Short History Of... - The Trans-Siberian Railway

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

The Trans-Siberian railway is the longest train line in the world, spanning 5700 miles, seven time zones, and straddling two continents. Though today’s passengers on the week-long journey can enjoy relative luxury, the route has a dark past. Who were the labourers who built it, enduring horrific conditions? How did the railroad provoke a war? And what part did the train line play in the bloody conflicts of the twentieth century?  This is a Short History of the Trans Siberian Railway. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Christian Wolmar, author of To The Edge of the World, The Story of the Trans Siberian Railway. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is March 1904, a relatively mild day in Siberia, but the air temperature is still well below zero. The surface of Lake Baikal has frozen solid into a blue-black layer of ice. It is thick and strong enough for thousands of Russian troops to march straight across, the most direct route to their destination. There are makeshift camps on the ice where soldiers can rest. Horses pull sledges of provisions and armaments. A battalion sits together, crowded around a stove, their bayonets propped to one side against a pile of logs. The men wear fur hats and boots and thick woolen coats. They swig from bottles of vodka to warm their bellies, clap their cold hands to get the circulation going, and stamp their numb feet onto the ice. These men are headed

to Port Arthur, a thousand miles to the east. It is a harbor in Manchuria, nestled between China and Korea, a world away from Moscow, but controlled by Russia. It is there that the Japanese have launched an attack on the Russian naval fleet. In the scramble to defend their eastern stronghold these men need to get supplies to the beleaguered port and fast. Now the Russians secret weapon approaches. It's a train creeping along an iron track laid on the ice. It has traveled all the way from Moscow, a distance of 3,000 miles, on a new railroad known as the Great Siberian Way.

But this is the most treacherous stretch of its journey. As the train cannot yet go around Lake Baikal, it has to go over it. The ice groans and creaks under the weight of a locomotive that is pulling several carriages loaded with supplies and more troops. The soldiers exchange looks as the train comes closer, its steam freezing in the air. The troops on board shout cheerfully from the carriage windows, whistling and catcalling as they approach the makeshift depot. as they approach the makeshift depot. But suddenly, there is a sharp crack.

A shout goes up and a horse rears an alarm. The locomotive lurches to one side as the ice gives way under its weight. A spout of crystal clear water sprays into the air. The front carriage derails, jackknifes and slides onto the broken ice. The waiting soldiers back away from a jagged edge that has appeared, revealing a chasm of freezing water below. They stare helplessly at the troops in the carriages. Hundreds of soldiers crammed up against the windows, desperately trying to open doors

as the train rocks from side to side. Another chunk breaks under the locomotive. The driver screams as the nose of the engine plunges into the lake, teetering over the edge but still held back by the weight of its load. Soldiers drop from the windows and doors of the stricken carriage, only to disappear into the black water. Men thrash in the freezing lake, trying to reach their comrades on the ice, but they're overwhelmed by the weight of their packs, or struck dumb by cold shock. Out of the reach of those braving the fracturing ice to save them,

they slip beneath the churning waters like sinking stones. Now, soldiers with sledgehammers fight to detach the carriages from the engine. If it sinks, it will drag the whole train down with it. After several fraught minutes, they succeed in breaking the couplings. But then, with a sound like a clap of lightning, a whole section of ice snaps. The tracks scatter like twigs and the locomotive slides into Lake Baikal to make its final mile-long journey downwards to an icy grave. The Trans-Siberian Railway runs uninterrupted for over 5,700 miles across Russia, from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east. It is the longest train line in the world.

It spans seven time zones, and even now the journey takes a week. The train must cross a continent and its unique landscape. The Ural Mountains, the Russian Steppe, Siberia, the immensity of Lake Baikal, and rivers that can be three miles wide. Passengers are able to sit back and enjoy the view because of an extraordinary feat of engineering, something many said was impossible.

