FROM the end of November to the middle of January the sun does
not rise in Russia’s new haven. All would be dark even at mid-day were
it not for the snow. The stars never set. The lights in the little
wooden dwellings are never put out. Great gales blow, rolling up
mountainous waves on the Arctic. Or Polar mists swallow up everything.
Snowstorms go on indefinitely and the frost may be forty degrees,
fifty degrees. Here is no town, no civilisation. Alexandrovsk has
no pavement, no high street, no cinema theatre, no hotel, not even
a tavern. Its population is hard, gloomy, northern. No one has any
intelligence of the great world far away to the south--the gaze is
toward the North Pole.
They say it has a great future. ’Twill be a mighty city with roaring
traffic and skyscrapers, theatres, cafés, passion, and sin. It will be
the Odessa of the North. Valery Brussof anticipates such a city in one
of his fantastic stories--Zvezdny, the capital of the Southern Cross
Republic, and as we read we ask--“Could it be? Could such a place ever
come to be?”
In any case, in the midst of this great destructive war one piece of
constructive work is in hand, the fashioning of a new port for Russia
far within the Arctic circle. We hear little of the work in England, or
we hear laconic accounts, such as: “A branch of railways has been built
on from Archangel to an ice-free port farther north, kept open by the
Gulf Stream,” which is inaccurate as regards the route of the railway
and, moreover, gives the impression that such a railway is easily
built, might, in fact, be improvised. But in truth it is not so trivial
a matter. The nearer you get to the actual place the more astonished
you are to recollect the airy opinions you heard expressed in Fleet
Street at home.
The harbour of Ekaterina, on which stand the town of Alexandrovsk and
the barracks of Semionova, is a queen of harbours, a marvellous natural
refuge, certainly no makeshift place. And then, as a glance at the
map will convince, it is not near Archangel, least of all by land. No
railway could ever go direct from Alexandrovsk to Archangel, and no
railway of any kind could easily or rapidly be built over a thousand
miles of _tundra_.
Those Russians who live in the north are in raptures over their new
port. Russia shall face north, the whole of North Russia shall be
functionised in Alexandrovsk and Archangel. And, indeed, the longer the
war lasts the better for this northern region materially. If the war
lasts three years longer Russia will certainly finish up in possession
of a new port and a valuable railway.
An enormous undertaking this, of trying to plant a railway on the
_tundra_. Many have died at work on it; hundreds must inevitably die
before it is a _success_. It was difficult to engineer. Russians say
now that it was badly surveyed to start with and needs re-planning,
but in any case it was extremely difficult to find a way over the
mosses and morasses and along the shores of the almost continuous
lakes that lie between Kola and Kandalaksha. The map of the railway
is now published in Norway and Sweden. It might just as well be made
accessible to the English Press. When Lord Kitchener died, maps
showing his route were printed in our papers as if he had been going to
Alexandrovsk (which was not the case) to travel on a railway which was
not in existence to Archangel! This caused much amusement in Russia.
As a matter of fact, the railway runs from Semionova across the Kola
peninsula to the White Sea at Kandalaksha, and then becomes practically
a coast railway to the little port of Kem. Thence there is a good
railway to Petrozavodsk and Petrograd. It does not come near Archangel.
Indeed, if the formation of this new harbour and railway should be a
practical success, Archangel is almost bound to suffer and to relapse
from its present state of prosperity to its former somnolence.
The railway when completed will be a memorable and valuable
achievement. It has taken an enormous amount of labour to construct.
First, Russian gangs were set to work and then they were called to
fight for their country. A Canadian contractor or contracting company
was then successful in obtaining the work. But the workmen sent over
found themselves confronted by conditions that were necessarily
difficult to have realised in advance. They faced the problem in a
commercial rather than in a military spirit. And when they had gone
there was almost as much work in prospect as when they came.
Their place was largely taken by Austrian prisoners who had volunteered
from their internment camps to come out and work for a wage. The
estimate of the numbers thus employed ranges from 10,000 to 20,000
men. They were guarded by Cherkesses, troops from the Caucasus who
presumably had also volunteered, since military service was not
obligatory for them. The Austrians worked well and did some of the
best work on the railway. But there was considerable suffering. Now
10,000 Chinamen, Kirghiz, and Mongols of various kinds are at work.
In the summer, except for water under foot and mosquitoes in the air,
the conditions are good, but in the winter all the men are working with
torches in the darkness. Despite much forethought on the part of the
Government many of the men have proved to be yet too thinly clad to
withstand the great frosts. The food from a European point of view is
coarse. Yet the work must go on, must be done. This year, before the
spring, one engine covered the whole of the course of the railway--one
only--and then the thaw came and enormous stretches of the track fell
away, were washed off, disappeared.
The Austrians were reported to have laid the sleepers purposely on
lumps of ice. When the thaw came they floated off. But in truth there
was nothing much but ice to lay them on. The Canadians, working with
torches in the darkness, were said to have failed to fix the rails with
the right balance on the sleepers and the first engine that passed over
worked havoc with the embankment. So they say in Alexandrovsk, but,
probably, neither Austrians nor Canadians were to blame--but Nature
simply had not yet been conquered, though there was a semblance of
conquest at the end of the winter.
In the autumn of 1915 Archangel froze unexpectedly early, and vessels
that could not discharge there went to Alexandrovsk to wait for the
railway. Ekaterina was packed with ships--you could almost step from
one ship to another and thus get across from one side of the harbour
to another. And as there were no rings for the moorings of the ships
there was a certain amount of fear that a storm might arise and the
ships dash themselves to bits against one another. But, as it proved,
no matter how fierce the tempest raged outside, this virginal harbour
was always placid.
Towards Christmas (one party on Christmas Eve) arrived our armoured-car
men, now fighting so gallantly with the Grand Duke in Transcaucasia,
telegraphists who erected the wireless stations, naval airmen, troops.
Men-of-war guarded the harbour. In that strange Arctic refuge, what
an assembly of British! They remained all the winter and thought this
Russia they had come to the most God-forsaken place in the world.
Nevertheless, they named the only street of Alexandrovsk “Pall Mall”
and at their concerts they sang incessantly some song about “Leicester
Square, Leicester Square.” One might think Leicester Square was really
an important place in the minds of Englishmen.
One obtains the idea that it is perhaps the Mecca to which the British
soldier turns, and some of the Russian soldiers who are fighting
“to put the Cross on Sancta Sophia” have a vague idea, hearing our
armoured-car men singing, that perhaps we are fighting to get back to
Leicester Square. Their marching songs are folk-lore airs with national
words. A contrast to our music-hall songs imported from America.
On English Old-Year’s night, which is a fortnight before the same date
in Russia, the men on the ships decided to celebrate the coming of
the New Year with festivity. The Russians ashore peacefully slept and
the great gloomy cliffs that close the harbour in were silent as the
grave. Suddenly from all the ships burst forth cries and fireworks
and rockets, songs, shoutings. The Russians ashore all wakened up and
thought the Germans had come.
This Ekaterina is a great sight, a most beautiful place, though
forbidding and austere, a symmetrical, flask-shaped exit from the
Arctic. In the storm of driving mist and snow it was difficult enough
finding the neck of the flask, the way in; but once in, all was peace,
though the storm raged in the heavens and in the air. There were no
ships to speak of in the harbour then, but a good deal of life on the
shore, especially at Semionova.
A tatterdemalion Russian population, some in sheepskins, some in
Caucasian _bourkas_, some in bowler hats, some in old khaki overcoats,
and smoking pipes--evidence of English influence. There were engineers
in leather jackets and with flannel bashleeks over their heads, workmen
in felt boots, many Circassian troops with their rifles and in
ragged uniforms, men with pale, severe faces--they make probably the
most terrible type of Russian troops, silent, faithful, relentlessly
severe and very powerful, speaking little or no Russian, Mohammedan by
religion--the guards of the Austrian prisoners.
When the railway is finished its terminus will be at Semionova, and
that will probably be the name of the new port. Semionova is all new,
unpainted wood. Here are hundreds of shanties and barracks, and an
indescribable chaos of workmen, materials, and mud. Engines puff along
the shore on the bit of railway which is in working order, and on these
engines the various agents and engineers clamber to go to the place of
action where the gangs are at work.
I fell in with various queer people; a speculator buying up land, a
one-eyed man with smoky glasses seeking a site on which to build a
cinema. Eight thousand roubles, would buy a cinema with all fixtures,
including an electric piano. It was bound to be a success, he argued,
for there would be no other place to go to in the long black winter.
Land has been bought up all round the harbour, and by people who
have never seen it--just for speculation, the curse of modern life
in Russia. And all the time whilst Russian peasants and workmen are
slaving and dying, comfortable commercial folk in the south are buying
and selling the prospective fruits of their labour and sufferings.
Still, that is the way of the world, and these people pass, whereas
the work remains. All the autumn and possibly through the winter the
work goes on again in the continuous darkness, with torches, under the
supervision of fur-clad engineers and grim Cherkesses. Many will be
the sufferings, though not greater than the sufferings on the field of
battle. Many have died and will die in the building and consummating
of the Murman railway. Still the railway will remain as a peaceful
memorial, the great new railway from Petrograd to the dark haven.