| Summary: | Siberia is the Sleeping Land, a huge subcontinent barely awakened by the first nomads who arrived here uncounted millennia ago, and still, toward the end of the nineteenth century, so devoid of people that in much of it you could travel hundreds of miles in almost any direction and see no evidence that humans had ever existed. Yet the aim of Tsar Alexander III in committing Russia to carve the longest railroad in the world across this great nowhere was not primarily to provide an avenue for settlement by immigrants from overcrowded and often impoverished European Russia. A hundred years after the railroad’s completion, Siberia remains today one of the least-populated places on earth. No, the primary purpose was empire building. It was a way to gain better access to the region’s dazzling natural riches, which were the property of the tsar; to protect the eastern flank of the empire against Chinese and Japanese designs and provide a launching pad for Russia’s own designs to the east; and to bind together a string of Russian settlements flung out over a contiguous land mass larger than that ever claimed by any other single entity. To accomplish its goal of uniting Vladivostok on the Pacific with Moscow and then St. Petersburg on the Atlantic, Russia had to do something that nearly all engineers at the time judged impossible—carve a passable corridor through a continent’s worth of forest, bog, permafrost, stone, and swamp. The work was done by free peasants, imported labor, and prisoners wielding wooden shovels, specially designed machinery, dynamite to blast through permafrost, and bonfires to melt it. Workers had to contend with plague and cholera, searing arctic winters and blistering summers, and attacks by insects, tigers, and bandits. It took twenty-five years from the first felled tree to the last spike, it cost roughly a billion rubles all told, or perhaps as much as seven billion in today’s dollars, and by the time it was done in 1916, the empire was nearly bankrupt and on the verge of collapse. But to a ...
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