Seven days and seven nights…
 
That’s how long a Trans-Siberian train takes from leaving Moscow’s
Yaroslavsky station to arriving at the Pacific port of Vladivostok 5,770 miles
and eight time zones away.

How and why did Russia build the longest railway in the world? Read the
story of how the Trans-Siberian railway was created against all odds and the
dramatic changes it brought to Siberia and Russia itself.
 
“God is in His heaven and the Tsar is far away.”

A popular saying summed up Russia’s lawless, freedom-loving wild east.
From the time Russia claimed Siberia in the 16th century this vast expanse of
dark forest and empty steppe remained an inaccessible, uncharted
wilderness.

Apart from the unfortunate inmates of the labour camps Siberia’s only
inhabitants were reindeer herders, political exiles, fugitives from justice,
religious heretics, escaped convicts, fur trappers, fortune-seeking
prospectors, and murderous footpads.

While rail networks were rapidly spreading through Europe Russian ministers
spent years debating how to build and pay for a railway to bring Siberia under control. A route was finally decided and work began in 1891 at the far eastern
end.
 
Among the many challenges facing the engineers in charge were a lack
of roads, wide fast-flowing rivers to cross, tangled undergrowth, patches of
permafrost, and deep snowdrifts that became squelching mud in spring and
hard troughs in summer.
 
With no trained workers to hand bridge builders were hired from Italy, peasant labourers came from China and reduced sentences lured Siberian prisoners to work on the line. All used wooden tools and wheelbarrows. Somehow the task was completed by 1916.
 
The railway soon gave rise to prosperous dairy farms. Fearing its approach
Japan declared war on Russia and won. During the 1917 Revolution a Trans-
Siberian train carried the deposed Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and their five
children to a house in the Urals where a drunken execution squad terminated
the Romanov dynasty.

Armoured trains clashed on Trans-Siberian rails in civil war battles between
the Bolsheviks and monarchist Cossacks. In Soviet times the railway
spawned noxious industrial towns and carried millions of doomed victims to
Stalin’s spreading gulag.

Today long, lumbering container trains constantly ply the railway bringing
goods from China to Europe faster than shipping can. And it is still a vital
lifeline for Siberian residents, as well as an ever powerful magnet for the
world’s railway and Russia buffs.

If you are one of those take the book to enliven your longed for journey when
you eventually embark on it. Or stay at home and read it for fresh insights into the notoriously perplexing country that is Russia.
 
Chief among a lively cast of characters you will meet are the scandal-hit
finance minister Sergei Witte, the project’s mastermind, and his powerful
accomplice, larger than life, tuba-playing Tsar Alexander III.
 
Among this edition’s colour illustrations are some striking images produced by Sergei Prokudin Gorski, pioneering inventor of a three-plate photographic
colour process. Travelling in a specially equipped railway carriage laid on by
the Tsar, Prokudin Gorski aimed to document the length and breadth of the of the early 20th century Russian empire. His entire photographic collection is held at the American Library of Congress and you can view it for free at
online for a fascinating detour.