Trans-Siberian Railway

• 1. Introduction

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  The Trans-Siberian Railway stretches more than 9,288 kilometers from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, making it the longest railway line in the world. That distance spans eight time zones. A passenger who boards at Yaroslavsky Vokzal in Moscow and rides to the end of the line will spend eight days in motion. What kind of country requires a railway that takes eight days to cross? And how did it come to be built at all, through a landscape of permafrost, river gorges, and political rivalry? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Land Without Roads

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  Nikita Myasnikov launched the first steamboat on the River Ob, a vessel called Osnova, in 1844. That single boat represented a modest breakthrough in a region where roads suitable for wheeled transport were simply rare. For roughly five months of every year, the rivers served as the primary highways. When winter froze them solid, horse-drawn sledges took over, traveling the same river channels now made firm by ice.

  Eastern Siberia's great rivers created a particular problem. The Yenisei, the upper Angara below Bratsk, and the Lena all ran north to south. They could move goods with the current or against it, but they offered almost no help to travelers needing to move east or west. A canal project linking the Ob and the Yenisei was attempted but produced little practical benefit.

  Before 1880, the central government in Saint Petersburg had largely ignored the scattered proposals to build railways across Siberia. Officials pointed to weak commercial conditions, bureaucratic inefficiency, and financial risk. By 1880, however, the volume of rejected and pending railway applications had grown large enough to worry the government. The fear was not economic but political: Siberia was drifting toward the Pacific without reliable links to the Russian heartland. That anxiety turned the question of a trans-Siberian railway from a speculative idea into a state priority.

• 3. The Decision to Build

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  On the 9th of March 1891, the Russian government issued an imperial rescript announcing its intention to construct a railway across Siberia. The task had taken a design process of ten years to reach that moment. Engineers considered a southern route via Kazakhstan, Barnaul, Abakan, and Mongolia, and a northern route through Tyumen, Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Yeniseysk. The line ultimately built followed neither extreme.

  The American entrepreneur Perry Collins had years earlier proposed an Irkutsk-to-Chita railway, supported by Transport Minister Constantine Possiet. Siberia's governor, Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, conducted surveys in the Khabarovsk region partly to advance Russian colonization of the Far East. But it was Tsarevich Nicholas, the future Nicholas II, who inaugurated construction in Vladivostok on the 19th of May 1891.

  Government ministers personally appointed by Alexander III and then Nicholas II supervised the project. The line was divided into seven sections, most of them worked on simultaneously by 62,000 laborers. Baron Henri Hottinguer of the Parisian firm Hottinger and Cie provided financial support; the total cost was estimated at 35 million pounds. The first section, running from Chelyabinsk to the River Ob, was completed at a cost 900,000 pounds lower than anticipated.

  One decision that would shape Siberian geography for generations was the routing around Tomsk. The swampy banks of the Ob near that city made bridging impractical. Planners moved the line 70 kilometers to the south, crossing the Ob instead at Novonikolaevsk, later renamed Novosibirsk. Tomsk received only a dead-end branch line, losing the transit traffic and trade that the main line would have delivered.

• 4. The Problem of Lake Baikal

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  Lake Baikal is more than 640 kilometers long and more than 1,600 meters deep. For the builders of the Trans-Siberian, it was an obstacle with no obvious solution. Until a railway could be built around the lake, the line simply ended on both shores, leaving a gap passengers and cargo had to cross by water.

  The solution was an ice-breaking train ferry called Baikal, completed in 1897, and a smaller companion vessel, the Angara, built in around 1900. Both ships were designed by Russian admiral and explorer Stepan Makarov, who lived from 1849 to 1904. They were constructed at Armstrong Whitworth's yard in Newcastle upon Tyne, then completely disassembled; every part was numbered, packed, and shipped in kit form to Listvyanka, where a dedicated shipyard was built to reassemble them. Their boilers, engines, and some components came not from England but from Saint Petersburg.

  Baikal was a substantial vessel: 64 meters long, equipped with 15 boilers and four funnels, capable of carrying 24 railway coaches and a locomotive on its middle deck. It made a four-hour crossing to link the two railheads. In winter, when ice prevented the ferry from operating, sleighs carried passengers and cargo across the frozen surface.

  The Circum-Baikal Railway, completed in 1904, finally rendered the ferries unnecessary. But rockfalls and derailments on that line meant both ships were kept in reserve until 1916. The Baikal was destroyed by fire during the Russian Civil War. The Angara was eventually restored and is permanently moored at Irkutsk, serving today as an office and a museum.

• 5. War, Revolution, and Steel

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  During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the single-track nature of the Trans-Siberian turned a strategic asset into a liability. Trains traveling east with troops or supplies had to wait in sidings for westbound trains carrying wounded soldiers to clear the line first. The resulting delays limited both the number of soldiers Russia could deploy and the speed with which ammunition and provisions could reach the front. Japanese forces, fighting closer to their own supply bases, were able to attack and advance while Russian commanders waited for reinforcements that the railway could not deliver fast enough.

