by the Obi to Obdorsk, within the Arctic Circle. Indeed, a regular
grain-export service was planned via the Kara Sea to London by an
ambitious Englishman. It failed after some promise of success, because
of the ice-packs in the Gulf of Obi. From Omsk, following the Irtish
upstream, steamer navigation extends as far as Semipalatinsk, in the
Altai foothills. Smaller craft may go nearly to the Chinese frontier.
By the Tobol and Tura rivers, Tiumen, in the Ural foothills, may be
reached, four hundred and twenty miles from Semipalatinsk. By ascending
the Obi, a boat may go fourteen hundred and eighty miles east from
Tiumen to Kuznetz on the Tom; through a canal from an Obi confluent the
Yenesei River System may be entered, and from it by a short portage the
Lena System. In all twenty-eight thousand miles are navigable by small
craft, and seven thousand miles by steamer. Omsk is the pulsing heart
of this mighty interior waterway system.
[Illustration: TIUMEN TOMSK PERM CITIES OF NEW RUSSIA]
The train leaves the station, which is at a distance from the town, and
once more we are en route. The eye rests gratefully upon the ribbon
of cultivated fields which follow the Irtish down. But we reënter the
steppe, and again the desolation settles over all. In hours of
looking, not a habitation is seen, not an animal, not a tree,--only
the same white billows. This Barbara district in the Tomsk Government
has an area of fifty thousand square miles. Kainsk, some seven hundred
versts from Chelliabinsk, is the centre. The section, though covered
with the fertile black earth of the adjoining regions, is, owing to
lack of drainage and adequate rainfall, arid and almost untilled.
The round-faced civilian from the compartment further up, whose
familiarity with the country has made him a welcome accession, joins us
at the window. He looks out over the level plain of the Barbara Steppe
with manifest satisfaction.
“You admire the landscape?” we ask satirically.
He smiles. “We got big money when the line went through here. I made my
first fortune then.”
He sighs at the memory of old times, and tells of the railway-building
days when the Czar had given the order for a road across the continent,
and the soldiers of fortune, of whom he was one, had gathered to the
task.
“Not a kopeck had I when the Dreyfus brothers made their big
speculation in Argentine wheat and went down, leaving us young clerks
stranded in Kiev. You know Kiev? Great pilgrimages come there to see
the bodies of Joseph and his brethren, all preserved just as when they
died. We heard by accident of a grading job under a big contractor out
here. None of us knew anything about construction, but three of us
grain-clerks wrote a letter saying we would put the work through, and
started. We had just enough money to get to Samara. In Samara was a
merchant much esteemed, whom I went to see. He went on our bond, never
having seen us before, and gave us enough money to come. So it was in
the old days. The country was flat as a board. We had but to lay down
the ties and spike the rails. Thirty versts we made of this line. It
cost us thirty thousand roubles a verst, but we got fifty thousand.
Would that we might do that now again.”
The contractor, his round jolly face glowing with the recital and his
eyes shining through gold-rimmed glasses, is entertaining a growing
company, for the judge has stopped to gossip, and the railroad official.
“I took my money and bought an estate in the country of the Don
Cossacks,” the contractor is saying. “I paid ten per cent to the
Government for taxes when I bought the land. I had to pay no more taxes
then all my life, but my heir would pay taxes, or, if I sold, he who
bought would pay. So it was done in the Hataman Government.”
“It is just,” says the judge. “Why should they, who get the property,
not pay taxes?”
The contractor shrugs his shoulder and continues: “For five years
I farmed, and though I had a German overseer, I did not prosper.
So I went to one of the cities of Russia and thought to put in a
tramway. The men of the city said, ‘Are all the horses dead? He of the
spectacles is mad.’ Yet by importunity I got them to give me the right
to make a tramway. There were in Petersburg then many Belgians, with
much money, wishing to give it away. So I went to them and said, ‘Here
is a great franchise, but who will build the line and gain the riches?’
“‘We will, we will,’ said the Belgians.
“From them I got a hundred and eighty thousand roubles clear, and an
interest. I sold the interest quickly to other foreigners, Frenchmen,
and went away. Yes, the tramway was built, and the people crowded to
ride on it as I had said. But when it was going well, and the profits
were yet to come, the people said, ‘Shall foreigners oppress our city?’
So the town bought the tramways for what they said was the cost, and
the Belgians went away. And they did not come back to Russia. Thus were
many railways and tramways built and taken. The foreigners will not
come back now, and Russians too do not enter these pursuits, lest the
Government come after them later. It is _hudoo_ (bad).”
“But is it not worse that these men should make a tramway and draw vast
money from the people?” says the railroad official. “For me, I think
the Government should do it all.”
“_Ni snaia_, I don’t know,” says the contractor. “But I who bought
stocks with the Belgians’ money (foolishly thinking that the business
which I knew not was safe, while that which I knew was shaky), I will
not give again to the stock-people the money I shall make from the
oil-fields of Sakhalin, where I go now.”
“But,” says the railway chinovnik, “does not the State do these things
better? Look you at this very railway. For years any who wished might
have built into Siberia. An Amerikanski, and Collins, an Angleski, came
proposing railroads, but all things slumbered. Then in 1891 the Czar
ordered the road to be built, and in ten years we had laid the eight
thousand versts to Vladivostok. I read that the line of Canada, where
too there are steppes and highlands as ours, took ten years for but
half the distance. We made two versts a day for all the years, and they
but one. Who other than the Government could spend a billion roubles
for a line that will bring money returns only in the far future?”
“Ah, you chinovniks, you say, lo, we do all this! But it was such as
I built that road, and because you gave us big money. And is not the
money to support it now got from the peasants’ taxes while so many
clerks and operators waste time in the offices? I have seen a third
as many men as at Omsk do the same work. And your trains go as the
water-snails, twelve versts an hour for freight, twenty versts an hour
for the mail-trains, thirty-five versts for the express. One can go
eighty versts in Europe.”
“Truly, truly, but why go so fast? It costs more for fuel, and the
track has to be made straight. What good does it do you to come in
sooner? If a man is in a hurry to get somewhere, can he not take an
earlier train?”
The group mulls over this knotty point of logic, which is complicated
by the fact that our own train is twelve hours late. They cite
hypothetical men with varying sorts of engagements, and then lightly
switch to talk of the nourishing properties of beer, the utility of
agricultural machinery, and the old tiger battue of Vladivostok.
The birch groves become more frequent now, pines begin to appear, and
at last the country has become forested. Several of the passengers
bestir themselves for departure, gathering multitudinous bundles, and
making the circuit in demonstrative hand-shaking farewells.
“We come to Taiga, whence they go to the stingy town of Tomsk,” the
government engineer observes.
“Why do you call it the stingy town of Tomsk?”
“I will tell you. Tomsk, before the railroad came, was the biggest,
finest, and wealthiest of our cities. She was the capital of the
great Tomsk Gobernia, with three hundred and thirty thousand square
miles of area, and a million and a half people. The Tom brought the
big river steamers to her wharves. In the city she had sixty thousand
inhabitants, increasing every year; a university, Stroganov’s Library,
a cathedral, fine public buildings. The merchants were rich; the miners
came down from the Altai; all things were prospering. When the railway
was ordered, the engineers came through to locate the line. All they
asked was a hundred thousand roubles. But how stingy were the people of
Tomsk! They had given two million roubles for their university, where
the students made speeches and got sent to the Yakutski Oblast, yet
they would not give a hundred thousand roubles to the engineers. ‘Give
fifty, give even forty thousand,’ said the engineers. But the people of
Tomsk said, ‘Are we not the seat of government for all western Siberia?
Have we not Yermak’s banner in the cathedral? Are we not Tomsk? You
must bring the railway here anyway.’ But if the engineers had done
that, who could say where it would have ended? All the other cities
would begin to make excuses. So the grades to Tomsk became suddenly so
bad that the line had to be run away south here, eighty-two versts. The
station where one changes was named, in mockery, Taiga, ‘in the woods.’
The merchants flocked out begging the engineers to come back to Tomsk.
They offered all that had been asked and much more. They hung around
the office and wept over the blue-prints. But how can a professional
man change his plans and sacrifice his reputation? One cannot do such
things. So Tomsk was left, and her trade now falls far behind that of
the other cities, Omsk and Irkutsk. We in Siberia smile at her and call
her the stingy city of Tomsk.”
“We have, too, another jest, of the Tomsk Czar,” chimes in the judge.
“There appeared one day there a stranger calling himself Theodore
Kuzmilch, who bought a little house which he never left save to do
some act of charity. For years he lived; then, when he died, the house
was turned into a chapel because of his good deeds. Many years after
his death, a merchant started the tale that this was the Czar Alexander
I, who did not die in the Crimea, but left a false body to be carried
to Petersburg and entombed in state. He had, it was told, not really
died, and, disappointed at his powerlessness to help his people, had
come, self-exiled, to Siberia. But we others laugh at this tale of
Tomsk as an imperial residence.”
The twenty minutes’ stop at Taiga ends, and the train renews its
journey through the forests.
With rolling hill and long-stretching forests, the watershed bounding
the eastern limits of the Obi Basin is crossed near Achinsk, and the
drainage-basin of the mighty Yenesei River, one million three hundred
and eighty thousand square miles in area, is entered. It just fails
to equal in length the Mississippi-Missouri System. Including the
administrative territory “Yeneseik” of the East Siberian Gobernia,
the river sweeps from the Chinese borderland north beyond the Arctic
Circle. In the far south, where it rises among the Minusink Mountains,
the valley country is like the Italian Alps, mild and very fertile.
Iron-mines of prehistoric antiquity are found in these valleys, relics
of the old Han Dynasty of China.
Of the twenty million bushels of grain produced throughout the
Yeneseik territory, nearly a third comes from the Minusink oasis. The
railroad pierces the central plains, farmed in the most favorable spots
only, and capable of enormously extended cultivation.
Through alternating forest, field, and plain the train moves on, and
crossing the three thousand-foot Yenesei bridge, enters the city of
Krasnoyarsk. When we pull out, the engineer, who has been chatting with
the erstwhile contractor, observes, “This town was a main hotbed of the
great strike. They are well in hand now, but we had our time with them
in 1905. Even I knew nothing of what had been prepared.”
He goes on to tell the most curious tale of the organized strike
movement which introduced the disturbances subsequent to the
Russo-Japanese War.
“On September 15 at noon, no one knows by whom or from what station,
a signal of dots and dashes was tapped off. Each telegraph-operator
answered the message and passed the word to the next, standing by until
it was repeated back. Then, leaving all things in order, he stepped
from the operating-room into the railway-station. With a motion he
gave the countersign to the ticket-sellers, and each, as he received
it, shut his desk, and walked out. The word went to the engineers, and
each, at the signal, drew his fires and left the engine and its train
forsaken on its tracks. Every postman put away his mail, closed the
safe, and left his office; every diligence-agent locked his doors. From
Astrakan to Archangel, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, the electric summons
went, and the whole realm of Russia was paralyzed.
“With two thousand roubles, offered by the Governor-General of Poland,
before them, and ten bayonets on the tender behind, an engineer and a
fireman were secured to run one coach, containing a terrified prince,
from Warsaw to the frontier. In the south, a few cars were started by
soldiers, but beyond such rare instances, for three weeks not a train
was moved. More than this, not a telegram was transmitted, not a letter
delivered. Everywhere was black silence, as if all the Russias had been
swept from the face of the world.
“‘More wages, and the constitution,’ was the slogan of the strikers.
The official cohorts met the issue courageously, with bribes and
bayonets, and little by little got the upper hand. Force and money were
used unstintingly to win the operators needed and break the front of
the strike. A few, who, contrary to the expectations of their mates,
had remained loyal to the officials, were finally secured and protected
by the soldiery. As in time one train after another was manned and
moved, the men who had stayed away lost heart, knowing but too well
what would be the fate of those who were left outside the breastworks.
First singly, then in crowds, they returned, and the great strike was
broken.”
“Here in Krasnoyarsk there was revolutionist rule for a while as well,”
the manager remarks. “The troops were driven out, and we had to wait
for reinforcements. Yet when I came to my office there were sixty
thousand roubles in the safe, not a kopeck of which had been touched.
Some of the best employees were condemned. I was very sad, and the
service was very poor when they marched away.”
“What became of them?” we ask.
In a low voice he answers, “They went to the Yakutsk.”
Everybody is silent for a moment.
“Where did you say?” inquires the missionary.
“The Yakutski Oblast,” answered the chinovnik.
In Europe people talk of the rigors of Russia’s winter. In Russia
of the cold of Siberia. In Siberia, along the railway, when the
thermometer gets down into the forties and the sentries pick up
sparrows too numb to fly, they say, “It’s as cold as the Yakutsk.”
“One starts to the Yakutsk by the steamer-towed prison barge, following
down the Yenesei from Krasnoyarsk,” the engineer continues. “For the
first thousand versts northward the way is through a mighty forest
region. The interior is almost as unknown as when the Samoieds were
its sole inhabitants. Marshes covered with trembling soil, to be
crossed only on snowshoes, alternate with thickets, called _urmans_, of
larches, cedars, firs, pines, and beeches.”
“It is not alluring,” we observe.
“The cold of the winter seems largely to arrest decay, and the fallen
trees, remaining unrotted, form a nature-made _cheval de frise_,
impossible to traverse save along the hunters’ trails. Another thousand
versts up the Upper Tunguska River, at whose limit of navigation is
a crossing into the Lena System, and the Yakutsk Province begins;
eastward to the coastal range overlooking Behring Sea, and northward
to the Arctic Ocean, a million and a half square miles of desolation,
extends this exiles’ oblast. Prison-stations are located in the
forsaken tundra country beyond the Arctic Circle, where scattered
clumps of creeping birches and dwarf willows struggle to maintain
existence in the few unfrozen upper inches of ground, congealed
perpetually beneath to unmeasured depths. Here, where the average
winter temperature is eighty below zero, come the exiles deemed most
formidable.”
“How long do men last in the Yakutski cold?” we ask the engineer.
“Oh, sometimes a strong man will outlive his sentence and return. The
friends of our strikers ask me sometimes about one or another, but we
have heard nothing of them since they marched away in chains. May fate
keep us from that road!”
The theme is not enlivening, and soon we go forward into the
observation-car.
After crossing the Kan River at Kansk, the railroad turns abruptly
southwest, through the hilly country of the Irkutsk Gobernia, and
climbing into the highlands of the Altai, enters the watershed of the
Angara. The drainage-basin of this river equals the combined areas of
Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It is as
well adapted to agriculture as parts of the best provinces of Central
Russia in the same latitude.
The train pulls next into the station of Nishneudinsk. A booted
peddler is making his way down the platform, with knives, combs, caps,
and cheap knick-knacks. He stops to show us something special, a
miniature of multicolored minerals, glittering from a hundred crystal
facets. The Russian engineer picks out the flaky quartz, the iron
pyrites,--“fools’ gold,” as they called it in old Nevada times,--green
porphyry, iridescent peacock ore of copper, and some black crystals
like antimony, which show here and there. Malachite, serpentine, topaz,
and numberless other minerals are in the mass, which glitters in
kaleidoscopic changes. A small piece of gold ore tops the pile.
“Cabinetski?” asks the engineer.
“Da, da,” assents the peddler. “Cabinetski.”
“It comes from one of the domains of his Imperial Majesty’s Cabinet,”
explains the engineer. “Stretches of forest, belts of fertile river
valley, fur districts, hundreds of thousands of square versts, the
best mines in these Urals which produce sometimes yearly seven million
roubles, the entire Nerchinsk region, producing six million roubles,
are ‘cabinetski,’” he remarks. “Even I, Ivan Vasilovich Poyarkov, am
‘cabinetski’!”
He explains the origin of the term, going back to the old days when
princedoms went to the courtiers of Catherine. Always for a great
enterprise it was necessary to have a friend at Court. So the rich
merchants and miners would form, with powerful members of the inner
circle at St. Petersburg, alliances such as that made by the Stroganovs
with Boris. Gradually, as time went on, the protected were swallowed
by the protectors, until one by one the various estates had passed
into the hands of the nobles of the Imperial Court. The mines in the
Altai, which Demidov had opened up, were taken over in 1747 by the
Emperor, those in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast at about the same time. With
the passing of the years, what had been graft and expropriation was
transmuted into vested interest, until now it is the established right
of the Imperial Cabinet, or the Grand Dukes, to receive the revenues
of these vast domains. In the mining regions their perquisite is from
five to fifteen per cent. Save for the tax, however, miners are free to
operate upon the ducal estates, and many are thus engaged.
A fur-capped station-agent clangs the big bronze bell, waits a moment,
and then clangs twice. The passengers climb back into the box-like
steel cars of the express. The third bell sounds, and the train starts.
We sit down beside the engineer and the conversation takes up the
“cabinetski” again.
“We have great traditions. One Governor, Neryschkin, of the
‘cabinetski’ mines at Nerchinsk, marched to fight the Czar. In 1775 he
was appointed chief of the mineral belt in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast.
He sat for eleven months at home with closed shutters. Then, on Easter
Sunday, singing a devil’s hymn, and with a fat female on either side,
he drove to church and ordered the service amended to suit a rather
bizarre taste. He organized a series of glittering shows at the Crown’s
cost, gave free drink to the populace, and throwing out many of his
subordinates, appointed convicts in their stead. When he had used up
all the tax-money in his keeping, he drew up cannon before the house
of the rich merchant Sibirayakov, the operator of the mines, and made
him hand out five thousand roubles. Finally he got together an army of
Tunguses and the peasants, to march against the Czar. He was caught on
the way and sent to Russia for punishment. It is the great honor of our
service to be governor over the ‘cabinetski’ mines. Perhaps I shall
rise there some day. Perhaps not. But I shall not march against the
Czar.”
The forests of birch and pine and fir, and the hills, as the car drives
eastward, close in again. The crests of mid-Siberian mountains lift
their snowy heads, and the train climbs up and up toward the great
central Lake Baikal, and the city of Irkutsk, 3378 miles from Moscow,
and further east than Mandalay.
When, on this seventh day, the train is winding up the Angara Valley
toward Irkutsk, one may mentally look back over the country that has
been traversed and estimate somewhat the meaning of the railway. The
Urals formed the first landmark. As in the dominion of the blind the
one-eyed man is king, so after the monotony of the plains, the Ural
Mountains seem great and worthy of the name given by the old Muscovite
geographer, the “Girdle of the World.” By actual measurements, however,
in their seventeen hundred miles of length, no peak rises over six
thousand feet. Coming eastward from the Urals the line has cut through
the southwestern corner of the old Tobolsk Government, has skirted
the northern border of the steppe, has bisected the Tomsk Province,
and after crossing the Yenesei River in Yeneseik has entered Irkutsk
Province, and traversed the central highland region nearly to Lake
Baikal.
Many who journey this way will have as their first impression, when the
long winter ride draws to its close, a feeling of depression, almost
of discouragement, so few are the settlements, so desolate seems all
Nature. They see the single line of rails, without a branch or feeder
in the mighty expanse from Chelliabinsk to Irkutsk, save for the stub
put in for the ungenerous outlanders of unlucky Tomsk. They calculate
that for a territory forty times the size of the British Isles, and
one and a half times as large as all Europe, the inadequacy of a
railroad less in total mileage than the Chicago, Milwaukee and St.
Paul, is manifest. Statistically-informed bankers sometimes shrug their
shoulders at the mention of the Trans-Siberian. “Every year a deficit,”
they say. “Gross earnings but twenty-four million roubles,--one sixth
of the Canadian Pacific Railway; one tenth of the Southern Railway.
_Hudoo_ (bad)!” One hears expressed not infrequently in Russia the
opinion that the railway is a sacrifice justified politically by
Russia’s need for a link to the Pacific, but ineffectual to secure
prosperity and advancement to the isolated land of mid-Siberia. It
is deemed, like the Pyramids, a monument to colossal effort and
achievement but of little service to mankind.
Their statistics are correct. But it is to the greater honor of the
road that much which it has accomplished will never appear in credits
on the account-sheets. Where the white stations of the Siberian
Railway stand now were once the wooden prison-pens with their guarded
stockades. Murderers and priests, forgers, profligates, and university
professors, highway robbers and privy councilors, all together have
tramped this way. It is its past from which the railroad has raised
Siberia, the past of neglect and exile that this steam civilizer has
banished to the far Yakutsk.