. This hastened the Russification of the area, although the roughnecks working the line were not the ideal colonizing sort. To maintain order, fourteen companies of troops were attached to the project to reinforce the railway guards.
Vladivostok again came into its own, refortified with massive masonry bulwarks, new heavy artillery, and a garrison of 80,000 men. About 120,000 more were stationed throughout Eastern Siberia. The small Cossack settlement of Sretensk became a booming railhead of ten thousand people; Chita grew from its wartime reputation as the favorite halting place for officers and troops on their way to Manchuria. Along the Ussuri line, villages were also “springing up like mushrooms,” and soon became towns of considerable size.622
Renovations extended down the line. Part of the Trans-Siberian was double-tracked, a branch line laid from Omsk to Tyumen, new warehouses and other storage facilities were built, and wooden bridges were gradually replaced by those of stone and steel. Gradients were also eased, and overall improvements made in the construction and maintenance of the track.
The government was so impressed with the result that it decided to try to lure international travelers to the Trans-Siberian with special, luxuriously appointed trains. These featured locomotives of the latest design, plushly furnished lounge and restaurant cars, where a piano, easy chairs, writing tables, a library, and board games could all be found, carpeted sleeping coupes, a gymnasium car equipped with dumbbells and a stationary bicycle, electric reading lights in each compartment (powered by a steam-driven dynamo in the baggage car), porcelain baths, a darkroom, and even a church car, or “ambulatory basilica,” complete with priest, icons, and a little belfry on the roof.
Such a train was reproduced in amazing miniature (just over a foot long) in the workshop of Peter Carl Faberge in 1900. The tiny locomotive that pulled the cars was gold and platinum, “with a ruby gleaming from its headlight,”623 and started up with the turn of a gold key. More grandly, at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 a simulated State Express, as it was called, was displayed in the Palace of Russian Asia. Conceived as a kind of diorama of Siberia, the exhibit included photomurals of Siberian landscapes, a scale model of the icebreaker Baikal, “stuffed seals and polar bears perched precariously on papier-mache icebergs,” and “reindeer-drawn sledges with fur-clad dummies of Ostyak hunters beside them.”624 Visitors were invited to dine in the restaurant cars, where they could behold a panorama of steppes, mountains, virgin forests, gold mines, churches, and towns sweeping past, courtesy of a mechanized rolling strip of painted canvas produced by set designers at the Paris Opera.
Oddly, the imaginary Trans-Siberian journey took the diner all the way to Peking (perhaps revealing Russia’s ultimate ambitions), where a Chinese porter suddenly appeared to announce the end of the line.
In reality, these trains were never as luxurious as advertised, nor did they attract the hoped-for clientele. But the State Express won some admirers. In 1900 Annette Meakin, the first Englishwoman to travel across northern Asia to Japan by rail, found the private compartments quite comfortably furnished, and at dinner one evening was agreeably entertained by a tenor and a pianist. Another traveler, however, complained that in his train at least the piano served “primarily as a shelf for dirty dishes,” and that the only porcelain tub he could find was in the baggage car, where it was used for the storage of ice, vegetables, and meat.625
In his charge to Nicholas in 1891 as president of the Trans-Siberian Committee, Tsar Alexander III had exalted the railway as a project “to facilitate the peopling and industrial development of Siberia,” and to bring “peace and enlightenment to the East.”626 This theme was repeated in the railway’s official Guide, which proclaimed it part of “the civilizing mission of the Russian government” and the vanguard of “Christianity in Asia.”627 Although it might be wondered what the civilizing mission was of a country that had an illiteracy rate of 80 percent, the lowest standard of living of any nation in Europe, the highest infant mortality rate, and the greatest incidence of syphilis, drunkenness, famine, and epidemic disease, there is no doubt that at the time it was built, the railway itself seemed like “a rainbow joining West and East” and one of the wonders of the world.628 “Whether he looked on it from the political, the strategic or the economic point of view, nobody could deny,” one historian remarked, “that the Trans-Siberian Railway had a certain greatness, a certain exotic nobility of conception, a touch, almost, of Jules Verne.”629
Upon the abolition of serfdom in 1861, many peasant families in the crowded central Russian provinces had set out for Siberia to establish larger homesteads, and to escape the recurrent famines that stalked the land. Before the coming of the railway, they had proceeded miserably on foot on an interminable journey beside horse-drawn carts loaded with all their worldly goods. Once in Siberia, land was plentiful and easily claimed, since large manorial or monastic estates were rare, and most of the land belonged to the Crown, which welcomed almost anyone willing to settle on it and turn it to some account. On the other hand, the migrants were pretty much left to shift for themselves. From 10 to 30 percent of them perished in an attempt to establish a new life, and a rather large proportion of the remainder eventually lost heart and returned home.
By the mid-1880s, the government had decided to intervene. To relieve the overpopulation of parts of European Russia and accelerate the colonization of Siberia’s expanse of untamed land, it established a new and more generous typical family allotment of 140 acres, with tax breaks, an exemption from military service, and long-term interest-free loans to heighten the allure. But more needed to be done. Like exiles they belonged to the world of the forlorn, and en route at least camped in such conditions that typhus and other epidemics spread through their ranks. A large samovar was kept boiling at every station to provide them with hot water for tea, but otherwise they had to provide their own food. “The filth, the rags, the utter woe-begone aspect of the Russian emigrant,” wrote a contemporary American traveler, “is something inconceivable.”630 Moreover, as the numbers increased geometrically with each succeeding line of track, government supervision became more urgent, as thousands were stranded at various wayside stations or encampments, became vagrants, or died.
Beginning in 1893, the government instituted a crash program to improve the transit facilities and entice the emigrants on their way. At the major stations, hospitals, soup kitchens, heated barracks, laundries, bathhouses, and other facilities were established where most of the services were virtually free of charge. By 1898, mortality among migrants of all ages had been reduced tremendously, to perhaps 1 percent, from the 20 percent average of former days. Moreover, the migrant fare was so low (originally 1/5 of a cent per mile, later less, with children under ten traveling free) that for a handful of rubles a family could travel halfway across Siberia.
For those hoping that Siberia would absorb Russia’s surplus population, the traffic volume as far as Irkutsk initially exceeded all expectations. Some 275,000 immigrants crossed the Urals by rail in 1896 and 1897 – mostly in seatless, fifth-class boxcars marked: “For twelve horses or forty-three men.” Indeed, even with increased government assistance, the going was hard. One eyewitness recalled: