Stalin's projects for the road along the Sea of ​​Okhotsk. Family archive

In 1989, together with three friends, I walked part of the route of Stalin's Dead Road.
Few people today know about the construction of this grandiose, but never born, highway. The official press prefers not to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed at this construction site. Until now, few people know that in the post-war years, the Stalinist regime used mainly pre-war repressive methods to implement the “great construction projects of communism”. The people who won the Great Patriotic War, liberating Europe from the fascist yoke, were again turned into slaves by the Stalinist regime. All major socialist construction projects were carried out by prisoners. The arrests of the post-war years killed millions of Soviet people. Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was the first to open the world's eyes to the essence of Stalin's bloody terror. From “The Gulag Archipelago” we learned the general picture of the tyrant’s total destruction of his own people. The author told people about hundreds of concentration camps, spread like a spider web throughout our country. This story is about another scary place.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS

Take a look at the map of the Northern Trans-Urals. Along the Arctic Circle beyond the lower reaches of the Ob River lies the West Siberian Lowland. This is an almost impassable, deserted country of swamps, bitter cold and mosquitoes. Suffice it to say that the population density here is 1 person per 20 square kilometers. There are no cities here, no mineral resources were discovered in Stalin's times. Winter here lasts eight months a year, the temperature often drops to 50 degrees, and the snow cover reaches two meters.

From time immemorial, the small local population has been nomadic. The Nenets and Selkups subsisted on hunting and fishing, but their main business was driving reindeer along their age-old paths.
And in these wild places, hotheads from Stalin’s entourage decided, soon after the Great Patriotic War, to build a railway.
My diaries, which contain memories of a trip along this road, lay motionless for many years because I could not find a reasonable explanation for this construction. What or who was supposed to be transported along the Arctic Circle between the Ob and Yenisei? “There must be,” I thought, “at least some justification for this great adventure.” Before the war, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was built. This construction ruined hundreds of thousands of people and billions of money, but at least they tried to justify it with national economic needs. And here?
The country had just ended a great war with Germany. Cities and villages were in ruins. Working hands were worth their weight in gold. The soldiers returning from the war and captivity barely began to come to their senses. And after 1946, as in 1937-1938, mass arrests began. But if in the pre-war years they caught mainly “kulaks” and the intelligentsia, now the KGB network has become fine-mesh. Entire families were arrested, sometimes together with teenage children. There were fourteen counts of charges - from the notorious Article 58, under which anyone could be declared an “enemy of the people,” to the absurd article prosecuting a person for the position he held under the tsarist regime.” For the “great construction” of Siberia, they cleaned up residents of areas that had been under occupation, underground fighters and partisans (they were also on enemy territory!), and members of the Polish resistance from the Home Army. Prisoners of war - Germans and Japanese - were also driven to Siberia, as well as white emigrants and their children arrested in European countries. There were widespread arrests in the Baltic republics. The majority of those arrested this time were workers and peasants. On the Siberian highway, workers in intellectual professions were unprofitable - they died too quickly.
This is how slaves were recruited to carry out the next monstrous Stalin-Beria adventure.
Only ten years after our journey along the Stalin Dead Road I was able to find a clear explanation of the reasons for this ridiculous and terrible construction.

WHERE THE DOG IS BURIED

In March 1947, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a resolution to begin construction of a seven-hundred-kilometer highway from Chum station (a continuation of the Kotlas-Vorkuta road) on the coast of the Ob Bay to the area of ​​Cape Kamenny. The railway was supposed to cross the Polar Urals in the Ob River valley. Security officer Colonel Baranov was appointed head of construction. To start the construction, it was decided to use prisoners from the camp in the village of Abez.
Why was this route needed? The head of the Northern Expedition of the railway project, Tatarintsev, vaguely explained its necessity by the economic needs of the region. However, the dog was buried much deeper.
When Stalin heard about the creation of an American atomic bomb of extraordinary power, he, as is known, did not react to it outwardly.
But soon this power was demonstrated in two Japanese cities - Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Stalin set the task of creating such a weapon to Soviet physicists. Lenin’s idea of ​​​​building a socialist society throughout the world did not abandon him. He understood that it was no longer possible to expect a revolution from below in European countries. Europe after the war was divided by the allies. This means that the victory of socialism can only be achieved through a new military conflict. And for this it was necessary to create modern military bases, preferably away from the western borders.
On February 4, 1947, the Council of Ministers issued resolution No. 228-104ss on the construction of a secret military port with a ship repair plant beyond the Urals. Naturally, a railway was needed to deliver goods to the port. The technical development of the project was entrusted to the management of the Main Northern Sea Route. However, the developers could not keep up with the construction that began in April. At this time, nuclear physicists in the Gulag sharashkas were working on the creation of new super-powerful weapons. The secrecy of the project provided him with unlimited funding. The construction was supervised by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, headed by Lavrentiy Beria. The Ministry had extensive experience in supplying slaves for Stalin’s undertakings. Barges with prisoners and building materials floated along the Ob. The ferry transported old steam locomotives that had served on the country's internal lines.
And suddenly...

