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.In 1884, work began on the line from Yekaterinburg on the east of the Urals to Tyumin, 1,330 miles east of Moscow.Starting such a massive project as the Trans-Siberian in a relatively backward country such as Russia in the 1880s was no easy task.It was built eastwards from Chelyabinsk and westwards from Vladivostok, and was by far the biggest railway project ever, at its peak employing over 89,000 men.The eventual cost of the initial alignment would be at least 855m roubles (say, around £85m 5), a staggering sum for an impoverished government of a largely agricultural nation with a small tax base.First there were major administrative hurdles, with the finance and transport ministries both trying to assert control over the project, which led to major internal battles.Then there was the need to obtain the finance, which led to the sensitive issue of whether this vital part of Russian infrastructure should be funded by foreign interests and thirdly, there were concerns about the choice of route through the steppe.It took almost a decade of wrangling over these issues before the ceremonial first stone for the railway could be laid.Just as with the American coast-to-coast railroad, it would take an inspirational and visionary figure to push through the project.In the case of the Trans-Siberian, it was Sergei Witte who, despite having a noble mother, worked his way up from the lower echelons of government administration to become, first, transport, and then finance, minister.Witte’s father and grandfather had been colonial administrators in the Caucasuses, a land with the same type of frontier spirit as the American West and, given this upbringing, it is no wonder that Witte had an interest in colonizing Siberia.Witte, whose cleverness was matched by his ambition, started his career as an administrator with the Odessa State Railway but then enjoyed a meteoric rise, once jumping seven grades in a single promotion in the railway hierarchy, thanks to his adept use of contacts, including the press, and his canny networking, as well as a ruthlessness which several times saw him turn against former allies in order to further his own interests.A Russian historian described him as a man of ‘great ideas’ who was ‘unscrupulous in taking advantage of any means available to make things happen his way.He was no stranger to playing a game concocted of brinkmanship, bribes, rumours and allegations published in the press.’ 6 A staunch monarchist, with an almost filial devotion to the tsar, and a fierce nationalist protective of mother Russia, Witte saw the Siberian railway as a way of showing the rest of the world that the country was the equal of the major European powers, able to undertake the globe’s biggest engineering project.In Witte’s mind there were endless hopes for the railway: it would bring about an end to the isolation of the country’s east, it would make Russia a key player in trade between Asia and Europe and would open up new horizons for world trade, with Moscow at its centre.As a biographer of the railway suggests sardonically, this description of the Trans-Siberian Railway by Witte was ‘a modern equivalent of the medieval religious doctrine that proclaimed Moscow as “the Third Rome”’.7Witte first pushed the project through the extremely bureaucratic machine of Russian government and then ensured it had virtually limitless supplies of money from the exchequer.Witte’s cleverest piece of manipulation was to have the future Tsar Nicholas II, Alexander III’s heir, appointed in 1891 as chairman of the Committee of the Siberian Railroad, the government body overseeing the scheme, a brilliant move which ‘all but guaranteed the completion of the Siberian Railroad’.8 Nicholas had travelled to the far east earlier that year and laid the foundation stone of the railway at Vladivostok, a journey that put him strongly in the camp of the Orientalists, those Russians who saw a kinship between Russia and Asia that was distinct from Europe.Indeed, Nicholas’s commitment to the scheme was such that he chose to retain the chairmanship of the committee following his accession as tsar on the death of his father three years later.The railway was more than just an iron road through the Russian steppe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.In 1884, work began on the line from Yekaterinburg on the east of the Urals to Tyumin, 1,330 miles east of Moscow.Starting such a massive project as the Trans-Siberian in a relatively backward country such as Russia in the 1880s was no easy task.It was built eastwards from Chelyabinsk and westwards from Vladivostok, and was by far the biggest railway project ever, at its peak employing over 89,000 men.The eventual cost of the initial alignment would be at least 855m roubles (say, around £85m 5), a staggering sum for an impoverished government of a largely agricultural nation with a small tax base.First there were major administrative hurdles, with the finance and transport ministries both trying to assert control over the project, which led to major internal battles.Then there was the need to obtain the finance, which led to the sensitive issue of whether this vital part of Russian infrastructure should be funded by foreign interests and thirdly, there were concerns about the choice of route through the steppe.It took almost a decade of wrangling over these issues before the ceremonial first stone for the railway could be laid.Just as with the American coast-to-coast railroad, it would take an inspirational and visionary figure to push through the project.In the case of the Trans-Siberian, it was Sergei Witte who, despite having a noble mother, worked his way up from the lower echelons of government administration to become, first, transport, and then finance, minister.Witte’s father and grandfather had been colonial administrators in the Caucasuses, a land with the same type of frontier spirit as the American West and, given this upbringing, it is no wonder that Witte had an interest in colonizing Siberia.Witte, whose cleverness was matched by his ambition, started his career as an administrator with the Odessa State Railway but then enjoyed a meteoric rise, once jumping seven grades in a single promotion in the railway hierarchy, thanks to his adept use of contacts, including the press, and his canny networking, as well as a ruthlessness which several times saw him turn against former allies in order to further his own interests.A Russian historian described him as a man of ‘great ideas’ who was ‘unscrupulous in taking advantage of any means available to make things happen his way.He was no stranger to playing a game concocted of brinkmanship, bribes, rumours and allegations published in the press.’ 6 A staunch monarchist, with an almost filial devotion to the tsar, and a fierce nationalist protective of mother Russia, Witte saw the Siberian railway as a way of showing the rest of the world that the country was the equal of the major European powers, able to undertake the globe’s biggest engineering project.In Witte’s mind there were endless hopes for the railway: it would bring about an end to the isolation of the country’s east, it would make Russia a key player in trade between Asia and Europe and would open up new horizons for world trade, with Moscow at its centre.As a biographer of the railway suggests sardonically, this description of the Trans-Siberian Railway by Witte was ‘a modern equivalent of the medieval religious doctrine that proclaimed Moscow as “the Third Rome”’.7Witte first pushed the project through the extremely bureaucratic machine of Russian government and then ensured it had virtually limitless supplies of money from the exchequer.Witte’s cleverest piece of manipulation was to have the future Tsar Nicholas II, Alexander III’s heir, appointed in 1891 as chairman of the Committee of the Siberian Railroad, the government body overseeing the scheme, a brilliant move which ‘all but guaranteed the completion of the Siberian Railroad’.8 Nicholas had travelled to the far east earlier that year and laid the foundation stone of the railway at Vladivostok, a journey that put him strongly in the camp of the Orientalists, those Russians who saw a kinship between Russia and Asia that was distinct from Europe.Indeed, Nicholas’s commitment to the scheme was such that he chose to retain the chairmanship of the committee following his accession as tsar on the death of his father three years later.The railway was more than just an iron road through the Russian steppe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]