125 years ago, on March 17, 1891, Emperor Alexander III signed the rescript. "I command now to begin the construction of a continuous railway across the whole of Siberia, which has to connect the abundant gifts of nature of the Siberian regions with a network of internal communications," the monarch ordered.
The 125th anniversary of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the greatest railway on the planet, is an occasion to recall some facts of economic geography that made this railway not only a guarantee of the preservation of the integrity of Russia, but also a factor of global importance.
Europe and Asia are the parts of the world with the maximum "economic potential difference". This means that the international division of labor presupposes the highest level of exchange between them. Those who complain today that the flow of goods from the APEC countries turns off European production and does not allow the balance of trade balances with China and Korea to be equalized, perhaps, would be very surprised to learn that this problem is more than two thousand years old. Even Pliny the Elder and Tacitus were indignant about "… the irrepressible flow of national wealth to the insatiable East." Ancient Rome could not do without Chinese silk, oriental spices, but did not find a single commodity that was so necessary for the East, except for silver and gold.
In the 19th century, historian Karl Vejle calculated the imbalance in the trade balance in ancient times: 100 million sesterces annually! And he even translated the ancient Roman currency into modern German marks: 22,000,000. “This led to a complete state bankruptcy and a shortage of precious metals in the last period of Roman history. All the national wealth of Rome lies in the land of the East."
True, Vejle's contemporary, British Queen Victoria, solved this problem in her own way. Indeed, in the 19th century, an even more serious commodity was added to silks, porcelain, and spices. Tea. The famous tea clippers ushered in the era of Hong Kong-Liverpool racing.
What could the British give China ?! Like Rome, they had to pay for the growing purchases of Chinese goods in precious metals. Trying to restore balance, the British authorities sent trade delegations to the Chinese emperors, but … the balance was not restored. In 1793, Emperor Qianlong told Ambassador George III, Lord McCartney, “We don't need anyone. Go back to yourself. Take your gifts. During the first third of the 19th century, of all foreign products, only Russian furs and Italian glass were in demand in China.
The solution to the "problem" for the British Empire was two "opium wars", which were conducted by the "drug queen" Victoria in alliance with France. The Europeans fought in these wars for the right to settle accounts with the Chinese with Bengali opium - and won.
Time has passed. The physical content of Asian-European trade has changed, gadgets and consumer goods have appeared instead of silk and spices, but the Asia-Europe vector has remained. The development of international trade has given importance to all options for laying trade routes from Asia to Europe. Since the time of Vasco da Gama, and especially with the opening of the Suez Canal, the sea route through the Indian Ocean has been and remains the main one. In connection with global warming, the chances of the Northern Sea Route are growing, but only the Transsib can truly compete with the Indian Ocean, which has a much greater growth potential, which is now held back by a heap of technical, organizational, and social problems. A consistent solution to these problems will bring the initial advantage of the Trans-Siberian Railway to the forefront of world trade - it is more than half the length of the sea route: 11,000 km versus 23,000 km (the numbers depend on the choice of terminals in APEC countries and Europe).
Emperor Alexander III, who signed the rescript on March 17, 1891, understood: the failures in the Crimean War and the semi-forced sale of Alaska showed that the level of development of communications in the Russian Empire came into a screaming contradiction with the size of its territory. The preservation of the integrity of the empire depended on the economic development and settlement of Siberia. Without the Trans-Siberian Railway, peasant settlers reached Primorye in three years (a period that included the necessary stops for sowing and harvesting in intermediate territories). The second way of settlement in 1879 was opened by the Dobroflot society: several ships acquired at the end of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78. for the export of the Russian army from near Istanbul, were given to transport people along the Odessa - Vladivostok route.
An indicative fact for the level of development of Siberian roads of that time: one of the first industrialists of Primorye, Otto Lindholm (a native of Russian Finland), for trips to the capital chose the route by sea to San Francisco, by rail to New York and again by sea to St. Petersburg.
The construction of the Transsib was preceded by the solution of the most important geopolitical task for Russia: the return of the Amur region, annexed by Khabarov, but later lost, and the acquisition of Primorye. Prior to that, the only way for Russians to reach the Pacific Ocean for 200 years was a mountain trail that twisted from Yakutsk to Okhotsk, through the Dzhugdzhur ridge, more than 1200 kilometers long. For the ships under construction in Okhotsk, the ropes had to be cut in Yakutsk, the anchors had to be sawed to a size that made it possible to load the load on a horse, and then reconnect. The furs were delivered to Kyakhta in northern China for two years. The first Russian round-the-world expedition of Kruzenshtern - Lisyansky (1803-06) was in fact the first successful attempt to bring furs from Russian Alaska to Hong Kong, and tea and silk purchased there - to St. Petersburg. This was the first delivery of Chinese goods to Russia not in saddle bags, but in the holds of ships! However, Alaska could not be kept in such conditions …
The Russian imperial government, having decided to build the Transsib, had in mind not only world trade, but also world wars, primarily the Crimean one. In one of my books, I called it "the first logistic war." When was the first steam-powered railway in Crimea built? By whom? That's right: in 1855, the British invaders who landed in the Crimea to transport shells with which they filled up the Russian troops from Balaklava to the outskirts of besieged Sevastopol. These details of the Crimean War became for St. Petersburg the main motive for the development of railway transport.
Soon after the end of the Crimean War, according to the Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860) treaties of the Amur and Primorye territories, the domains of the Manchu Qing dynasty, in which the Han Chinese were forbidden to appear, were transferred to Russia without war, without any conflict. China, attacked in the "opium wars" by the British and French, and then under the threat of Japanese attack, actually invited Russia to become a counterweight to European expansion. And these plans came true, despite the fact that Russia lost the war with Japan.
On June 20, 1860, Vladivostok was founded, an outpost on the line held by Russia as a result in all wars. "All powers look at our Vladivostok with envy."This apt phrase belongs to the military engineer and Colonel of the General Staff Nikolai Afanasyevich Voloshinov (1854-1893), whose selfless efforts brought closer the beginning of the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Voloshinov's expedition, undertaken jointly with railway engineer Ludwig Ivanovich Prokhasko, passed through the taiga, exploring both routes from the Angara to the Amur - south of Lake Baikal and north, through the Baikal and Severo-Muisky ridges to the rivers Muya and Cherny Uryum. Voloshinov and Prokhasko chose the option south of Lake Baikal, and he was destined to turn into the Transsib. The second route in 80 years will become the BAM, the Baikal-Amur Mainline.
Steel spine of Russia
The significance of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the steel backbone of Russia, which made it possible to keep the Russian geopolitical space through all the revolutionary storms of the twentieth century, was instantly appreciated abroad.
The English economist Archibald Kolkhun wrote: “This road will not only become one of the greatest trade routes that the world has ever known, and will fundamentally undermine the English sea trade, but it will become in the hands of Russia a political instrument, the power and significance of which is difficult to guess … it will make Russia a self-sufficient state, for which neither the Dardanelles, nor Suez will no longer play any role, and will give it economic independence, thanks to which it will achieve an advantage like no other state has dreamed of."
The whole epic of the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway showed the world the ability of Russians to rally around great national goals, nominating figures who stood at the level of the tasks of their time.
The first among these figures is, of course, Alexander III. Several years before the start of the great construction project, in the margin of the Irkutsk Governor-General's report, the emperor wrote: “I must confess with sadness and shame that the government has so far done almost nothing to meet the needs of this rich but neglected region. And it's time, it's high time."
The tsar could not help but realize that in the foreign policy of his predecessors on the throne, several decades were spent on stupid fuss in Europe: "Holy Alliance", aid to England, German monarchs, Austria-Hungary. Under Alexander III, Russia had just "concentrated", approaching the great leap into Asia. Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev, not only an outstanding chemist, but also a prominent scientist and economist, remarked about the reign of Alexander III: "… the best period in the history of Russian industry." In 1881-96, Russia's industrial production increased 6.5 times. Labor productivity - by 22%. Steam engine power - by 300%.
