Meanwhile on the western side of the Caspian a railway was constructed to connect Baku with the new possession of Batum and with Tiflis. The network locked newly acquired territories into the Empire, and enabled forces to be quickly switched between the Caucasus, Central Asia and the imperial heartlands. Only communications across Siberia remained as slow as ever. It was obvious that if Russia was to have a successful future as a Pacific power this needed to be rectified. The American Civil War had demonstrated that success in war was now a product of barbed wire, steam power and mass production as much as of the dash of cavalrymen and the endurance of foot soldiers. Efficient transport for mass armies, vastly expanded output of iron, coal and steel, and the production of the tools of war were now prerequisites for any great power. In 1891 the Russian government took a decisive step towards meeting these demands by starting construction on a railway to the Pacific.
For a vast developing country with little native capital, the decision to build by far the longest railway in the world over its most difficult terrain was certainly ambitious. But, though the trans-Siberian project was risky, its completion promised alluring rewards. Linking Moscow with the Pacific would enable the Empire to build up its power on the Pacific and on the frontiers with China and Korea. The massive orders it would generate for rails and engines would stimulate industry. And, together with the construction of new lines linking the industrial regions with each other and with the ports, it would provide an even bigger stimulus to the economy as a whole than the first railway boom had done. On the other hand the cost of borrowing the necessary capital would impose an immense burden of debt which would take many years to pay off; the projected maintenance costs were also alarming, and the technical difficulties in, for example, cutting over thirty tunnels to find a way round Lake Baikal and establishing a stable bed for rails over deserts and morasses would pose formidable problems for the engineers. Moreover, 1891 was a famine year in Russia, so the project had to be justified in social terms.
The project’s mastermind, Sergei Vitte, had headed the railway department of the Ministry of Finance since 1889. His background was in state railway administration in southern Russia, but he had also worked in the private sector. He knew that, since the Empire could not generate sufficient capital, this had to come from the West - chiefly from France, Germany, Belgium and Britain. He also knew that the costs of servicing the loans and borrowings would constitute a serious burden on the budget, but that the price had to be paid. He was soon presented with the responsibility for finding the means of paying it: in 1892 he was promoted, in quick succession, to be minister of communications and then minister of finance.
Aside from its military and economic potential, the great project would help to answer looming social problems, permitting the rapid transportation of food to famine areas, argued Vitte. Once bureaucratic reluctance to encourage large-scale settlement in Siberia had been overcome, it would also help to relieve the rising rural-population pressure in European Russia. Vitte’s promotion of Russian industry was also to absorb some of this excess rural population. Even so, the capitalist-minded Vitte himself remained conscious of the Empire’s fundamental problem. In a secret memorandum to the Tsar dated March 1899, he was to compare
Russia’s economic relationship to western Europe … [with] that of colonies to their mother countries. The latter see their colonies as convenient markets from which they can sell their … industrial products advantageously and from which they can extract the raw materials they need … To a large extent Russia … is such a … colony for the industrially-developed states. It provides them with the products … at low prices, and buys … their products at high ones.
There was one saving grace: Russia was a powerful independent state able to break out from dependency and create ‘a fully independent national industry’. 20 The Trans-Siberian Railway project was the first major step towards this goal, and, overall, the achievements were brilliant.
