Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes

by Peggie Benton

  At this moment, a stone glanced off the window pane. We couldn’t see who had thrown it. Someone as uncultured as ourselves, it seemed.

  The line was now running through a gloomy forest, the primeval Taigá, which covers thousands of square miles in Central Siberia, forming an almost impassable barrier between the rivers. The men who built the line, the biologist told us, had to struggle with soil which, in the deep shadow, remained frozen until midsummer and then turned, briefly, into a swamp which swallowed up the tree trunks laid side by side to provide access roads for rails and sleepers. Trees, whose roots lost their grip as the surface water drained away, crashed suddenly to the ground. Unfortunately, their wood was too brittle to serve for construction, and timber for sleepers, poles and buildings had to be brought from the Kurgan forests three or four hundred miles away. But to avoid the danger of fire from the sparks produced by the locomotives, the useless timber had to be cleared in a swathe two hundred and fifty feet wide.

  In this part of the world the temperature drops in winter to –50°F, whilst at Krasnoyarsk, a little further along the line, temperatures of –67°F have been recorded. We were fortunate to be travelling in early September, avoiding the heat of the Siberian summer as well as the winter cold.

  Another pair of trains, buckled and intertwined, were lying at the side of the track. Apparently, the accident rate for goods trains on the Trans-Siberian has always been high, owing to overloading and careless handling, and the harsh conditions endured by engine drivers and brakemen. Passenger trains had a better record, the biologist assured us.

  The Taigá, with its history of misery and frustration, had already depressed our spirits, and the day was to end horribly. In the inconsequential way to which we were becoming accustomed, we pulled up opposite a siding. A cattle train was standing there, its unglazed windows heavily barred and revealing wooden shelves running the length of each waggon. On the shelves lay creatures so gaunt and unkempt that unless they wore beards it was hard to tell whether they were men or women. Hands like claws, and arms and legs with the skin stretched tight across the bones were thrust through the bars, either in an effort to change an intolerably cramped position or to bring a little fresh air to aching limbs. The spectacle was so horrific that it was hard to believe that it was real. It was a measure of the lack of organization for tourists at that time that our train was carelessly allowed to draw up beside these tragic victims.

  ‘They must be criminals or dangerous subversives, at least,’ I thought.

  Untourist had come up and was standing beside us, obviously embarrassed.

  ‘What have they done?’ we asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied in a low voice. ‘Just gone for a walk.’

  ‘Pogulat’ or ‘go for a walk’ was the accepted euphemism for changing jobs without having a signature in one’s labour book to show than an employer had given permission. It was only one of many grounds for condemnation to a labour camp.

  We had known of the chaos caused by the savage regulations introduced into Latvia after the Soviet annexation: how the workers, embittered by the loss of their social rights and the mismanagement of the Communist political appointees in the factories, goaded by an intolerable piecework system, forced into unpunctuality and abseenteeism by food shortages and the need to forage for their families, and unimpressed by Communist Party incentives, had taken to a go-slow which was entirely foreign to their natures. Thousands of men from the Baltic States had been carried off to labour camps in Siberia, but we had not thought to see a living example of their sufferings.

  That night, as we lay wakeful, haunted by the sight of the unfortunate prisoners, the train raced at speed along the track, swaying and creaking and hooting frequently. We hoped that the driver was keeping a close eye on the signals.

  Our route from Riga to Vladivostok, via the Trans-Siberian Railway

  When we woke next morning the dark Taigá had vanished. The rich black earth was cultivated in a sporadic way, and in the villages the hay stacks were larger than the biggest houses. Patches of vegetables and the cold blue-green leaves of cabbages filled the hollows. On bare grassy slopes cattle were pastured. Behind them rose the dun-coloured mountains of Mongolia.

  To our regret, the identity problem of the two attendants had been temporarily solved. The man on duty, his face swollen with toothache, crouched by the samovar. Pushkin lay unheeded on the floor beside him. There was no doubt now which of the attendants was which.

  ‘Isn’t there anyone on the train who can help you?’ we asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Here are some aspirins. Take two now and two in three hours’ time. You must get help in Krasnoyarsk.’