"The Russian Empire literally shuddered from the heavy tread of industrial progress: a seismic station in Riga recorded a two-point earthquake, when at the Izhora plant in St. Petersburg, the second in Europe in power after the Krupp plant in Germany, a press with an effort of 10,000 tons bent armor plates."
The Tsar-Peacemaker was able not only to define national goals, but also to select people to fulfill the assigned tasks. Minister of Railways, then Minister of Finance S. V. Witte, who won the "tariff war" from Germany, raised funds for a nationwide project: thanks to the introduction of the vodka monopoly, the money taken from shinkars and tax farmers (24% of the state budget!) Went to a great construction project …
Witte drew up a construction plan, dividing the Trans-Siberian into six sections. At the same time, construction began on the West and Central Siberian sections (Chelyabinsk - Irkutsk) and Yuzhno-Ussuriysky (Vladivostok - Grafskaya). The most difficult section was the Circum-Baikal Railway (Circum-Baikal). Tunnels made their way through the solid rocks west of Lake Baikal, requiring protection from rockfalls and avalanches.
The government understood that the international situation was in a hurry. The urgency of the Circum-Baikal Railway forced the hiring of Chinese, Albanian and Italian workers. The guides still show the "Italian Wall" here. The new Minister of Railways, Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Khilkov, left Petersburg and for two years lived in the area of the Baikal station Slyudyanka, in the center of the construction of the Great Siberian Route.
Near the city of Sretensk in the Chita region, the Transsib split in two. The future Priamursky section went along the mountainous terrain, skirting around Manchuria in a giant arc, and in addition required the construction of a bridge across the Amur near Khabarovsk (2, 6 km, the largest bridge in Russia to this day, was completed only in 1916!). An alternative line, the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), ran through Manchuria to Vladivostok with a straight arrow, a chord. It was 514 versts (almost one and a half times) shorter; it passed mainly along the steppes, except for the Big Khingan with its 9 tunnels. Harbin was located in the middle of the 1389-verst chord of the Chinese Eastern Railway, from which there was a perpendicular to the south: Harbin - Dalny - Port Arthur, another 957 versts. There was an exit to the Yellow Sea and the main theater of the future Russian-Japanese war.
The Trans-Siberian Railway marked the coincidence of the geopolitical interests of Russia and China. The CER, which remained the only Transsib route to Vladivostok for 15 years, was completed in 1901 and turned out to be a surprisingly solid acquisition. The road with the adjacent lands and the emerging cities was ironically called in Russian newspapers of the beginning of the twentieth century "Zheltorossiya" - by analogy with Novorossiya. An even greater irony of history was that Zheltorosiya survived monarchist Russia for 12 years, and its capital Harbin remained the main non-Soviet Russian city that survived the conflict on the Chinese Eastern Railway in the 1920s, the Japanese occupation, wars … Only the Chinese "cultural revolution" 1960 -x erased the Russian trace here.
Incredible work, sometimes ingenious engineering impromptu … The world's longest railway was built in 23 years. Somewhere the Transsib shocked the world at all. While the Circum-Baikal Railway, one of the most difficult routes on Earth, bypassed Lake Baikal from the south, they came up with the idea of putting the rails directly on the Baikal ice, in the summer they started up the ferry. Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his novel Other Shores: photo-postcards with trains traveling on ice were perceived in Europe as fantasy drawings. The throughput capacity of the ice section was only 2-3 times lower than the average trans-Siberian one.
The through route to Vladivostok was opened, and already on July 1, 1903, even before the start of all official celebrations, it began under the guise of technical tests of the transfer of Russian troops to the east. The transportation of one army corps of 30,000 men with weapons took a month.