But the relative luxury enjoyed by those traveling across Siberia by rail today belies a dark past. Who were the laborers who were paid, or forced, to endure horrific conditions? How did the railroad provoke a war? And what part did the train line play in the bloody conflicts of the 20th century. I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In May 1890, the writer Anton Chekhov sets off from Moscow to travel almost the full width of Russia to interview prisoners on the penal colony of Sakhalin Island in the Far East. His journey takes 11 weeks. He goes mostly by horse-drawn sledge or river steamer, because there are no roads across Siberia. It is springtime, but the earth remains frozen,

and ice flows make rivers dangerous. Chekhov reaches Sakhalin unscathed, but the journey was so perilous that he returns home by sea, even though it means sailing halfway around the world to do so. Around the time that Chekhov loses patience with the transport infrastructure of his homeland, the Russian emperor, Alexander III, is equally exasperated. His empire stretches 5,000 miles from Europe to Asia. But when he looks east, the Tsar sees nothing but wasted resources. Siberia is a vast land brimming with rich soil for agriculture and minerals for extraction. But without reliable access to this untapped wealth, he can't exploit it. But without reliable access to this untapped wealth, you can't exploit it.

Worst of all, rival empires have grown mighty by harnessing transport and resources. The British have a merchant navy and a string of Asian ports. France and Germany are also expanding. Russia occupies a unique position, straddling two continents, but benefits little from its strategic location. A new overland transport route could connect Europe with Asia, West with East, providing a direct line to China, Japan, and over the Pacific to the United States. A trans-Siberian railway could end British domination of global trade and put Russia at the center of the world. Christian Wolmer is a transport specialist and author of the book

To the Edge of the World, The Story of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The question as to why the Russians built the Trans-Siberian is actually, to some extent, shrouded in mystery. In many respects, it was an insane scheme. This was not a rich country. It was only beginning to industrialize towards the end of the 19th century. It only had about 15,000 miles of railway at the time, which was very small for such a large country. It had basically neglected the area known as Siberia, which is broadly the area east of the Urals for much of its history. So why did they want to build this massive railway? Well, it was seen as a potential source of mineral wealth and a potential source of really establishing the East as part of Russia.

So in a way, it was Russia looking eastwards rather than towards Europe. So it was a combination of military, political, or imperial aims and a strong message of military, political, or imperial aims, and a strong message of saying, we are a country that is part of Asia as well as part of Europe. Tsar Alexander dreams of a railroad opening up the East in the same way that America's trains pioneered the Wild West.

The main difference is distance. A pan-Russian system would need to be twice as long, and the construction is more complex. The track would need to endure one of Earth's most inhospitable climates and cross three of its largest rivers, not to mention a lake the size of Belgium. But despite the complications, another man shares the vision of a great Siberian way. Count Sergei Vita grew up in present-day Georgia, where his first job was selling train tickets at a station in Tbilisi. He became stationmaster,

rose to management level of the Ukrainian railway company, and eventually impressed Tsar Alexander enough to be appointed head of state railways. He sees the Siberian train line as a chance to populate vast wastes of land and secure the eastern side of the empire from attack by Asian powers. The problem will be the sheer scale of the endeavor and raising the funds to build it. There is no doubt that Sergei Vita is Mr. Trans-Siberian Railway. And one could say also the Tsar was important, both Alexander, who was there at the Tsar at the beginning, but who died quite soon after the start of it, and his son Nikolai, the last Tsar, as it happens, were very centrally involved, but only because of Witte's drive and personality. Witte was the person who pushed this

through, and he did that both by gathering the money together and persuading the state to pay for it, and he did that by putting forward to the Tsar as an idea that there should be a separate committee which developed the railway rather than directly as a kind of government body. And that was very important. And very cleverly, he got the Tsar Nikolai, who then became the Tsar,

as the chairman of this committee and was somewhat in awe of Sergei Vita, who was like a fantastically intelligent and capable politician, who later became prime minister briefly as well, which was all unusual for a man who, yes, he did have a bit of noble birth, but was really a self-made man who got there thanks to his talents. With Sergei Vitte on board, the Tsar commits to building an iron highway across the continent, what Alexander calls the road to power. In February 1891, his cabinet approves the plan. The construction is so vast that it is decided

to build the line in sections, starting at both ends and working towards a meeting point in the middle. By May, a foundation stone is being laid in Vladivostok, on the shores of the Sea of Japan, just north of the border of what is now North Korea. The Emperor's son, Nicholas, who will later become Russia's final Tsar, attends the ceremony. He is the first monarch ever to visit the remote Pacific city. Newspaper photographs show Nicholas as a fresh-faced 23-year-old, in full military uniform, pushing a wooden cart past a line of dignitaries and Orthodox priests. The crown prince breaks the ground and loads earth into the royal wheelbarrow before symbolically dumping the soil further along the line.

