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A Dead road
They want to reanimate the Stalin heritage at the OJSC "Russian Railroads"
In the middle of August Sergey Ivanov, Vice-President of the OJSC "Russian railroads" declared that a possibility of constructing a railway branch to the polar Norilsk is being considered. Nobody knows what is going to come out of it. Nevertheless the tragic details of the Salehard - Igarka railway construction by the GULAG convicts are well known. Apropos, Igarka is a seaport on the Yenisey situated some 220 km to the southwest of Norilsk. The Norilsk Nickel magazine correspondents have disclosed some little known facts of the history of that construction project.
The railway from Salehard to Igarka that was being built in the fifties under Joseph Stalin's order was to go up to the Bering Strait from where America was close at hand. The "master's" grandiose dream was not to come true. For four years hundreds of thousands of convicts kept building the railroad. But they did not complete the construction. "The construction" cost the state more than forty billion rubles buried in the permafrost and marshes. Still after the dictator's death the road built on human bones was simply forgotten. It was for that that the track got its name of a "dead road".
Towards death!
The idea of building a railroad within the Polar circle was practically unfeasible from the very beginning. It is impossible to lay ties and rails on top of them in the permafrost without any preparation, documentation and pre-feasibility survey. But the idea belonged to Stalin himself. There is no need to explain what that meant.
That epopee tragic for the country began after the Great Patriotic War. According to numerous documents, the dictator had a meeting with William Harriman, the US ambassador to the USSR, after the victory. Allegedly the following idea was also under discussion at the meeting: the idea to organize a ferry line between Chukotka and Alaska via the Bering Strait for communications convenience, and to build a railroad from Chukotka to the Urals - a certain northern Transsib variant.
Besides, as the issue investigators state, the German generals' interrogations materials were instrumental in fastening the idea of building a Northern railroad in Stalin's mind. Among other things it got out that Hitler had renounced the idea of a three corps landing party to the Ob and the Yenisey. Nevertheless in August 1942 the German cruiser "Admiral Speer" came close to Dixon (a port on the Taimyr - Ed.), and shipwrecked a steamship "Sibiryakov" there; it was attacked by the fire of coastal guns and left.
The very idea of the USSR Arctic coastline vulnerability was never out of Stalin's mind. The decision to begin the construction was taken on January 29, 1949 without the participation of scientists and railroad transport specialists. Only eight most trusted by the leader Politbureau members were present at the meeting.
- We must take the North in hand, - Stalin said. - We shall start building. The labor power and resources will be no problem.
That was how the two construction sites progressing towards one another emerged: from the west the road Salehard-the Pur station (the so-called construction site 501), from the east Igarka - the Pur station (the construction site 503). Convicts were to build 1200 kilometers of railway. It was planned to connect Igarka with Norilsk after that. Had the railroad been completed, in due course the problem of further construction of the railroad to Yakutsk and still further to the Bering Strait might have arisen. That was what the great idea of Dzugashvili - Stalin amounted to: to setting the great Northern railroad into operation.
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A life for nothing
In 1949 convoys with convicts and exiled started arriving in Igarka via the Yenisey. Halting periods could last for months under unbearable conditions and under surveillance of the NKVD troops guard. Those were cruel people though still young ones. They were up to whatever they wanted, sparing neither old nor young. A step to the right - a step to the left - and fire for effect followed. Criminals who had actually taken power were still more trouble. They stole, robbed, and played cards using women as stakes, raped. A human life cost nothing there.
- Criminals could pour mercury from a thermometer into the ear of a sleeping man; in the morning he would simply not wake up, - Roman Engelgardt remembers the stories of his grandfather, a repressed Soviet German, who was a railroad builder in Igarka.
But there were also sunny days in the convicts' lives. Once a repressed crew of a Northern Fleet destroyer arrived in Igarka as part of a current halting party. The sailors, some of which had been through the war, established an exemplary life in the camp; they put a halter upon all the criminals and made them work; they also stood up for political prisoners. But soon the guards began to fear lest such an organized and united mass of men should stir up a rebellion. The sailors were distributed among other camps where most of them perished at the hands of criminals.
In the fifties halting parties used to arrive in Igarka so often that there was no time to allocate people. This is what Zoya Marchenko, an exiled, writes it in her reminiscences:
- Hundreds of people were put on a barge in Krasnoyarsk. Nobody told us where we were being taken. It was a road to hopelessness. We were landed in Igarka, taken to the square and the guards left. We were told we could take lodgings where and how we wanted, it was just that next morning at 10.00 everybody was to be there on the square. All sorts of people came up to us.
- Are there any Armenians? - a man called out.
- Yes, there are! - and they were taken away.
- Are there any Jews?
- Yes, there are! - and they were also taken away.
- Are there any Georgians? - again they were taken away.
But none of those who came up to them asked whether there were any Russian or Ukrainian people among them: that was what a national idea meant!
Most of the convicts remembered the winter of 1949 to the end of their days. The contingent lived in tents and half-dugouts for 200 people (it amounted to not more than 40 cm. per person). They used to wake up in the morning with their hair and clothes frozen into the planks. They were fed three times a day but the food was repugnant. It was the following year that the food quality got much better.
