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The construction of the railway began in 1947 and most of the workers (up to 100,000 according to some estimates) comprised prisoners from Gulag labour camps. In winter, bitter cold; in the summer, clouds of mosquitoes, a lack of equipment and food, slave labour, primitive technology, violence, tyranny, death These were the conditions that prevailed on this insane building project that had been personally ordered by Stalin. In the post-war period, it was clear to almost everyone in the leadership of the USSR that prisoners’ slave labour in the corrupt Gulag system was wasteful and desperately inefficient. Only Stalin failed to realise this and he was obsessed by similar construction projects. To this day, it is still not completely clear – even to Russian historians – what made him want to link the uninhabited and hostile environment of Siberia’s Polar regions by railway. It was most probably for strategic regions. Route 66 chicago tmc updated 2017 map. The northern part of Siberia was virtually unprotected from a military point of view.

A railway that was passable all year round, culminating in a deep-sea port by the Arctic Ocean would have changed this situation. After all, fanciful plans for linking the regions of northern Russia with the Far East had already existed under the tsar. At that time, nothing was known about the richest deposits of Russian natural gas located in the region which have seen the railway undergo new development. The railway was originally meant to link the already existing line (also built by Gulag prisoners) from Moscow to Vorkuta (from the Chum station in the Polar Ural region) with a port at the Gulf of Ob near Mys Kamenny. On 22 April 1947, the Soviet ministers of the USSR issued an order to the Ministry of the Interior and the Gulag administration to immediately begin construction of a massive deep-sea port, docks, an adjacent city, and a railway, which would link the port with its hinterland. Due to the great haste surrounding the project, the actual construction itself began alongside preparatory and planning work, which led to the tragic absurdities that are only possible in a totalitarian socialist state. After nearly two years, when work on the construction of the railway through the Polar Ural was in full flow and several Gulag labour camps stood in the Mys Kamenny region, it was discovered that the water in the Gulf of Ob was too shallow and that the entire coast was totally unsuitable for the building of a deep-sea port.

Apparently, this was down to a mistake by Russian cartographers, who changed the name of the gulf in the language of the indigenous Nenets population – instead of “pas” (crooked) they had understood it as “paj” (stone). Stalin, however, did not give up on the plans and ordered the railway to continue along the Arctic Circle as far as the banks of the Yenisei River, to the city of Igarka. Despite the fact that Igarka is located 250 kilometres from the mouth of the Yenisei, the great depth of this mighty Siberian river allowed for the construction of a deep-water port there.

All that was needed for the construction of the transpolar railway to continue was to drive tens of thousands more prisoners into the Polar marshlands, tundra, and taigas. The planned length of the line now amounted to 1,459 kilometres. The technical conditions for the construction of the railway were extraordinarily difficult, if only because of the inaccessibility and bleakness of the locations where the line was supposed to go (apart from a few villages that were home to the original Siberian nations – the Nenets, Selkups, Khanty, Kets, and Evenks – there were no settlements in these places). The entire line runs along permafrost, on which it is difficult to build anything. For most of the year, the ground is frozen and covered with snow.

During the short summer, the upper part of the soil melts and changes into a marshy surface. Moreover, the line was to cross two great Siberian rivers – the Ob and the Yenisei.

No bridge construction was planned for these – in the summer, transport was arranged using special river ferries; in the winter, tracks were laid on the ice of the frozen rivers. Building was done hastily without the necessary technical backup.

“Try sawing through a rail by hand with two people. We did it that way, and it was terrible work,” the former prisoner Aleksander Snovsky recalled. “In order to meet standards in the construction of the embankment, we also threw down branched trees there to bulk it up.” If we factor in the impact of the melting permafrost, it is no wonder that the railway required constant maintenance, repairs of damaged sections, and the pace of work on the parts in operation was minimal. In comparison with the Gulag camps of the 1930s and 1940s, however, the living conditions of the prisoners on the construction were just a little bit better.