It signifies that one of the world's most ambitious construction projects is underway. Nicholas is praised for exemplifying the dignity of a simple worker, but the real laborers face rather more arduous conditions. It is the summer of 1893 in central Siberia. A man named Nicholas Mezheninov is the engineer in charge of this section of railway, probably the hardest of all to construct. In a stationary railway carriage that doubles as his lodgings and office, Mijeninov pours over his plans. The map he was given by the authorities back in St. Petersburg

is little more than a blank sheet with a red line drawn from west to east. But as the engineer sends out surveyors to assess the features of the land ahead, he slowly fills in topographical details. He is drawing the map of the land ahead he slowly fills in topographical details he is drawing the map of siberia as he goes outside in the sun his workers advance ahead of the train to clear the route for fresh track unlike his comrades in the western section mageninov's team have no mechanized equipment they hack at the taiga or primal forest with saws and axes. Men fell trees, dig up roots and shift earth. Their aim is to construct a raised path on which they can lay wooden sleepers and iron track. When this section is laid, Mijeninov's carriage

will move along a short distance and the process will start all over again. But now his concentration is broken by shouts. He pokes his head out of the window in time to see a man running into the taiga, pursued by three of his comrades. Maizheninov sighs, opens the door, and jumps down to see what's happening. By the time he reaches the workers up ahead, there is a knot of men fighting in the dirt to the side of the freshly laid track. At the sight of the engineer in charge, they jump up and stand back

until there is only one person lying face down on the ground. Slowly, he also pulls himself to his feet and wipes blood from his nose. He stands face to face with the Mijeninov, glaring at his boss, who can feel menace coming off the angry and injured man. His sleeves are torn and his trousers are wet with swamp mud. Most of these workers are convicts, some criminals and some political prisoners. They're barely paid for their labor, the equivalent of a few pence per day, plus tobacco and vodka.

Their main incentive is to reduce their sentence. For every year worked on the railway, they will get out of jail several months earlier. Most are motivated laborers, but sometimes the conditions get too much and a man breaks and tries to escape. The barren wastes of Siberia offer only death from starvation or exposure. But that doesn't stop a desperate few from trying.

So, to prevent runaways, they make prisoners work in self-policing gangs. If one convict escapes, they're all punished. This group has just stopped one of their own from fleeing. They dragged him back from the thorny taiga, subdued him, got him back on the chain gang. Mezheninov stares down the injured man until the convict's shoulders sag in defeat. His comrades sigh, relieved, and pick up their tools. As the engineer heads back to his carriage, work resumes. A saw cuts into a tree, a pickaxe thuds into the permafrost. Men break into a ragged saw. Further down the line, where the eastern Uzuri section is under construction, a similar scene

has subtle differences. Instead of endless taiga, the workers here face swampy conditions, often working up to their waists in stagnant water. These laborers are more likely to be foreign migrants than domestic prisoners. A quarter of the workforce are non-Russians, predominantly Chinese masons and joiners, but also Japanese, Persians, Southern Europeans. The segregation of ethnic groups

enables inequality of pay and conditions. Russian workers get 1 ruble and 76 kopecks per day, less than $1. But the Asian labourers are paid a third of that salary, after deductions for food. Where the Russians are given shovels and wheelbarrows to use while clearing land, the Chinese rely on the hose and hessian sacks they have to purchase themselves. Poor quality tools mean that the Chinese teams clear land at a slower rate than the local workers, a fact that is used to justify their lower pay. A vicious circle that the Chinese

cannot escape. Nonetheless, the eastern Uzuri section grows at breakneck speed, around 500 miles of track finished within three years. You know, Siberia was not only very cold, but very remote. There were vast forests in some places or otherwise vast steppes, empty areas. There was almost every obstacle that a railway could face. There wasn't enough workers out there. They had to bring them in. They could only really work for about five, six months a year. There were swamps. And the fact that they completed all this

within 10 years was one of the world's great engineering achievements. I mean, the biggest difficulty was crossing the rivers. The rivers are absolutely enormous in Siberia, you know, massive, two, three miles across some of them. And that was the last thing to be done. Some of them weren't actually crossed until after the line was open. But the crossing the rivers was very successful. And one interesting aspect of that is that a lot of American technology was used. And there's quite a lot of imports of equipment from America.

This was a country that was largely frowned upon by the rest of Europe. So this was very true of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was viewed as a ramshackle, Spartan railway built poorly and cheaply, when in fact it's up there with the pyramids and the Eiffel Tower, whatever, as a kind of fantastic engineering achievement.

