There were cars for families and cars for single men. The former were simply stables on wheels. In them, three human generations – grandparents, the man and his wife in their prime, the children – and the population of their little farmyard back in Russia. Three cows and half a dozen sheep lie in straw and knee deep filth, munching hay and green stuff. Bales of hay and straw are stacked to the roof, the home of the wandering fowls and turkeys and ducks. A couple of big lean dogs crouch in a corner.... Goods and chattels are disposed here and there, chairs are placed around the rude table, a lamp and even a pair of religious prints hang on the wall.... The single men’s quarters are populated by an intimidating band of ruffians, bareheaded, barefooted, shaggy bearded creatures with flat animal faces and wild, bloodshot eyes, one’s conception of a shipwrecked crew after ten years on the desert island.631
Some 35 million acres in the Barabinsk Steppe – “in summer, a mosquito-infested jungle of reeds, sedge grass, and stagnant lakes and ponds between Omsk and Novonikolayevsk”632 – was cleared and drained by the government; more arid areas were irrigated by canals.
In 1894, about two-thirds of the emigrants that year settled in Tomsk Province and most of the rest in the steppe region of Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk. A few thousand others ventured east as far as Irkutsk, or embarked at the Black Sea port of Odessa for the Ussuri Valley by sea. By 1896, the valley of the Yenisey had-also become popular, with many settling around Minusinsk and Kansk; and by 1900, others were prepared to brave an overland journey all the way to the Far East – formerly a two- to four-year trek by road, but by rail reduced to just a few weeks. Even so, to encourage settlement the government divided the area into 80-acre lots (about twice the size of the average homestead), with 20 percent of all the migrants who crossed the Urals in 1907 making the trip. In some cases the allotments were as much as 160 acres – equal to the generous norm established in America under the Homestead Act. By 1914, almost 2 million Russians had settled in the Far East, the majority in Transbaikalia, but over 300,000 in the Amur River Valley as well.
Altogether, up to 7 million peasants entered Siberia from 1823 to 1914, with 750,000 making the trip in 1908 alone. This mass migration over the Urals, as one historian has pointed out, was “one of the greatest such movements in history... surpassed only by the greatest of all historic time which brought 35 million people in a century from Europe across the Atlantic to the United States.”633 The Trans-Siberian brought most of them in, and sustained them as well, with seed grain, food to tide them over until the harvest, implements, lumber for cabins on Siberia’s great southern plains – in short, with all the supplies and materials they required to establish a new life.
Not only did the railway vastly increase the population, but it changed its complexion, as the proportion of Russians to other ethnic groups reached 86 percent. Economically, it encouraged specialization and facilitated the exchange of goods over large areas. The sudden accessibility of distant markets stimulated agriculture and dairy production, led to an expanded fishing industry on the Pacific Coast, and enabled innumerable cottage industries to thrive. It also helped to open the country to competition, which meant an end to long-standing monopolies exercised by Siberian merchants on some consumer goods, and a more rapid development of Siberian industry because the cost of importing machinery and equipment was no longer prohibitively high. Factories and workshops sprang up where none had existed before; new firms began to work rich mineral deposits, especially iron and coal. Millions of pounds of surplus grain from Siberia went for export, as did millions of pounds of surplus high-grade, clarified butter, which was a major Siberian industry even before the Trans-Siberian Railway was built. Danish settlers in Western Siberia introduced new and improved dairy methods, and the increased output soon led to special refrigerator cars and eventually complete butter trains. By 1900, there were more than one thousand dairies in operation, and in 1913 more than four thousand. By 1913 Siberian butter production had exceeded that of Australia and the Netherlands, and had begun to rival Denmark itself.
In short, the Trans-Siberian Railway dramatically transformed the entire area through which it passed, fostering agriculture and industry along the line, and effectively ending Siberia’s colonial status by bringing Vladivostok to within ten days’ journey of the capital. A vast new influx of settlers virtually doubled the population to 10 million in as many years; and after 1907, about a fifth of these settled in the Far East. In parts of Western Siberia (around Tomsk, for example) the population increased nine times. Meat, dairy, and grain production, and prodigious shipments of timber, minerals, and hides all helped bolster Russia’s import and export trade, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg food from Siberia could be found on every plate.
Although Siberia remained rural (only about 12 percent of its population lived in towns) and its industry comparatively small (3.5 percent of the industrial population of the empire in 1908), some of this lag began to be made up by foreign investment. Large gold-mining companies were foreign-financed – by the British, primarily, but also the Germans, Belgians, and French – and the industrial expansion likewise attracted American capital, which participated in railway building and in the manufacture of trolleys, bridges, dry docks, and ships. The International Harvester Company supplied agricultural equipment of all types to Siberia; the Westinghouse Company made air brakes for Russian railway cars in a factory it had opened in Petrograd; the Singer Sewing Machine established itself in Krasnoyarsk and other Siberian railway towns. Parke Davis & Company and Victor Talking Machine were other companies that played a role in Siberian industry and trade.
In 1905, Nicholas ii was the only remaining monarch in Europe who did not share power to some degree with a parliament or other representative assembly. Article I of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire declared his sway absolute, and (with the encouragement of his wife, Alexandra) Nicholas clung to medieval notions of his autocratic power. He was, in fact, far more medieval in his thinking than his grandfather, Alexander II, who (though only vaguely apprehending Russia’s perilous future) had introduced tentative reforms “from above” – most notably, the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the creation of zemstva, or locally elected provincial and county councils in the following year – which happily coincided with the beginnings of an industrial and commercial revolution.
But the abolition of serfdom did not emancipate the peasantry from its desperate poverty, while a new class of poor – the urban proletariat – emerged with Russia’s burgeoning factories and mills. As for representative government, only nobles and bureaucrats were granted a voice, and then only in an advisory capacity, which bred some dissatisfaction even among society’s most privileged coteries. The hopes raised by Alexander’s initial reforms in any case faded as his own enthusiasm for modernization seemed to wane. Frustrated by his inability to relieve the exasperating state of domestic affairs, foreign policy adventures increasingly absorbed him, while day by day revolutionary organizations found a deepening soil in which to thrive. After his assassination, the tsardom under Alexander III had reverted to its age-old insular, Caesaro-papist form; “Nationalism,” “Absolutism,” and “Orthodoxy” were its talismanic words; the national and religious minorities of the empire felt the full weight of the imperial yoke.
Nicholas in turn did nothing to relieve the strain. Infatuated with the autocratic aura and legacy of his forebears, he made clear at the outset of his reign that he regarded popular aspirations for a voice in national policy as “senseless dreams.”634 On this matter alone, perhaps, he and Witte saw eye to eye. “I am an enemy in principle – and I have been so since my youth – to any kind of constitutionalism, parliamentarism, or granting of any measure of political rights whatsoever to the people,” Witte flatly declared. In Witte’s adamant opinion, Alexander II’s zemstvo reform of 1864, which had introduced the principle of representative self-government into Russia, was fundamentally at variance with the principle of autocracy, and would ultimately lead to anarchy.