  The biologist had joined our morning conversation group and Mr Shimada was asking why the line did not go through Tomsk, once the most important city in Siberia.

  ‘They say the city fathers refused to pay the bribe demanded by the surveyors,’ said the biologist, ‘so they punished them by taking the line sixty miles south of the town.

  This kept the track straight, saving over fifty kilometres of railway line, so the authorities in St Petersburg accepted it as an economy measure. But it was evident that such an important town could not be left isolated and finally a branch line was built. This required the labour of twenty-nine thousand men and the total cost was far higher than that of a direct line through Tomsk.’

  The treatment of Tomsk was only one example of a trend, and many stations were sited at a distance from the towns they served. Of course this suited the local carriers, but was so inconvenient for everyone else that it really seems as though bribery—or rather the lack of it—was involved. The Siberian towns are now growing at such a rate that in many cases they must have flowed out to meet the once distant stations, but one can hardly credit the surveyors with so much foresight.

  The town of Krasnoyarsk was coming into view, dominated by what looked like a detached steeple, but was in fact a chapel built by a 19th century gold miner on a spur of rock above the river. The line ran through a confusion of wooden sheds and stacks of timber leading to a large repair depot, the graveyard of hundreds of locomotives in every stage of decay, some slowly rusting away, others stripped to their bare ribs. Rims and spokes of discarded wheels lay scattered on the ground. The town itself had a dreary air.

  ‘Krasnoyarsk is one of the most blissful regions on the entire earth,’ de Fries had written two hundred years earlier. ‘No place in the world can be found, I believe, where food is so abundant or so cheap as it is here.’ However, the inhabitants, he observed, had greatly dishonoured benevolent nature by their revelry, idleness and debauchery.

  We walked disconsolately up and down beside the train much as one trudges round the deck on a grey day at sea, hating every minute but doggedly resolved on exercise. At the far end of the platform stood a large wooden notice board covered with photographs, dog-eared and faded by sun and rain. Without exception, the expressions of both men and women were gloomy and even ferocious.

  ‘It must be a Wanted List,’ said Barbara. ‘But a funny place to put it. Perhaps they hope to stop the villains escaping by train.’

  ‘Those are Stakhanovite workers,’ Dorothy corrected her. ‘They have special privileges for working harder than anybody else.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as though they enjoyed it very much,’ Barbara said.

  Instead of the usual coat of aluminium paint the standard railway station statues of Lenin and Stalin had been treated to electric blue, and the railway sheds were plastered with Communist slogans.

  ‘Either the inhabitants of Krasnoyarsk are unusually enthusiastic supporters of the Party or the authorities are having a bit of bother with the idleness de Fries talked about,’ suggested Nick.

  The face of our unfortunate attendant had swollen until one eye was scarcely visible.

  ‘We must find someone to help him,’ we told Untourist. Very unwillingly he wandered away into the station, return
ing with a nurse carrying a small black bag. She made the attendant open his mouth, ran a heavy hand round the swollen jaw and hurried away. That was the last we saw of her. At our request for aspirins she had just shaken her head.

  ‘We’ve enough to keep him going until we reach Irkutsk,’ Dorothy said. ‘Let’s hope they do something there.’

  ‘Have you been able to sleep?’ we asked the poor fellow. He shook his head. But after two sleepless nights he still carried on with his work uncomplaining.

  Men with Mongolian faces and fur-lined hats with naps upturned were climbing onto the train. ‘Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok,’ bellowed the tannoy, and the train moved off to cross the broad Yenisei on a twin eight-span bridge forty feet high, reinforced upstream to withstand the battering of the ice floes in spring.

  ‘The bridges are an amazing feet of engineering,’ said the biologist, who had joined us as we looked out of the window. ‘Most of the stone work was done by Italians who must have suffered torments in the Siberian winter. The cost of the bridges was alarmingly high—not just in money but in human lives. Men stiffened with cold as they worked on the high spans and crashed down onto the ice below.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The official story was one life for every million roubles spent, but losses must have been very much higher. The contractors went on drawing the wages of the men who died and no one will ever know the truth.’