Regular train services start as soon as individual sections of the railway are complete. Tsar Alexander dies in 1894, but one obstacle remains before his heir, Nicholas II, can boast an uninterrupted transport link between Europe and Asia. The trains still need to cross Lake Baikal. The lake is 400 miles long and, at the southern point where the railroad must go, 30 miles wide. More problematic still is its extreme depth. Plunging one and a half miles into the earth, Lake Baikal is the deepest on the planet, five times deeper than its nearest rival Lake Superior in the United States.

There is no way that stone supports could ever be raised to carry a bridge. In addition, its southern side is mountainous, so it will take years to construct a line that skirts the waterway. In the meantime, it is necessary to break up the train ride with a separate lake crossing. The authorities commission a ship, a ferry robust enough to carry a train, its passengers, and navigate the icy waters, the Titanic of the Baikal. The job goes to a shipyard in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northeast England. After the unique icebreaker is built, it is disassembled into almost 7,000 component parts

and transported to St. Petersburg. These pieces are then moved along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Irkutsk, the terminus before the lake. In a purpose-built shipyard on the shore at Listvyanka, the boat is painstakingly pieced together. By April 24, 1900, the ferry, which is itself called Baikal, is ready to be launched. The ceremony attracts hundreds of visitors. The shipyard and nearby houses are decorated with ribbons and state flags. There is a festive atmosphere with regal music and parades. At five o'clock in the afternoon, a flotilla of

small boats carrying dignitaries takes to the water, while thousands of spectators line the quayside and hills overlooking the lake. As its ropes are cut, the mighty Baikal floats out across the unfathomably deep waters to cheers and celebrations from its well-wishers. The ferry is a great success. Its lower deck carries the train, up to 25 wagons and a locomotive. The second deck houses 300 passengers in cabins ranging from first to third class. There is also a dining room and a royal salon. The upper deck is where travelers promenade and while away the four-hour crossing. But the Baikal is only comfortable when the weather allows.

Even in summer, conditions on the lake can shift unexpectedly from fair to rough, with the Siberian wind whipping up waves five meters high. And then there is the cold. The lake stays frozen for at least five months a year, from January through to May or June. Though the ship is designed to break ice, even its double-steel hull cannot contend with a frozen surface in the depths of winter. They need to find another way across. So initially they decided to lay tracks across Lake Baikal for use in the winter. But when they tried to run locomotives on those tracks, the locomotives were too heavy.

And a couple of them plunged into the depths of Lake Michael. And so after that, they could only use horses pulling wagons across. And there's kind of pictures of this. And there was a kind of tea place every 10 miles or something. So they could stop to warm themselves up. I mean, when I was there, it was minus 15, and that was not the coldest that you get. So maybe minus 20, minus 25. It must have been hell on earth. So in the winter, there were not that many passengers who would want to brave 30 miles of trip on Lake Baikal. It is clear that crossing the lake by ferry in the summer and by treacherous horse and sledge

in the winter is only a temporary solution. Elsewhere, there's a thousand miles of track still to be laid so that the Trans-Siberian Railway can run continuously from Europe to the Pacific Ocean. And in the east,

there is debate over which route to take. To the north of the Amur River lies Russia's toughest geological conditions, a region where the climate means the earth is permanently frozen. Engineers consider instead a southerly route through Manchuria. It is easier and more direct. There is only one problem. Manchuria is not in Russia. It is Chinese territory. When Russia negotiates a deal with China to complete the line via Manchuria, both nations have their eye on a threat from further east, Japan. Russia promises to help defend China from invasion, pointing out that the railroad will allow it to transport troops and arms

more easily to the region. Indeed, by the turn of the century, Russia has 170,000 soldiers stationed in Manchuria, all traveling by train. Russia argues that its deployment is a bulwark against invasion. But to Japanese eyes, it looks like aggression. Is Russia readying to expand into East Asia?