Petersburg was in a hurry. In October 1901, the sovereign said to Prince Henry of Prussia: “The collision [with Japan. - I. Sh.] is inevitable; I hope it will happen no earlier than in four years … The Siberian railway will be completed in 5-6 years."
… The road was built 32 months earlier than the plan, but only after July 1, 1903 those people in Russia who understood the meaning of what was happening were able to take a breath. Before that, only the ironic salutes of Kaiser Wilhelm II in honor of the "admiral of the eastern seas of Tsar Nicholas" were heard. If Japan had attacked then, both Vladivostok and Port Arthur would have found themselves in the position of Sevastopol in the Crimean War: an annual "march" without reinforcements, with ammunition limited to what soldiers in knapsacks and pockets could carry.
Much bitter has been said about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, but neither the railroad workers nor the Baikal ice failed in that war. More than half a million Russian soldiers were deployed to Manchuria. The travel time of the military echelons on the Moscow-Vladivostok route was 13 days (today it is 7 days). Without the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Russian army in the Far East simply would not exist (with the exception of Cossack detachments and several garrisons), and Japan would have completed the entire military campaign with forces sufficient for an ordinary police operation.
Transsib and victory over Japan
The finale of World War II, which became the Soviet-Japanese war of 1945, requires study not only with maps, a calendar, but also with a chronometer. Determination of the actual contributions of the USSR, the USA, and Great Britain to the common victory depends on this.
In Yalta, Stalin promised to go to war with Japan 3 months after the defeat of Germany. On the night of August 8-9, 1945, the USSR began hostilities in Manchuria, and if we count from the point of Germany's surrender, introducing a correction for the difference in time zones, we will discover the grace of Stalin's move: the Soviet leader kept his Yalta promise to within a few minutes.
The choice made by China 90 years earlier, which consisted in relying on Russia in the confrontation with the Europeans who started the "opium wars", and then Japan, was fully justified. The Soviet-Japanese war became a decisive factor in the liberation of China and the creation of the People's Republic of China. “The Red Army,” noted Mao Zedong, chairman of the CPC Central Committee in August 1945, “has come to help the Chinese people drive out the aggressors. There has never been such an example in the history of China. The impact of this event is invaluable."
To this we can add that one of the conditions for the entry of the Soviet Union into the war with Japan was the diplomatic recognition of the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR) by the Western powers, which the West did not recognize until 1945, calling it a “Soviet vassal”.
The Americans were also preparing for war. Stettinius, the US Secretary of State, later wrote: "General MacArthur and a group of military laid out before President Roosevelt a certificate, a calculation of the Committee of Chiefs of Staff, which asserted that Japan would surrender only in 1947 or later, and its defeat could cost the lives of a million soldiers."
The decisive role of the Soviet offensive in Manchuria is evidenced by the existence of a plan in Tokyo, code-named "Jasper to smithereens", which, in the event of the Americans landing in Japan, would evacuate the emperor to the continent and turn the Japanese islands into a continuous death zone for American troops using bacteriological weapons.
The entry of the USSR into the war prevented the destruction of the Japanese population. Manchuria and Korea were the raw material and industrial base of the empire, the main factories for the production of synthetic fuel were located here. … The commander of the Kwantung Army, General Otsudza Yamada, admitted: "The rapid advance of the Red Army deep into Manchuria has deprived us of the opportunity to use bacteriological weapons." The swiftness of the throw of the Soviet troops was ensured by the Transsib.
The commander-in-chief in the Far East, Marshal Vasilevsky, and the chief of the rear of the Red Army, General Khrulev, calculated the time for the transfer of troops. The capacity of the Transsib has again become a decisive strategic factor. Tens of thousands of tons of artillery pieces, tanks, motor vehicles, many tens of thousands of tons of ammunition, fuel, food, uniforms were transported and reloaded.