  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the line took on a different kind of strategic role. The Czechoslovak Legion, a military force stranded in Russia by the collapse of the Eastern Front, used heavily armed and armored trains to seize control of large sections of the railway and, through it, substantial portions of Russian territory during the Siberian Intervention. The legion supported the White Russian government of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, based in Omsk. Their leader, politician Milan Rastislav Stefanik, traveled the full length from Moscow to Vladivostok between March and August 1918. Partisan fighters ultimately weakened the intervention by destroying bridges and sections of track, particularly in the region between Krasnoyarsk and Chita.

  Electrification of the line began in 1929. The entire track was double-tracked by 1939. Both projects were driven by the recognition that the railway's capacity in wartime, and in peacetime, had never matched the demands placed on it.

• 6. World War II and the Pacific Route

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  Between 1939 and 1941, the Trans-Siberian Railway carried rubber from Asia to Germany under the terms of the Soviet-German pact. With German merchant shipping shut down by the Allied blockade, the railway and its Trans-Manchurian branch became the essential link between Germany and Japan. By March 1941, an average of 300 tons of rubber per day was crossing Siberia on its way to Germany.

  At the same time, thousands of Jewish refugees were moving in the opposite direction. Mathematician Kurt Gödel was among those who used the Trans-Siberian to escape Europe. Thousands of Jewish refugees made the journey using Curaçao visas issued by Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk and Japanese visas issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania. Most traveled the railway to Vladivostok, then continued by ship.

  After Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, the flow reversed entirely. The railway became the backbone of what was called the Pacific Route, carrying American Lend-Lease supplies from Vladivostok westward into the Soviet heartland. Japan, despite German pressure, allowed Soviet ships to sail between American ports and Vladivostok unmolested. The Pacific Route ultimately carried as much freight as the North Atlantic-Arctic and Iranian routes combined, though it was restricted to raw materials and non-military goods.

  From 1941 to 1942, the railway was also used to displace entire Soviet industries eastward, moving factories from European Russia to Siberia ahead of the German advance. When an Anglo-American delegation visited Moscow in October 1944 to discuss Soviet entry into the war against Japan, General Antonov and Stalin told the visitors that the line could handle 36 pairs of trains per day, though only 26 could reliably be counted on for military traffic, each carrying between 600 and 700 tons.

• 7. A Complicated Legacy

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  Siberian grain was already moving westward before the railway was complete. From 1896 to 1913, Siberia exported an average of roughly 501,932 metric tons of grain and flour annually. The arrival of the Trans-Siberian also brought millions of people: between 1906 and 1914, about four million peasant-migrants from western Russia and Ukraine arrived in Siberia.

  But the historian Christian Wolmar has argued that the railway was, in fundamental terms, a failure. It was built for narrow political reasons, with poor oversight and planning. The costs were inflated to benefit corrupt bureaucrats. Siberian soil proved too infertile and the climate too harsh to support the dense settlement the planners had imagined; little settlement took root beyond about 30 miles from the line itself. The single-track construction meant that the railway buckled under the weight of wartime traffic, a weakness Japan factored into its strategy in 1904.

  Wolmar quotes a blunt assessment of the initial build: lightweight rails that broke easily, insufficient ballast, railroad ties carved from green wood that rotted within the first year, small bridges of soft pine that decayed quickly, and embankments too shallow and narrow that washed away in the rains. Wheel flanges on rolling stock wore out after as little as six weeks of use. The railway reached Vladivostok and connected a continent, but the gap between its ambitions and its execution shadowed it from the beginning.

  Electrification, completed in 2002, allowed train weights to double to 6,000 tons. Projections at the time anticipated a 40 percent increase in rail traffic as a result of that upgrade.

• 8. The Route Today

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  A cargo container moving from Beijing to Hamburg via the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian lines can make the journey in as little as 15 days, though typical transit times run considerably longer. From Japan to major European Russian destinations, reported cargo transit times have averaged around 25 days. In early 2009, Russian Railways announced a plan called Trans-Siberian in Seven Days, proposing an investment of 11 billion dollars over five years to reduce goods transit across the roughly 9,000-kilometer route to one week.

  On the 11th of January 2008, China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Germany agreed to collaborate on a regular cargo train service between Beijing and Hamburg. Under the 2009 rate schedule, the railway was offering to transport a 40-foot container to Poland from Yokohama for 2,820 dollars, or from Busan for 2,154 dollars.

  Meanwhile, the Baikal-Amur Mainline, the fourth primary route departing from Taishet and reaching the Tatar Strait at Sovetskaya Gavan, was only completed in 1991 after more than five decades of sporadic work. Proposals continue to circulate for extending the network to Tokyo, via bridges or tunnels linking the Russian island of Sakhalin to the Japanese island of Hokkaido, a connection that would add a new chapter to a system already more than a century in the making.