The Trans-Siberian Railway: A Traveller's Anthology

The Dream

We stood in the hall of the Armoury Museum in Moscow. We had just seen the Great Siberian Railway Easter egg made by Michael Perkin in Faberge’s workshop with its scale-model of the train. In the afternoon we would be on the train itself. We got talking to some Americans, recognized from our massive hotel, and we learned they had been to Leningrad, to Georgia, even to Samarkand.

And you? they asked politely.

This afternoon we board the Trans-Siberian railway to travel to Hong Kong.

Now that, said one, his eyes lighting up, "is the trip I really want to do."

***

This chapter is devoted to descriptions of this fascination with the great journey. Perhaps the most eloquent was written by Lesley Blanch who was, through her childhood and into adult life, obsessed by the idea of a journey to Siberia. Excerpts from Baedeker (1914) set the scene, and must have been read by many who never actually boarded the train. Bassett Digby, who first travelled the route in 1910 and returned more than once, also describes the size of the country and gives glimpses of what can be seen along the way. Lindon Bates Jr describes a whole day on the train in 1908. Sir Henry Norman, MP, discusses the strategic dream of the railway in 1901. Harry de Windt, who went this way both before and after the railway was built, provides a comparison. Lindon Bates Junior discusses the potential of the line in 1908, A. Rado records the Soviet government’s commitment to the railway and finally Paul Theroux, who returned from his great railway journey (told in The Great Railway Bazaar) on the Trans-Siberian Railway, tells of the journey westwards and the people encountered along the way.

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The Trans-Siberian Railway Thundering Through the House

Lesley Blanch, 1968

Sometimes he told me fairy stories - Russian legends, Ilya Mourametz the heroic, or Konyiok Gorbunok, the little hump-backed horse who brought his master such good fortune; or the magical cat, chained to a tree, who sang verses when he circled to the right, and told fairy tales when he went to the left ... Best of all, he would tell of the great train that ran half across the world - the most luxurious and splendid train that ever was - the Trans-Siberian.

He held me enthralled then, and today, a life time later, the spell still holds. He told me the train’s history, its beginnings (first mooted, it seemed, by an Englishman, a Mr. Dull by name); how a Tzar had said, ‘Let the Railway be built!’ And it was. He told me of its mileage, five thousand (to the Canadian Pacific’s three thousand); of its splendours: brass bedsteads instead of bunks; libraries, hot baths, and grand pianos to while away the hours. (From Moscow to Irkutsk, barely a half-way point to Vladivostok, was nearly a week’s travelling.) Of its miseries; of prison wagons, iron barred trucks hitched on at some wayside halt where the shackled lines of wretched creatures could be heard clanking their chains, often five pounds of wooden logs added to the heavy irons - and singing their traditional exiles’ begging song, the Miloserdanaya, a sort of funeral chant of doom and despair.

***

How I loved him! How I loved his Traveller’s tales and the way he brought the Trans-Siberian railway thundering through the house. There was a chapel on the train, he said; a candle-lit ikon-filled chapel where the long-haired, long-bearded Orthodox priests (‘Popes we call them’) gathered the pious together before a gilded iconostas, praying and swaying as the great engine snaked across the steppes. Piety ran the length of the train. Piety and patriotism: love of a country. As the train rattled across the bridge over the Volga, every man stood up and doffed his cap to Mother Volga.

I knew it all by heart. Every Wednesday and Saturday, the Trans-Siberian train pulled out of Moscow and for seven days ate up the eastward miles to Irkutsk, and farther, into the heart of Siberia, through the Trans-Baikal provinces, edging the Mongol steppes and the yellow dust-clouds of the Gobi desert. There was a branch line to Outer Mongolia-another, along the Amur, to bandit-infested Manchuria, and at last, ten days later-Vladivostok, Russian outlet of life and death on the Sea of Japan. One extension of the line led to ‘The gates were scarlet lacquer, a hundred and fifty feet high, and stuck with the heads of malefactors,’ said the Traveller, spreading beef-dripping with a lavish hand.