Step by step most camps were removed from Igarka to the Yermakovo settlement. By 1950 there were five thousand convicts there. The camps were 500 by 500 meters in perimeter, fenced with barbed wire and stuck with watchtowers. Inside there were one- story barracks, a canteen, SHIZO (a penal isolation cell), and an armed watch in front of the only gate. Outside the perimeter there were houses of the guards, a shop, a bathhouse, warehouses and a club. From 500 to 1500 convicts were put into each camp.
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Wasted work
Work was in full swing at the sites. Reports on the achievements were constantly dispatched to the capital; numerous NKVD officials came to the North for control. Though in 1950 already many leaders began to realize the uselessness of the railroad: there was nothing and nobody to transport there. Even the party leader began to realize that.
But people were still performing useless work with picks and spades. They kept cutting wood with their bare hands. Bundles bound with wire were put into the marshes. All that was covered with clay soil with gravel on top. It was all rammed down by tractors, the groundwork was placed on top. In the morning the shift coming to work saw holes, which had appeared overnight. And all the work began anew.
- The work was often useless, the track ditches dug during the day filled with dirt by the next morning, - Zoya Marchenko writes.
The convicts' living conditions grew worse every day.
- The thing that saves me is living for a moment: come what will. There are faceless, broken by oppression of captivity people around, - these are the words of Valentina Iyevleva, yet another convict of the construction site 503.
The answer to all the sufferings was overseers' words: "We do not want you to work, we want you to suffer".
People committed suicide, perished from diseases and the guards' harassment. The latter may be literally called animals impersonating human beings. There used to be a sort of a "reward" from the superiors: if one killed a runaway, one could go home earlier. The guards took convicts to the woods and simply shot them there. Other camps also had their own "traditions". For example, the guards used to put some guilty convicts to stand under their watchtower. Gnats stuck all over the convict in a matter of seconds, but the victim could not move, lest he should be shot.
- Люди убегали, а их расстреливали с самолетов, закидывали гранатами, - пишет Александр Сновский. – Местное население – коренные народы севера – тоже помогали. Они - охотники - просто простреливали колени беглецам и отвозили в лагерь, за что получали деньги, муку, порох патроны.
- People ran away and they shot them from airplanes, threw grenades at them, - Alexander Snovsky writes. - The local population - the indigenous peoples of the North - also helped the guards. They were hunters, they just shot the runaways' knees through and took them back to the camp getting money, flour, powder, and cartridges for that.
The bodies of shot convicts and those who died from diseases were stored near a barrack specially assigned for the purpose; later on they were loaded on a special sledge and other convicts brought a tractor and took them out to an open pit, where they were covered with earth by a bulldozer. Nobody ever counted how many people perished in the course of the railroad construction.
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With only our memory left
From 1952 the scope of works on the Salehard - Igarka railroad gradually began to decrease. People, facilities and materials were now forwarded to other more important for the country construction sites. There were ideas on the construction suspension, so as to proceed with the building of the Northern railroad later on, but the estimates showed: the funding would not be sufficient. After Stalin's death it was decided to give up the construction.
A major part of what was done was abandoned and gradually sank into decay. Though one can find in the tundra some fragments of the railroad, which is missing on all the maps, even now. Rails, camp barracks, the guards' watchtowers, whole locomotives, stations…Norilsk old-timers say, that rails from the construction site 503 were used when the broad railway of the road from Dudinka to Norilsk was being built.
Practically nothing is left from millions of innumerably and with inhuman cruelty exterminated people. Just our memory and repentance. And who knows, may be, the labor of people ruined without any guilt will stand the building of a railroad from Salehard to Norilsk half a century later in good stead…
P.S. What might follow the RR statement on the possibility of building a railroad to Norilsk and whether anything follows at all is still unknown for the present. The company press service declines to comment on the issue in any way. But one thing is known for sure. Every kilometer of such a railway will cost a fortune. One can surely assume that even the largest home company will lack resources for the construction and operation. But if the road were built it could change the situation in Norilsk and the whole of the Russian North drastically. It is no use trying to find out in advance, we shall live and see.
The NN reference
At the beginning of the twentieth century an attempt was made to build a road from Siberia to Alaska. A French businessman Loic de Loubelle was striving to get the project. But the provisions were unacceptable for Russia: the investors demanded to be assigned a 16 miles broad railway reservation along the railroad for 90 years after the completion of the road construction with foreign capital participation.
The very idea of building a Northern railroad is most challenging. As a matter of fact, the development of faraway regions of Siberia and the Far East is inevitable. It was for that very reason that The Great Siberian Route or, as it is called nowadays, Transsib, was built at the turn of the previous century. And then also BAM at the end of the eighties of the twentieth century.
Nowadays the line Pechenga - Linnahamari in the Murmansk Region is the most northern operating surface railway in the world (69 degrees 39 minutes of northern latitude).
A self - contained railroad branch Dudinka -Norilsk-Talnah situated in the Krasnoyarsk area was the most northern passenger railroad in the world not so long ago (69 degrees 33 minutes of northern latitude). It lost its status with the closure of the passenger railway communication in 1998.
Life\'s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting \"Holy s--t!....What a ride!
. Эта линия первоначально планировалась как часть проекта Агрыз - Пронино - Сургут. Строительство началось в первой половине 1950-х гг. Частично построена, но по непонятным причинам проект резко свернули (судя по срокам, возможно, в связи со смертью Сталина
