But the problem remained as to how to make Russia and Siberia one.
14
THE IRON ROAD TO WAR
Muravyov-Amrsky’s vision of Siberia as a land of opportunity with unlimited potential may have been shared by some other officials, yet nothing lasting had been done to lend substance to the dream. Not until almost the end of the century did the economic and social development of Siberia at last became a priority of the government. And the chief means used to advance it was the building of the stupendous Trans-Siberian Railway (1891-1905).
After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861-63, emigration to Siberia had increased enormously. The one great road across Siberia – the Great Siberia Post Road, or Veliky Trakt – was an unpaved relic of the conquest and early settlement, and though coordinated with a growing river traffic, could scarcely accommodate the new torrent of humanity or meet the basic economic and communication needs of the region. Nor was the network sufficient for the region’s defense, now that neighboring Manchuria and Korea were both coveted by an awakening Japan.
The United States had opened the world’s first transcontinental railway in 1869, followed by the Canadian Pacific in 1885. The binding of British Columbia to eastern Canada seemed especially analogous to what Russia needed to do to at last make European Russia and Siberia one.
The idea was not entirely new. Muravyov-Amursky had suggested linking the Amur River Valley with the sea by rail, and in 1857 an American millionaire and world traveler, Perry McDonough Collins, had proposed a short line from Irkutsk to Chita, to join the Amur River Valley with that of the Yenisey. “Reflecting on the vast extent of the country, its mighty rivers... the magnitude of its natural resources, and with its possible value to the commerce of the world,” he pictured the Amur River as “the destined channel by which American commercial enterprise was to penetrate the obscure depths of Northern Asia, and open a new world to trade and civilization.”573
Collins’s enthusiasm found a sympathetic ear at the U.S. Department of the Treasury – well connected, he had made his fortune in banking with the brother of Ulysses S. Grant – which vaguely appointed him “Comercial Agent of the United States at the Amoor River.” In 1856 he sailed for St. Petersburg, met Amursky (who gave him every encouragement), and after a winter journey of 3,500 miles (in which he had to change horses 200 times), became the first American to set foot in Irkutsk since the Connecticut Yankee John Ledyard had been arrested there as a spy. From Irkutsk he went to Chita, visited the silver mines of Nerchinsk and the gold deposits near the Onon River, and boarded a steamer down the Amur to Nikolayevsk. As he passed through the river valley, he admired the “majestic cliffs streaked with iron, the shore well-timbered with pine and, somewhat farther downriver... meadows carpeted with shoulder-high grass.” All around he beheld wild game in abundance. Although the area was Russian by treaty, its wilderness suggested a no-man’s-land, and in fact the Chinese still pretended to some jurisdiction. From time to time a Manchu official, “distinguished by a cap sporting a peacock feather, two black squirrel tails, and a white ball,”574 would row out to the barge and, passing his hand repeatedly across his throat, indicate Collins had better turn back if he didn’t want to lose his head. But on July 10,1857, he reached Nikolayevsk safely, took an opium pill to ensure a good night’s sleep, and called on the Russian rear admiral in charge of the region the following morning.
Meanwhile, Amursky had received Collins’s “Amoor Railroad Company” proposal, and had referred it to the Minister of Ways of Communication in St. Petersburg with his endorsement. The Siberian Committee, however, recently created to study major questions bearing on Siberian affairs, decided the undertaking was “premature,” in part because its fanciful cost estimates omitted any serious discussion of logistical or technical problems to be encountered in the engineering task.
Disappointed, Collins sailed home to the United States, only to return a few years later with another grandiose Russian project to promote. Backed by Western Union, it was Collins who became the driving force behind the round-the-world overland telegraph scheme that first brought George Kennan to Siberia in 1865.
The debate about a Siberian railway went on without result in the Russian government for several years, but by 1875 it was accepted in principle that there should at least be a through trunk line from Moscow to Irkutsk. A first link in that line, from Perm on the Volga through Yekaterinburg in the Urals to Tyumen, was completed in 1885, and in 1886 construction was also begun on a line from Samara northeastward through Zlatoust to Chelyabinsk. Thereafter it was more or less agreed to eventually connect the major towns and cities, located on the major rivers, in Southern Siberia by rail. Some urgency was lent to the matter by increasing reports of Chinese infiltration into the Transbaikal, but the strategic vulnerability of the region was also recognized more clearly than ever now as a consequence of its general neglect. On the three hundredth anniversary of the conquest of Siberia by Yermak, Alexander III suggested that “the vast and rich Siberian region” would soon be “in a position indivisibly together with [Russia] to enjoy similar institutions of state and society, the benefits of enlightenment, the increase of industrial activity to the general good and glory of our beloved fatherland.”575 But four years later (1886), in the margin of a report from his governor-general of Eastern Siberia, he exclaimed: “I must own with grief and shame that up to the present the Government has done scarcely anything to meet the needs of this rich but forsaken country. It is time, it is high time!”576
In fact, it was too late. For the pace of events would now outrace all that the imperial will could do.
Surveys of possible routes were hurriedly begun; to keep construction costs down (Alexander III was an exceptionally tight-fisted monarch), it was decided to adopt building standards well below those used elsewhere in Russia and the West. The line was to have one track, and corners were to be cut on the quality and quantity of all materials used, including ties, rails, and roadbed ballast. This also meant bridges of wood rather than steel or stone – except across the widest rivers, which required long, costly metal spans – and depots and stations of the crudest design. Steep gradients and sharp curves were also tolerated to avoid tunneling or cutting through hills.
The preliminary design of the route was: from Chelyabinsk in the Urals (designated the first station of the great new railway), eastward in a nearly direct line through the heart of Southern Siberia, linking all the principal towns that had grown up along the original post road from the Ural Mountains to Irkutsk. Then the line was to loop around Lake Baikal, descend the Stanovoy Mountains through the Transbaikal to Sretensk, and down the Amur River Valley all the way to Vladivostok.
The one anomaly in the route was that it bypassed Tomsk – at the time Siberia’s fastest-growing city – but did so by design: Tomsk was a hotbed of regionalist sentiment, and by disconnecting it, in a sense, from the mainline of Siberia’s future communication and growth, the government punitively hoped to keep the separatist movement from gathering force.
On May 12, 1891, an imperial edict authorizing construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was promulgated on the shores of the Pacific at Vladivostok by the tsarevich, Grand Duke Nicholas, hier to the throne. On May 19, Nicholas pushed a wheelbarrow full of dirt along a plank and emptied it upon an embankment: the work had begun.
No tsar or tsarevich before him had ever visited Siberia, and Nicholas’s very presence seemed to herald the end of official neglect. “Every town he passed through erected a triumphal arch to commemorate the occasion,” we are told, and Cossacks “crowded on the cliffs of the Amur to shout hurrahs as he passed.”577 Wherever he performed the slightest official function, or paused to dine, or spent the night, brass plates would later mark the spot, and “on a hill outside Chita, a pillar was inscribed: ‘Here our master deigned to accept bread and salt.’ ”578 All this must have been quite gratifying to the tsarevich, whose recent grand tour of Greece, Egypt, India, Indochina, and Japan had been brought to an untriumphant conclusion when a saber-wielding fanatic in Tokyo had nearly struck him down.