***

For me, nothing was ever the same again. I had fallen in love with the Traveller’s travels. Gradually, I became possessed by love of a horizon and a train which would take me there; of a fabled engine and an imagined landscape, seen through a pair of narrowed eyes set slant-wise in a yellow Mongol face. These Asiatic wastes were to become, for me, the landscape of my heart, that secret landscape of longing which glides before our eyes between sleeping and waking; a region I could not fathom, into which I was drawn, ever deeper, more voluptuously, till it became both a challenge and a retreat. It was another dimension where I could refuge from the rooms and streets about which I moved, docile but apart. From the first, the Traveller had understood my infatuation for Asia, and every time he came to see me, he brought some object which told of those horizons. A chunk of malachite or a Kazakh fox-skin cap (which smelt rather rank) and once, a bunchuk, or standard, decorated with the dangling horse-tails of a Mongol chieftain. I was enraptured.

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From Moscow to Vladivostok

Baedeker, 1914

8134 V. (5391 M.). Railway from Moscow to Tchelyabinsk, 2056 V.; Trans-Siberian Railway from Tchelyabinsk to Irkutsk, 3049 V.; Trans-Baikal Railway from Irkutsk to Mandshuriya, 1424 V.; Chinese Eastern Railway from Mandshuriya to Pogranitchnaya, 1388 V.; Ussuri Railway from Pogranitchnaya to Vladivostok, 217 V.-Customs Examination. On the outward journey Chinese officials examine passengers’ luggage at Mandshuriya, and Russian officials at Pogranitchnaya (registered luggage at Vladivostok). On the return journey there is a Chinese examination at Pogranitchnaya, and Russian examinations at Mandshuriya, Tankhoi, and Irkutsk. - Two Express Trains weekly in 8% days, one being operated by the International Sleeping Car Co., and the other by the State Railways. Carriages are changed at Irkutsk. Fares 327 rb. 44, 212 rb. 77 cop. (first-class compartment reserved for a single traveller 523 rb. 70 cop.); from Berlin to Vladivostok 673 M, 424% M; from London to Vladivostok 37-38l., 23-25l. The first-class compartments or sections are for two persons, the second-class for four. The railway tickets (apply early) are available for 22 days if bought in Russia, or 3 months if bought elsewhere. If the journey is broken, it is necessary to obtain a new seat ticket for the rest of the journey. Thus, e.g., a new seat-ticket from Omsk to Irkutsk costs 18 rb. 40 or 13 rb. 80 cop. The amount of luggage allowed free is 60 Russian lbs. (54 lbs.), but through passengers from foreign countries are entitled to twice as much. Each additional 10 lbs. (9 lbs.) costs 2 rb. 69 cop. The charges in the Dining Car are B. 55 cop., dej. 1Va, D. 1% rb. -Mail Train daily in 18 days (fares 158 rb. 93, 96 rb. 76 cop.; carriages changed at Tchelyabinsk, Irkutsk, and Mandshuriya). Also ‘Passenger Train’ daily as far as Mandshuriya (seat ticket, see p. xxiii). - The journey from Moscow to Tsuruga (Yokohama) via Vladivostok takes 12 days (fares 365 rb. 19, 250 rb. 51 cop.); to Nagasaki 12 days (fares 380 rb. 48, 265 rb. 81 cop.); to Shanghai 14 days (fares 410 rb. 7, 295 rb. 39 cop.).

From St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, via Perm and Tchelyabinsk. 8269 V. (5481 M.), express train twice weekly in 9 days (fares 329 rb. 35, 214 rb. 25 cop.). Carriages are changed at Irkutsk. Comp. R. 35.

Through passengers from W. Europe to the Far East must have their passports vise by a Russian consul (comp. pp. XVIII, XIX); registered luggage is not examined before it reaches the frontier of the country of destination. Tickets (available for 2 years) are obtainable for the journey to the Far East by railway and back by steamer, or vice versa. The steamer-journey may be begun or ended at Shanghai, Yokohama, Kobe, or Nagasaki.