Is it planning to make a move on Korea? Both sides reach an impasse. And in 1904, Japan decides that the time is ripe to strike. There's not many railways that actually provoked a war, but this one certainly did. And it provoked a war with Japan in 1904 and 1905. And the reason for that was that Japan was just waking up to its imperial ambitions. Japan had been isolated until the 1860s, 70s. It didn't like the idea of this Trans-Siberian Railway, which at that stage in the early 1900s was a pretty crude railway. It had speed limits of around 15, 25 miles an hour at most on

large parts of it. It would take 10, 12, 14 days to get from Moscow to Vladivostok. And so the Japanese saw this as weakness. It was a crude railway, but nevertheless, it was a railway that did manage to bring people in, bring soldiers in, and bring settlers in. On the 9th of February, 1904, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacks Port Arthur, the Pacific base of the Russian fleet. Now, the two nations are at war. The Russians envisaged the Trans-Siberian Railway as a strategic asset, allowing the army to move troops quickly from west to east.

But the poor quality of the rapidly built line lets them down. Rushed construction and cheap materials such as iron track instead of steel means that the railways beset with faults and delays. Plus, there is only a single line, so trains waste hours waiting in sidings for the oncoming service to pass. Worst of all, during the winter of 1904, locomotives and soldiers are lost into the deep waters of Lake Baikal. So instead of a new weapon in their arsenal, the Trans-Siberian Railway turns out to be a shot in the foot. The Russo-Japanese War continues into 1905, when the Russians are finally defeated with the loss of 100,000 men and the fall of Port Arthur.

There was humiliation for the Russians. The most humiliating part was they sent their Baltic fleet over. Now, if you can imagine sending your Baltic fleet around the bottom of Africa to get around there, it took kind of nine months. And the Japanese were waiting for them and they probably sank the whole fleet when it arrived in the Sea of Japan. And this was greatly humiliating for the Russians and prompted something of a revolution, certainly a precursor to the 1917 events.

And I would argue, actually, the railway was certainly indirectly and possibly directly in some respects responsible for the 1917 revolution as well. The Russo-Japanese conflict prompts the authorities to step up the pace of construction of a stretch of track through mountains south of Lake Baikal. The Circum-Baikal line means there is no longer a need

to cross the water in summer or ice in winter. The new line is less than 200 miles long, but it is vital to bringing the whole railroad together. When it is finally complete, the Circumbaikal becomes known as the Golden Buckle on the Steel Belt of Russia. Now trains can travel uninterrupted from St. Petersburg in the west to Port Arthur in the east. The journey takes 16 days by regular train and 13 days on an express. This is a massive improvement on Chekhov's journey, taken only 14 years earlier.

The service is immediately popular. Wealthy tourists travel in style, sleeping in lavish carriages with tiled ensuite bathrooms. The train is like a moving resort, with restaurants, a bar and piano room, even a hair salon. Travellers who are interested in photography can make use of an on-board darkroom for developing film. There is even a church carriage with a belfry and resident priests. But those who cannot afford first class have a less comfortable experience, with the cheapest tickets giving access to little more than cattle wagons. Soon, the railway is plunged into turmoil again.

It is called into service for the First World War, hauling troops and tanks to the front. But the country is sent reeling by the horrors of that conflict. Russian troops on the front line have inadequate supplies and weapons. The military leadership of Tsar Nicholas II proves ineffective, and there are massive casualties on the Eastern Front. When Russian battalions are forced to retreat, it comes as another humiliation only a decade after losing the war against Japan. Russia turns her anger on her leaders, especially Tsar Nicholas. In early 1917, a series of public protests and workers' strikes escalates into the

revolution that topples the monarchy. In March, it is inside a carriage of the imperial train that Tsar Nicholas signs the abdication document. Along with his wife Alexandra and their five children, he is transported along the railway into hiding in Siberia, then back by train to be put under house arrest near Yekaterinburg. In July 1918, the entire family is executed at Ipatiev House, only one mile from the train station on the Trans-Siberian Line. A power vacuum in the aftermath of the revolution leads to a civil war that rages until 1922. The railway, once again, proves to be the front line of conflict. Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky commands his Red Army from an armoured train

that patrols the country from east to west. His steel-clad carriage is called Zarmuretz, a roving military base it bristles with weaponry. It also boasts telegraph capabilities and is flanked by infantry who can fan out to secure sites along the train line. As the conflict escalates, there are some 300 armored trains on the Trans-Siberian, but only 75 are built in official yards. The rest are cobbled together from salvage and old naval artillery. But Zarmiretz is the father of them all. It has two turrets for long-range fire and eight machine guns for close protection. Its armor is four inches thick. But even with two Fiat engines, Zarmiretz can only reach a top speed of 28 miles per hour.