  ‘The wicked capitalist system?’ I enquired.

  ‘It is human nature that is wicked,’ said the biologist quietly.

  ‘Everything was sacrificed to speed, and to save time the engineers went on ahead building the line.’

  ‘But how did the passengers get across in the meantime?’

  ‘In summer they were carried over on ferries attached to a cable which was fixed from bank to bank. A train was waiting on the opposite side. When the rivers froze, rails were laid over the ice. To lessen the weight, passengers used sledges and the train crossed very slowly. Between seasons the service had to be suspended, sometimes for weeks until the ice floes cleared, or the winter freeze-up was sufficient. The bridges caught up with the line remarkably quickly, considering the difficulties and the danger involved.’

  We looked back across the swiftly flowing Yenisei to the town of Krasnoyarsk. Against the limitless background of Siberia the squalid spread of the town, which would have been more evident against the narrower skies of White Russia, became insignificant.

  The train was climbing slowly through small-forest country with scattered pines and groves of stunted birches, their golden leaves beginning to fall. Here and there a bush, turned crimson, smeared the gold and silver of the birches with a streak of blood. Next morning we woke to drizzling rain and were happy to settle in for a morning with Mr Shimada. He was now busy teaching us as much Japanese as he thought we could assimilate before arriving in his country—and this was very little.

  However, we were getting an idea of the immensely hierarchical approach of the Japanese to their language. His pencil flickered over the pages of my sketchbook making complicated designs to show that a wife must use a more respectful form of address to her husband than he to her, whereas both, in their appropriate degree, used less polite forms when talking to a servant. Child-parent conversations were conducted in yet another way. If there had been the slightest hope of our learning enough words to make use of these complicated instructions we might have been worried. As it was, we listened charmed, and wondered what he must have made of manners in Moscow, his first foreign post. The Shimada family fortune was founded on a brewery, it seemed, and he assured us that they also made excellent whisky.

  ‘How sad that your wife can’t enjoy it,’ I commented slyly.

  The rain had stopped, leaving a dreary landscape made even drearier by the mud. We halted at a coal-mining town with gaunt winding gear surrounded by slag heaps. Rolling stock appeared to be in short supply, as a train of box cars was being used to transport coal, which was held in by boards placed across the window openings. I thought of the sessions with Our Friend and wondered if these mines had been the subject of a self-criticism feature lately, and how far they were behind with their targets.

  We were approaching Irkutsk, a distance of three thousand five hundred miles from Moscow. Fifty years earlier, passengers using the fastest post horses available had taken thirty-five days for the trip, averaging four miles an hour against our thirty miles per hour.

  The train drew into the station and people were jumping off before it stopped, rushing to form the usual queue for a newspaper. Another gallery of grim Stakhanovite faces stared down at us. Just behind the engine sheds stood a parachute tower, looking like something left behind by a travelling circus. In this case, the amusement provided had a strictly practical purpose.

  The station platform was heaped with mud over which the passengers slithered, but across the river, between massive new buildings, one could glimpse clustered domes and painted spIres.

  During the belle époque Irkutsk was christened the Paris of Siberia, but it would have been more apt to call it the ‘Manaus’.

  Though the two cities were on opposite sides of the world, one isolated in the frozen wastes of Siberia and the other in the steaming rain forests of the Amazon, their origins and way of life were very similar. Irkutsk grew out of the gold rush and Manaus was founded on the rubber boom. The big spenders of both cities built themselves fabulous mansions, sent their laundry to Paris and wore Parisian clothes and jewellery. Manaus built an opera house which was visited by international stars, whilst the inhabitants of Irkutsk paid for a splendid theatre and two permanent companies to play there all the year round. Racketeering was common in both cities, though the streets of Manaus were far less dangerous than those of Irkutsk, which were infested with bandits and garotters. Whilst the streets of Irkutsk were unpaved and ankle-deep in mud or dust when they were not covered with ice, the pavements in Manaus were patterned in black and white mosaic and there was a brisk tramway service and a band of women street cleaners under the competent direction of a Scotsman.