Siberia has an area (4,784,034 sq. M.) lV4 times greater than Europe, 21l3 times larger than Russia in Europe, and more than 40 times larger than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1910 its population was estimated at 8,220,000. It extends from the Ural Mts. (59° E. long.) on the W. to the Sea of Japan and the Okhotsk and Behring Seas on the E. (Cape Deshnev or East Cape, 174° 24’ E. long.), and from the Arctic Ocean on the N. to China on the S. It is divided into the two Governments of Tomsk and Tobolsk (which together formerly constituted the General-Government of West Siberia); the General-Government of Irkutsk, which includes the Governments of Yeniseisk and Irkutsk and the Territories of Yakutsk and Transbaikal; and the General- Government of the Amur Territory, comprising the Amur and Maritime Provinces, Kamtchatka, and the N. half of the island of Sakhalin. The N.W. part of the General-Government of the Steppes (the Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk Territories) belongs officially to Russian Central Asia.

Western Siberia, from the Urals to the Yenisei, is for the most part a flat plain, with good arable land and pastures in its central and S. portions. Eastern Siberia, which is three times as large, is mountainous and less fertile, labouring under the disadvantages of a severe climate in its W. part and of periodical inundations in the E. In N. Siberia most of the ground is covered with forest (Taiga), gradually passing over into a waste of barren lands (Tundras), which are frozen for the greater part of the year and marshy in the summer. To the S. and S.E. are the Altai Mts. (p. 526), the chief peak of which is the Byelukha (14,900 ft.); the Sayan Mts. (highest peak Munku-Sarduik, 11,275 ft.); the YablonoviHills; and the StanovdiHills, all of crystalline formation. - Into the Arctic Ocean flow the Ob (2240 M. long), with its greatest tributary the Irtuish or Irty’sh (about 2200 M. in Siberia and 330 M. in China, where it is known as the Black Irtuish); the Yenisei (about 2490 M. long); and the Lena (2860 M. long). The Amur (p. 587), which with the Argun is over 2720 M. long, flows into the Sea of Okhotsk. The largest lake is Lake Baikal (p. 533).

The Climate of Siberia runs to extremes both of heat and of cold; the winter is long and the air dry except on the E. coast. The coldest month is January, the hottest July. At Tomsk the range is from -3.3° Fahr. to + 65.6°, while the mean annual temperature is + 30.7°. The corresponding figures at Irkutsk are: 5.4°, + 65.1°, and + 31.3°; at Blago-vyeshtchensk, on the Amur: 13.9°, + 70.5°, and + 33.3°; at Vladivostok: 14.1°, + 87.1°, and + 40.3° F. Siberia is rich in coniferous trees. The deciduous trees of W. Siberia lack variety, consisting mainly of birches, aspens, alders, and poplars; to the E. of the Yablonovi range the list receives many additions, such as the oak, walnut, and elm. The Territory of the Amur, on the other hand, abounds in deciduous trees. Siberia is especially rich in minerals. These include gold (output in 1909, 2895 pud or 1,524,762 oz.), silver, lead, copper, iron, coal, and graphite. Exports to the W. include wheat, rye, oats, and butter (in 1911 more than 4,300.000 pud or 69,320 tons, most of it via Windau).

The great majority of the Inhabitants of Siberia, especially those in the towns and along the railway, are Russians, including free im-migrants (peasants and Cossacks) and the exiles and their descendants (comp. p. 261). [Between 1896 and 1910 there were 3,970,000 immigrants.] The Turkish (Kirghizes, Tartars, Yakuts), Finnish (Voguls, Ostyaks), and Mongolian (Teleuts, Buriats, Samoyedes, Tunguses) races are also represented. The exiles, most of whom are to be found in E. Siberia, consist of criminals condemned to penal servitude, those compelled to settle in prescribed communities, and those banished by administrative process. As a result of an Imperial Ukase of June 10th, 1900. the banishment to Siberia has been considerably limited.