Nonetheless, whoever possesses the war train rules the railway and hence Russia itself. It's actually not a very effective form of warfare. You have troops on the train behind you. You also had motorcycles and the odd car that would be transported along would enable you to find out what was going on in a wider range. The armoured train itself was very well equipped with guns. They were a bit stuck on the rails. They're not enormously flexible.

So their real use was as reconnaissance and as the kind of first way of entering a territory, but they needed to be backed up very quickly. In fact, some of those armored trains were captured by the other side and used against their original owners. of warfare but nevertheless quite daunting for local population to put off a military to find this armored train kind of thundering along the tracks with machine guns blazing and bigger guns kind of mounted on them so it was a crude but kind of sometimes briefly effective form of warfare On August 16, 1918, a vicious firefight sees the demise of the Baikal Ferry, which had been conscripted into action as military transport around the lake. As troops from the White Guard fight Red Army revolutionaries for control of a port on the southern shore of the lake, the icebreaker is struck by a missile. With a damaged stern, the ferry tries to back away from the pier into the safety of deeper water. But before it can get out of range, it is struck again on the top side. Its load of charcoal catches alight,

and the ship sinks close to the shore. The first two decades of the 20th century see constant conflict. From the hostilities with Japan to World War I, a revolution and civil war, the Trans-Siberian Railway plays a key role in them all. Its strategic importance is clear, and so work to maintain and develop the line never stops, even as the reins of power change hands again and again. By now, the railway is a central artery, bringing life to barren Siberia. New stations and service yards result in towns growing in a ribbon development across the nation. Trains deliver immigrants, people in search of land and a fresh

start. But it serves a darker purpose too. Prisoners, criminals, and political enemies of the state are sent by Stalin's communist regime to gulags in the north from where most people never make a return journey. Just as Tsar Alexander had imagined at the end of the previous century, the railway opens up the east like the North American railroads conquered their west. opens up the East like the North American railroads conquered their West. It is very much like the Wild West. One of the ways that the government wanted to retain its hold over Siberia was by ensuring that it was peopled. And they gave them all sorts of concessions. They even had churches built and schools built and settlements created. And the very name of one of the main towns, Novosibirsk, you know, New Siberia, it was a small village in 1900 and now an enormous industrial town.

So that was all the result of building the Trans-Siberian. And in the first decade, you got about a million people settling there. And they were given land as well to cultivate. Not always successfully, of course, just like in the Wild West, where not everybody managed to make a living out of it. But there was a lot of state support. There were even things like churches on wheels, which would go and visit once a month. They'd have a service in a particular place. And then for the next Sunday, they would move a couple of hundred miles to the next settlement. They would have cinema cars and people would have the opportunity to sit in the train and watch films for the first time and so on. And some of that was also used for propaganda.

They would kind of highlight the wonders of communism and the like after the 1917 revolution. kind of highlight the wonders of communism and the like after the 1917 revolution. And so it was the mechanism by which the imperial power, and indeed later on the communists, would seek to hold on to Siberia and ensure that it was part of Russia, and to subjugate it, and to take over from the nomadic peoples who occupied it to kind of create a permanent presence that would entrench Siberia as part of the Russian Empire. During the Second World War, the route again plays a vital role for all sides in the conflict. While the rival navies fight to dominate the seas and fighter pilots battle for control of the skies, the land armies of Central Europe want access to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Hitler invades Poland in 1939. An estimated three and a half million Jews flee the country. Over 2,000 refugees go to Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Some families manage to secure a ticket for the Trans-Siberian Railway. For the high price of $200, the train takes persecuted Jews away from the conflict in Europe to the relative safety of the Far East. In the winter of 1940, a young Polish boy sits with his family in a busy restaurant carriage. Their few belongings are stowed in the cabin.

The child watches as miles of frozen steppe pass by the window. His younger brothers are bored and fidgety, complaining about the unfamiliar food. But the boy is mesmerized by the view. But the boy is mesmerized by the view. After months of living in fear, this train ride lets him feel as though he has escaped to another world. The steppe is so flat and featureless that he can see to the end of the earth. Between here and the horizon, there are none of the things he has come to dread. No soldiers, no tanks, no bombs. Just mile after mile of peaceful wasteland.

A little later, he sees a shack with a cow tied to a pole. After hours of nothingness, this sign of life comes as a shock. And he points it out to his brothers. They press their noses to the window as they pass a horse pulling a sledge. More shacks. A market. Soon they're on the outskirts of a town. Fear bubbles inside him as he sees soldiers on the platform where the train slows to a stop.

