What Was the Trans-Siberian Railway?
The Trans-Siberian Railway is a network of railway lines running 9,289 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific. It was built between 1891 and 1916, and for a long time it was the longest railway in the world. The construction was begun in May 1891 by Tsarevich Nicholas (the future Nicholas II), who turned the first sod at the harbour in Vladivostok; the line was completed on 18 September 1916, when the last bridge over the Amur was finished, and the through route finally lay on Russian soil (see Marks, The Road to Power, 1991).
The setting
The idea of a trans-Siberian railway had been discussed since the 1850s, but it was the strategic crisis of the 1880s that pushed it forward. Russia’s Far Eastern possessions — Outer Manchuria, the Amur region, the Maritime Province — were at the end of a 6,000-kilometre overland route that took months to traverse. The Russian attempt to build a rail line through Chinese territory in the 1880s, the Chinese Eastern Railway project, had been vetoed by China. Sergei Witte, the minister of finance from 1892, made the all-Russian line his priority, and the imperial treasury financed the bulk of the construction (Westwood, The Great Railway Era, 1964).
The construction
The line was built simultaneously from three directions: from Chelyabinsk east to the Pacific; from Vladivostok west; and from the middle of Siberia outward. The first through route, the so-called “Trans-Siberian proper” running through Manchuria on a branch of the Chinese Eastern Railway, was completed in 1903; the all-Russian route took another thirteen years, with the Amur line through the new town of Svobodny and the long bridge over the Amur finished only in 1916.
The conditions were brutal. The permafrost and the vast distances of the taiga required techniques the Russian engineers had not used before: the rail was laid on specially designed sleeper-pads, and the routes around Lake Baikal were re-laid twice. The labour force numbered in the hundreds of thousands: soldiers, convicts, and migrant workers from European Russia, China, and Korea. The mortality rate was high, particularly in the early years. The construction also produced the Siberian cities — Novosibirsk (founded 1893 as a railway camp), Khabarovsk, Tynda — that would come to dominate the region (Marks, 1991).
The impact
The railway transformed Siberia. The Siberian population, which had been about 5 million in 1897, was about 10 million by 1914 — a doubling in less than twenty years. The Kuznetsk Basin (Kuzbas) coalfield, opened in 1896, became the industrial base of central Siberia. The railway also made possible the settlement of the Far East: Vladivostok, the terminus, grew from a small military post in 1860 to a city of 84,000 in 1913. The railway was the chief artery of the Russian Far East and a central element of the 1904-1905 war effort against Japan — although it was the fact that the Amur line was not yet complete that contributed to the Russian defeat (Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun, 2001).
The line was also a financial gamble. The Russian treasury spent about 1.4 billion rubles on the project, and a great deal of the equipment — rails, locomotives, cars — was imported from Germany and the United States. The line was, however, a financial success. It carried about 5 million tons of freight in 1913, and the revenue paid the running costs. The Russian treasury took the construction as the centrepiece of its 1890s industrialisation, and Witte’s gold-standard reforms of 1897-1899 were timed to the completion of the line (Gatrell, The Great War and the Russian Economy, 2005).