History. The Russian conquest of Siberia began in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who in 1574 invested the merchants Jacob and Gregory Strdganov with the right to build forts upon the banks of the rivers Tobol, Irtuish, etc. In 1575, for the protection of their extensive domains, the Stroganovs took into their service 800 Cossacks under Yermak, the former Volga pirate, who penetrated far into the interior of Siberia, and (on Oct. 26th, 1581) captured Isker or Sibir (p. 528), the capital of the Siberian Tartar Empire. Yermak was drowned after a fight in 1584 while attempting to escape by swimming across the Irtuish-Thence forward the Russians pressed steadily eastward and northward, and easily vanquished the inhabitants who opposed them. Tobolsk was founded in 1587, Tomsk in 1604, Yakutsk in 1632, Irkutsk in 1652. In 1649 the Cossack Hetman Khabardv fitted out an expedition to take possession of the Amur district, but the peace of Nertchinsk (1689) gave this territory back to China. The scientific exploration of the land was undertaken during the reign of Peter the Great, when Behring discovered the strait which bears his name. In 1854 Count Muravyev (Amurski), Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, descended the Amur with a military force, and in 1857 the left bank of that river was ceded to Russia by China. In 1860, by the treaty of Peking, Russia acquired the Ussuri province; and in the same year Vladivostok was founded. During the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891-1903) the Russians leased the peninsula of Kuantung (with Port Arthur) from the Chinese (1898). The Russians occupied Manchuria in 1900, and their refusal to evacuate it at the request of Japan brought on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, which ended in the defeat of the Russians. By the Peace of Portsmouth (1905) Russia lost Kuantung, Manchuria, and the S. half of Sakhalin.

The best Travelling Season for Siberia extends from the middle of May (O. S.) to the middle of June. July is a very hot month, but August is pleasant, while September is a favourable season for Manchuria (voyage on the Amur, see p. 539). Those who make the trip in summer should take light clothing and a warm overcoat, while woollen underwear is the best safeguard against the sudden changes of temperature. Travellers should on no account drink unboiled water. High goloshes or ‘rubber boots’ are desirable, as the unpaved streets of the towns are almost impassable in spring and autumn; in winter felt over-shoes or ‘arctics’ are also necessary. A mosquito-veil is desirable in E. Siberia and Manchuria during the summer. It is desirable to carry a revolver in Manchuria and in trips away from the railway. - The Hotels are almost invariably dear and indifferent. Bed-linen, soap, etc., should always be taken. A disturbing feature is the inevitable concert or ‘singsong’ in the dining room, which usually lasts far into the night. Travel in Siberia is about one-third more expensive than in Russia in Europe.

The traveller must be on his guard against Thieves. Thus, when he quits his compartment at a railway station he should have the door locked by the provodnik (p. xxi).

Travellers in Siberia should avoid carrying large sums of money on them. Instead they should have orders on the Russo-Asiatic Bank (comp. p. 96), on the Commercial Bank of Siberia, or (for the East) on the firm of Kunst & Albers at Vladivostok (branch at Hamburg).

Bibliography. More or less extensive accounts of Siberia will be found in the following works: A. Bordeaux, Siberie et Californie (Paris, 1903).- A. J. Dmitriev-Mamonov and A. F. Zdziarski, Guide to the Great Siberian Railway (1900). - J. F. Fraser, The Real Siberia (1902). - W. Gerrare, Greater Russia (1903).- Sir A. Hosie, Manchuria (1901). - G. Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (4th ed., 1897) and Tent Life in Siberia (New York, 1893). -J. Legras, En Siberie (Paris, 1913). - M. P. Price, Siberia of Today (1912). - P. A. Stolypin & A. V. Krivoshein, Kolonisation Sibiriens (Berlin, 1912).- M. L. Taft, Strange Siberia (New York, 1911). - S. Turner, Siberia (2nd ed., 1911). - Chas. Wenyon, Four Thousand Miles across Siberia (5th ed., 1909).- R. L. Wright and Bassett Digby, Through Siberia (1913).