  But while Manaus, when the rubber boom collapsed, faded into a ghost town which has only recently come back to life, Irkutsk, invigorated by the new railway, grew even more important.

  Besides being essential for the development of Siberia the railway was urgently needed for strategic reasons. By the end of the century it was clear that Japan was a serious rival to Russian expansionist plans in the Far East and might even menace Russian domination of her conquered territories there. Men and supplies for the Far East had all to be sent by ship from the Black Sea through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, taking a minimum of forty-two days, so a more rapid link was essential for defence purposes. But however many thousands of miles of the Trans-Siberian were completed, the line would not serve for the rapid transportation of troops and supplies until it was viable throughout its entire length.

  By 1896 only forty-two miles separated the railhead at Irkutsk from Lake Baikal, whose further shore had already been reached by the eastern section of the railway. The Angara, the only river flowing out of the lake, takes a swift northward course, dividing the city of Irkutsk on the east bank from the railway station on the west. The terrain on the east side of the river offered an easier route for the railway but the surveyors considered that the cost of building a bridge to take the railway over to Irkutsk, and another to bring it back to Port Baikal at the point where the Angara leaves the lake, would be excessive. A survey of the west bank was carried out, unfortunately at a time when the terrain was blanketed under an exceptionally heavy snowfall, and no account was taken of the depth of the ravines to be crossed or the swiftness of the current, which gouged at the river bank. (From the windows of the train we had seen how the scour of the water had cut away the shore so that the wooden houses built near the edge were falling, one after another, into the water. The current at Irkutsk was so rapid that men fishing from barges moored in the river could use it to keep their sp
inner revolving on the surface.)

  For four years the railway gangs toiled, building over fifty bridges, blasting the permanent way out of rock in some places, and making miles of retaining wall in others. By 1900 they reached Port Baikal.

  It had always been recognized that the southern end of Baikal, with its clifls falling sheer into immensely deep water, would present formidable problems to the engineers. A hundred and sixty-two miles of track were needed to link the two points reached by the eastern and western sections of the railway. In view of the daunting expense involved the authorities decided to bridge the gap by using ferries.

  A magnificent ice-breaker, the BAIKAL, which would carry trains from Port Baikal to Mysovsk, a distance of only about forty miles, was ordered from a shipbuilder in Newcastle. It would provide luxury accommodation for a hundred and fifty first and second class passengers, and deck space for six hundred others. The vessel was taken in pieces to a small shipyard at Listvyanka opposite Port Baikal, where it was assembled and launched in 1899. Another lighter vessel, the ANGARA, was built and sent over in the same way, but as soon as the ice thickened to a winter depth of five feet she was unable to make any headway unless the larger BAIKAL went ahead to open a passage. Even in summer navigation was not easy. At times great fog banks formed over the lake. At others, storms whipped the water into huge waves.

  The authorities decided that the Circum-Baikal loop must somehow be built, and in 1901 work was started. Thirty-three tunnels had to be blasted through the cliffs, sometimes for long distances, and a couple of hundred bridges built to carry the line over torrents and ravines. Unfortunately for the Russians, the Japanese, in February 1904, fearing that the completion of the Circum-Baikal loop would not long be delayed, attacked the Russian Fleet without warning, and the Russo-Japanese war began.

  My father, who was in Russia shortly after this, had told me how Prince Khilkov, realizing that urgently-needed supplies for the army would pile up at the bottleneck at Port Baikal, laid rails across the ice. The temperature was –40°F and tests had shown that the ice cover was thick enough to support rail traffic. But Baikal is treacherous: warm springs produce weak spots here and there and through one of these the first locomotive plunged. After this, rolling stock, lightened of all non-essential parts, was towed across the ice by ropes. The officers crossed in commandeered sledges and the men on foot, a march which even to Tankhoi, the nearest point on the opposite bank, could take as much as thirteen or fourteen hours. The great rifts in the ice, possibly caused by submarine currents, which occur without warning, were a further hazard. One of these buckled great sections ofline, tearing the rails loose from the sleepers. To spread the load, thirty-foot lengths of timber were laid at right-angles beneath the track.