From April to September 1945, 1692 trains were sent along the Transsib. In June 1945, up to 30 trains passed through Transbaikalia every day. In total, in May-July 1945, up to a million Soviet troops were concentrated on the railways of Siberia, Transbaikalia, the Far East and on marches in the deployment areas.
The Japanese were also preparing for the fight. Marshal Vasilevsky recalled: “During the summer of 1945, the Kwantung Army doubled its forces. The Japanese command held in Manchuria and Korea two-thirds of its tanks, half of the artillery, and selected imperial divisions."
The actions of the Soviet army in Manchuria had all the features of the most beautiful, according to the canons of military art, operation to completely encircle the enemy. Western military textbooks call this operation the "August Storm".
On a gigantic territory of more than 1.5 million square meters. km., crossing the Amur, the Khingan Mountains, it was necessary to split and defeat the Kwantung Army: 6,260 guns and mortars, 1,150 tanks, 1,500 aircraft, 1, 4 million people, including the troops of the puppet states of Manchukuo and Mengjiang (Inner Mongolia region).
The role of the Transsib was not limited to the transfer of troops in trains. In the course of hostilities, the pace of the offensive became an absolutely decisive factor. The advanced Soviet units cut through the rear of the Kwantung Army, and here more than once there was a reason to remember how soundly the Russian builders of the CER were built. One such case was told by the Hero of the Soviet Union D. F. Loza (9th Guards Tank Corps):
“Heavy rains for many days have formed a kind of artificial sea on the vast Central Manchurian Plain. The roads were unsuitable even for tanks. In a critical situation, when every hour was expensive, the only feasible decision was made: to overcome the flooded area along a narrow embankment of the railway track from Tongliao to Mukden, 250 kilometers. South of Tongliao, the brigade's tanks climbed the railroad embankments. The march began along the sleepers, which lasted two days … I had to direct one caterpillar between the rails, and the second - to the gravel bedding of the sleepers. At the same time, the tank had a large side roll. In such a distorted position, under the feverish shaking on the sleepers, we had to move more than one hundred kilometers … The eleventh day of the operation turned out to be very productive: Changchun, Jirin and Mukden were taken."
During military operations, Soviet troops captured 41.199 and accepted the surrender of 600,000 Japanese soldiers, officers and generals. At a meeting of the State Defense Committee of the USSR on August 23, 1945, Stalin said about the Japanese prisoners: “They did enough of their own in the Soviet Far East during the Civil War. It's time to pay off your debts. So they will give them away."
Another result of the rapid campaign in the Far East was that “as a result of the defeat of Japan,” as noted by Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky, “favorable conditions were created for the victory of popular revolutions in China, North Korea and Vietnam. The People's Liberation Army of China received huge stocks of captured weapons."
Well, as for the lie widespread in the West that “the Soviet offensive began when the second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki and Japan was demoralized,” then many words are not needed to refute it.
Soviet diplomat M. I. Ivanov, who was among the first to visit Hiroshima, Nagasaki after the bombing, wrote in the book “Notes of an eyewitness”: “On August 7, Truman announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Japanese experts did not believe in the existence of such a powerful weapon. Only a few days later, the government commission that visited Hiroshima, headed by the chief of intelligence of the General Staff, General Arisue and the Nobel Prize winner, the largest Japanese scientist Nishina, established the fact of the strike: "an atomic device dropped by parachute" … For the first time, the commission's report was published in abbreviated form in 20- x days of August "… This information reached Manchuzhuria even later, and by August 14-17, the defeat of the Kwantung Army had already been completed!
Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa writes in his monograph Racing the Enemy: “The entry of the Soviet Union into the war contributed much more to the surrender of Japan than atomic bombs … with the mediation of Moscow."
Terry Charman of the Imperial War Museum in London: “The blow that the USSR delivered changed everything. In Tokyo, they realized that there was no hope left. The "August storm" pushed Japan to surrender more than atomic bombs."
And finally Winston Churchill: "It would be a mistake to assume that the fate of Japan was decided by the atomic bomb."