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I’ll Give You Siberia!

Lesley Blanch, 1968

‘Siberia! I’ll give you Siberia - you with your chilblains,’ said my nurse, when I whined to go out in the brown-edged, slushy London snow. I was hardening myself, in preparation for journeys to Omsk and Tomsk (later I named two kittens after these towns) and the mysterious, icy-sounding places along the Trans-Siberian’s way. Verkhne-Udinsk, Chita and Chailor Gol were names round which the tempests of Asia howled. Nevertheless Nanny, who had now left us, showed an under-standing of my peculiar passion, and next Christmas sent me a purple-bound volume (a come-by chance, off a barrow in the Portobello Road) entitled On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden - New York (1892.)

‘Must have been off her rocker,’ said cook, when I read her the more dramatic passages. Moreover she was adamant in her refusal to make pelmeni, pieces of stuffed pasta, a celebrated Tartar dish, of which the Traveller had given me the recipe.

‘Staple Siberian diet,’ he said. ‘Filthy, but filling.’ He also added it was very hard to make.

‘Which is as maybe,’ said cook darkly, basting the roast in a crimson glow of professional complacency.

Nor was she any more co-operative when I dwelled on the habits of Genghis Khan’s troops who were required to carry a sheep’s stomach full of desiccated dried meat, and another of powdered milk flour under their saddles, thus being ever at the ready to gallop off on some foray.

‘But it would only be like getting a haggis,’ I pleaded, when she refused to supply a sheep’s stomach. I had planned to attach it to my tricycle, and thus provided, pedal furiously off down the path to Asia.

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The Sheer Size of It

Bassett Digby, 1928

Pull out the map and have a look at Siberia. The outline of the United States will help you to get an accurate idea of the distances.

Picture yourself starting off from Leningrad, one gloomy Leningrad February afternoon. If it is a typical gloomy February afternoon you’ll be glad to be starting off anywhere. Look at the departure board in the ramshackle railway station. Adventure beckons. Trains are leaving for Archangel, up on the White Sea, and the Crimean seashore resorts down on the Black Sea, for Rumania, for Vienna, for Central Asian destinations within a morning’s horse-ride of the frontiers of mysterious Afghanistan, and for Manchuria and China. Truly a wonderful range of destinations!

You clamber up into the cars ... A bell is clanged. No one among the jostling throng on the platform pays any attention to it. A few minutes later it clangs again. Now the doors become jammed with crowds of friends answering the All ashore! signal, simultaneously with crowds of tardy passengers answering what they interpret as the All aboard! signal. The latter are laden with those extraordinary assortments of hand baggage peculiar to Russia and Siberia. It is no use asking me how one passenger can board a Russian train through the thick of a descending cataract of see-ers off, while laden with a large brass samovar (tea-urn), a huge wicker-work basket with the lid coming off; a wooden sugar box full of pots and pans and crockery, with no lid at all; a bundle of bedding and an armful of sled-runners. I can only advise you to go and see for yourself. Everyone is frantically imploring someone else to do what someone else does not in the least want, or intend, to do, with a view to easing the congestion. Yet, against all probability, and practically all possibility, the comers come and the goers go by the time the station bell is clanged three times. The loco-motive gives an answering hoot, a mournful hoot. With a jerk and a clang the couplings come taut - and off you go.

Now what do you see? Nothing at all, unless you are lucky. There are double windows in the cars to keep out the intense cold, and the majority of them frost over, so that you have to go down the corridor to the end platform if you want to get a glimpse of the landscape. And there are only half-a-dozen different glimpses all told. Every additional glimpse is a repetition of one of the others. A vast ocean of deep snow, now with occasional birch trees, now with fir forest breaking its monotony. Occasional snowed-under villages of stockaded log cabins, on distant slopes. Occasional rough sledges drawn by dejected-looking, head-hanging horses. The fence by the track-side; and the telegraph poles, staggering this way and that.