But the troops do not seem interested in boarding his train. His father whispers that they are going in the other direction, heading west towards the war. Doors slam as passengers disembark, porters call for business, food vendors shout out their wares. But the boy's father doesn't get off to buy supplies, as he does at some stations.

He tells the children to sit quietly and not draw attention to themselves. He is watching those German soldiers warily. Presently, the train doors shut. His brothers start to sing a song from the synagogue, but his mother shushes them. They still have a long way to go until they find a place of safety. The carriage shudders and rattles as the journey resumes. The boy knows that they need to reach a place called Japan, and perhaps America. As the train rattles on and the frightening soldiers are left behind, he resumes his vigil over the wilderness.

Like thousands of Jews who managed to get tickets for the Trans-Siberian Railway between June 1940 and July 1941, this family will arrive in Vladivostok only to be stripped of their belongings. The Soviets allow safe passage but do not allow currency or goods to leave the country. So Jewish refugees arrive destitute when they sail on to Japan. Many are taken in by Jewish-Japanese communities. Although Japan is an ally of Germany, it offers sanctuary to Nazi victims. A smaller number will get visas for America and sail across the Pacific to a new life

there. It will be years before they learn that the railway was their ticket to salvation, as millions of those who remained in Europe perished in the Holocaust. But the railway in the early 1940s has only one track. When the eastbound train carrying Jewish refugees pulls into a siding to let a westbound train pass, ironically that service is likely to be carrying supplies for the Nazis. In the years when Russia claimed neutrality, the Trans-Siberian Railway provides a useful transport link between Japan and Germany. All that changes in 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the USSR. Now, as the Russians side with the Allies, they block the Nazis' use of the railway, and the US utilize it instead to send supplies and equipment to the European front,

to aid the British, French, and Russians. Soviet troops also traveled east by rail to reach the Japanese front in Asia. Once again, the Iron Highway is a prize sought by all sides. But its designers had foreseen this outcome decades ago. It is relatively simple for the Russians to prevent the line being taken over by the Germans because it had been purpose-built to be incompatible with the rolling stock of the rest of Europe. Russian rails are spaced at five foot apart, where the rest of Europe is four foot eight and a half. Because there was a different gauge and the Germans were using the railways to take supplies, they had to either change the gauge or transship the supplies from one set of rails to another.

And this greatly slowed the advance in Operation Barbarossa, which was the invasion in the summer of 1941. So the whole of the Trans-Siberian is built to a different gauge. And when it goes into China, for example, Mongolia, you have to change gauge to standard gauge, which nowadays can actually be done on certain trains automatically. But otherwise, you have to actually lift the carriage up and put it on a different set of wheels and so on. It is quite a hassle. And that was greatly affected in slowing down German advance.

It was greatly effective in slowing down German advance. Over the decades since the railway proved its value as the backbone of the continent, it has been expanded with new branches and an electrified line. Today, a third of all Russian exports are delivered to east or west via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Thousands of local passengers use the service to navigate a vast country. And, in peaceful times, foreign tourists are drawn to make the journey too. It has once again been conscripted into war, with troops, tanks and artillery delivered to the border of Ukraine by train. For modern-day passengers riding the rails, the journey offers an insight into the mysteries of Russia,

a country that Winston Churchill described as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, a nation whose position in the saddle between East and West has brought conflict as well as one of the greatest achievements in modern construction. Certainly if they hadn't built the Trans-Siberian, I think Russia would have split and it would have lost its eastern lands and it would have looked west. And ultimately that might have been a good thing,

that it might have been more united on the other hand. It might have tried to conquer Europe, who knows? But history would undoubtedly be very different. And that's why I do suggest that of all the railways that were built, this is the one that probably had the greatest impact on history. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of St. Patrick. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of St. Patrick.

The latter-day myths about Patrick don't have a historical basis in Patrick himself, but they do go fairly far back in the legend of Patrick. For example, when the story that he drove the snakes out of Ireland isn't true. There never were any snakes in Ireland. If you go to the National Museum of Natural History in Dublin, you won't find any snakes there at all. There never have been. But the idea that he drove the snakes out is just a symbolic way of saying

he drove the evil out of Ireland. Ever since the book of Genesis, snakes have been associated with evil. That's next time on Short History Of.