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A Century of Russian Railroad Construction: 1837–1936

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2017

Edward Ames
Edward Ames*
Affiliation:
Amherst College
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Extract

Any Survey of Russian economic history has two serious barriers to surmount. The first is a tendency to assume that this history either began or ended in 1917; the second is a tendency, induced in part by the remoteness of the country and in part by the difficulty of pronouncing Russian geographical names, to assume that the Soviet Union is a homogeneous steppe evenly populated throughout. This article will survey the growth of the Russian railroad network on the assumption that there is a considerable measure of continuity in Russian economic development, and that regional factors are very important in explaining the course of that development.

Problems of ownership and control are somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but it may be helpful to the general reader to have some idea of the history of the ownership of the Russian railroad network. Ownership and construction of railroads in nineteenth-century Russia were handled in various ways.

Type
Articles
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 6 , Issue 3-4 , December 1947 , pp. 57 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1947

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References

1 This article cannot lay claim to new discoveries, inasmuch as it is based upon material in the three standard contemporary works on the Russian transportation system: two books by Khachaturov, T. S., Razmeshcheme Transports (Moscow, 1939), pp. 425–703 Google Scholar, and Puti Razvitiya Transporta SSSR (Moscow, 1941); also Ekonomika Transporta (Moscow, 1941), by L. Y. Volfson, V. I. Ledovski, and N. S. Shilnikov. The First Five-Year Plan published by the State Planning Commission of the U.S.S.R. in 1929, and Volume I of the Economic Geography of the U.S.S.R., published in 1940 under the editorship of S. S. Balzak, V. F. Vasyutin, and Y. G. Feigin, provide useful background information. The three works on transportation arc descriptive and chronological rather than analytic, and the material in them has been drastically reorganized for the purposes of this article.

2 Since 1917 the names of many cities have been changed. In this paper, references to pre-1917 names are accompanied in parentheses by the present names of the cities concerned. Names unaccompanied by alternatives in parentheses are the current names. St. Petersburg is now Leningrad.

3 Since this paper does not deal with the problem of multiple-track lines, it may be assumed that all mileage data refer to “line,” i.e., length of main right-of-way, excluding second track and railroad yards. All Soviet statistics, so far as can be determined, use this definition, although some statements may be ambiguous in this respect.

4 It is, however, the procedure followed in the authorities cited, and is one of the reasons why these books are difficult to use.

5 This refers, of course, to pre-1913 Russia only.