This depressing monotony, broken only by a half-hour stop tomorrow at Vologda station, the junction for Archangel, and a stop on the following day at the town of Perm, lasts all the way to the Ural mountains. How eagerly you await the sight of this famous range, after the tedious journey across the plains! But if you expect anything jagged, towering, picturesque, like the Rockies or the Pyrenees, you will be sadly disappointed. The earth merely heaves itself up in gradually steepening, forested hills, for a couple of hundred miles. Now and again there is a glimpse of a sheer cliff or a deep gorge or a pinnacle of rock, but, for the most part, such of the range as you can see is as tame as the Blue mountains of Pennsylvania. There is an hour’s stop at the great station of Ekaterineburg, the chief mining town of this range of rich mineral deposits. Then down the train trundles to level ground again, and out on to the plains of Western Siberia ...

If anyone told me that the west of Siberia was uninteresting I should immediately deny it and embark upon a priggish dissertation about the vileness of writers of guide-books, whose interest in lovely wild flowers, queer smells (and majestic stinks), home-made chimneys, what peasants are eating for supper at yonder table under the trellised vine, the occasions when stockings should be worn, how cats are treated, what people pin up on the wall, the etiquette of singing at wineshops, butterflies, the things that various sorts of people read, the songs of birds, the way the local fish are caught and which are the brutes among them that the Devil himself stuffed with bones, what the villagers do when they fall ill, the animals in the woods around and their queer ways and so forth, is nil. For why judge the allure of every place by the monuments it contains, The View, or the tradition that someone or other whose name got into books somewhere or other, did or said something there sometime or other (or even passed through, one sultry July afternoon, in a drunken stupor)? I should tell you that if, by some miraculous dispensation of Providence, I were enabled to kick every writer who had dismissed as not worth a visit or without interest places that I have found extremely interesting though totally destitute of historical parlour tricks, or Views, one pair of boots would not last for the job.

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Dreaming with Baedeker

Lesley Blanch, 1968

I sat on the noisy terrace of a brasserie, waiting for the interminable cafe filtre to fill my cup and wishing passionately that it was a tchai-khana in Russian Turkestan - the kind the Traveller had so often de-scribed to me in his tales. But he had gone, and with him, his tales; and now Kamran was lost too. With a sense of abandonment that verged on panic I turned inward, into that other world of fantasy that always waited for me, that was only a sigh away.

I scuffled in my bag and tugged out the chunky little red volume which alternated with Herzen’s Memoirs as my daily reading. My affection for Baedeker’s Russie 1895 (French Edition) which rivalled and often contradicted that other treasure, Murray’s Handbook of Russia for 1893, was mystifying to my French and Russian friends. They constantly reminded me that it was out of date. But then I, too, was out of date, keeping company with a ghost who had known Russia at that time. Apart from the fact that the Russia of which Baedeker writes is no more and that present-day guide books suggest enormous itineraries and cover distances which are only realizable by the use of jet planes and fast cars, there is another, striking difference.

These earlier guide books are all obsessed by the same question -how to pass the time (when of course, the real problem is how to stop it passing so quickly, especially if one is in the faraway realms on which Baedeker and his kind dwell). But on that particular Mayday of desolation at the Mairie des Lilas time undeniably seemed to drag. So, ordering another cafe filtre I opened my guide book and took flight to Russia, to St. Petersburg, 1895 ...

The magic never failed. Paris faded; the spire of the Admiralty gleamed before me, the old familiar smell of sun-flower seeds, wet leather and salted fish assailed me. I was home, safely home ...

Emploi du temps, says Baedeker, listing his suggestions - all of them, to me, mouth-watering prospects, but it is clear Baedeker doubts his reader’s abilities to pass the time in Russia without his aid. Murray goes further and devotes a long passage to eating, counselling and explaining the typical Russian cuisine for adventurous British stomachs. Is there, perhaps, a faint trace of cynicism to be detected? Of patronage, perhaps? In listing Botvinia merely as ‘a soup of a green colour,’ or describing Porosionokpodkhrenum, cold boiled sucking pig with horse-radish, as ‘not a pretty dish but very eatable’, and dismissing various local cheeses warily, ‘should the digestion or habit require them’, we can also detect a dyspeptic note. Murray follows up this gastronomic section with one headed SANITARY PECULIARITIES, and I imagine the editors sitting back, a good day’s work done. That will keep the tourists busy! After the red pottage (or the green soup?), the exceeding bitter cry. Just let them try out those dishes. They have been warned, and then, if they feel poorly, we have listed reliable pharmacies and doctors too, say Murray’s editors complacently, going off for a mutton chop at their club.

But Baedeker knows his French readers are not to be fobbed off with any suggestions about eating as an emploi du temps. They have been brought up in the noble traditions of the French cuisine and for them eating is not an emploi du temps; it is a whole way of life, a whole civilization. They are not to be distracted by picturesque plats. They must be given other suggestions for passing their time abroad. But so insistent are the editors on this emploi du temps, this pressing question of how to pass the hours, that I begin to envisage numberless tourists, all raging with boredom, all pacing up and down the confines of the variously graded hotels, throughout the world. In cities and remote provinces alike, the same ennui, the same gnawing preoccupation -how to pass the time? At the Hotel de France, the Imperial, de la Poste, du Commerce, the Schweizerhof, the Victoria, or, for bold travellers in southern Russia, Cafes Tartares en face de la Gare. Malpropres. The emploi du temps here will probably be how to obtain insecticides but the preoccupation of the editors is always the same: how to pass the time. In Russia? They wouldn’t have to tell me.

***

A Day in 1908

Lindon Bates Jr

You rise with the rest, draw on your fur cap and gloves, work into the heavy fur-lined overcoat, and clamber down to the platform. A little wooden station-house painted white is opposite the carriage door. It has projecting eaves and quaint many-paned windows. In front of it is a post with a large brazen bell. On the big signboard you can spell out from the Russian letters Zlatoust. This is the summit station of the pass that crosses the Urals. Around are standing stolid sheep-skinned figures, bearded peasants just in from their sledges, which are ranked outside the fence. Fur-capped mechanics, carrying wrenches and hammers, move from car to car to tighten bolts and test wheels for the long eastward pull. Uniformed station attendants are here and there, some with files of bills of lading. As you walk down the platform among the crowd, you come upon a soldier, duffle-coated and muffled in his capote, standing stoically with fixed bayonet. Forty paces further there is another, and beyond still another, all the length of the platform, and far up the line. What a symbol of Russian rule are these silent sentries! And what a mute tale is told in the necessity for a guard at every railroad halting-place in the Empire!

You stroll along toward the engine. Huge and box-like are the big steel cars, five of which compose the train. Two second-class wagons painted in mustard yellow are rearmost, then come the first-class, painted black, next the wagon restoran and the luggage-van, where the much advertised and little used bath-room and gymnasium are located. The engine is a big machine, but of low power, unable to make much speed; and the high grades and the road-bed, poor in many places, additionally limit progress. It is apparent why the train rarely moves at a rate greater than twenty miles an hour.

At first you do not notice the cold. But now that you have walked for a few minutes along the platform, it seems to gather itself for an attack, as if it had a personality. You draw erect with tense muscles, for the system sets itself instinctively on guard. The light breeze that stirs begins to smart and sting like lashes across the face.

The hand drawn for a moment from the fleece-lined glove, stiffens into numbed uselessness. As you march rapidly up and down the platform, an involuntary shiver shakes you from head to foot. A fellow passenger, remarking it, observes:- "It is not cold today, in fact, quite warm. Ochen jarko."

You walk together to the big thermometer that hangs