At the beginning of 1948, prospectors announced that they had made a mistake in their “great” undertaking. It turned out that the depth of the Ob Bay does not exceed five meters, and at Cape Kamenny it is only one and a half meters. This means that it is impossible to build a port in the chosen location.
The organizers of the construction were racking their brains in horror on how to report to Stalin and Beria about the fatal mistake. They even thought about deepening the bottom of the silting Gulf of Ob up to ten meters, but such an undertaking was beyond the power of even the Stalinist regime. Construction continued for about eight more months.
Only on January 29, 1949, by resolution No. 384-135-ss, the Council of Ministers stopped construction, but the difficult undertaking did not end there. Moreover, it took on even more ambitious proportions.
How was the life of prisoners organized?
The camp itself, production buildings, barracks for guards and houses for management - all this was called a production column. Such columns were placed every 5-7 km, on a site that was supposed to be built within a year.
The route was single-track, so stations with sidings were built every 60 kilometers. Women's and men's columns were built separately, but the work was the same in both. It was necessary to dig trenches, fill in gravel and sand, unload vehicles, carry rails and sleepers. The main tools were shovels, wheelbarrows, picks and crowbars.
The most difficult jobs went to pioneer prisoners. The sludge was thrown forward, to where there were no rails yet. They were transported on barges, tractor drags, or driven into the wilderness and swamps under their own power. There they were thrown to settle in new sections of the planned route. The expedition took place not only in summer, but also in winter. People dug dugouts, insulated them with peat “bricks,” and built flooring from poles. They were not entitled to mattresses or mattresses. Our own padded jackets and cotton pants served as both bedding and blanket. It is not surprising that the mortality rate under such conditions was extremely high.
Construction materials and equipment were transported to the vacated space and the dugouts were replaced with barracks. A new camp or column was formed.
In plan, it was a square plot with sides of 200x200 meters. It was fenced with three rows of barbed wire. Security towers were placed in the corners, with spotlights on them.
There were 5-6 barracks for prisoners on the camp territory. The barracks were divided into 2 halves of 40 people each. The entrances were separate. In the middle of each half, a stove was built from a metal barrel. Two-tier bunks were laid along the walls.
Houses and servants - the same barracks - were placed outside the camp territory. Some inhabited columns had a bathhouse, a library, and a first-aid post. Each camp certainly has its own
internal prison - punishment cell. It was an insulator surrounded by an additional row of thorns. It consisted of two single unheated cells, one cell for 4-6 people and a heated room for security. The doors were lined with iron, leaving a peephole to observe the prisoners. In the punishment cell they were fed cold food at a reduced rate.
The camp day began with an early rise, rations of bread, fish gruel or porridge, inspection and taking the prisoners to work. The work areas were fenced with posts with the inscription: “Forbidden zone.” The shooters, to escape the mosquitoes, sat near the smokers. Rails were also delivered to the construction site by river. Their undertakings were transported on platforms along the already paved section. All work was practically carried out by hand.
Due to the abundance of streams and small rivers in the forest-tundra, builders built many bridges from sleepers, and on large rivers such as Taz, Pur, Nadym, Turukhan, the construction of stationary, steel bridges on concrete supports was planned. Ferry crossings were planned across the Ob and Yenisei. In winter, the rails were transported to the construction site on ice. Simultaneously with the laying of rails, economic and road services were built: locomotive depots, repair shops, woodworking plants, as well as residential buildings for the administration.
The village of Ermakovo on the banks of the Yenisei has turned from a small village into a city with a population of twenty thousand.

HOW MUCH DO CAMP COSTS COST?

Despite the cruelty in treating people, it was impossible to achieve quality work. People were not to blame for this. In the summer, the canvas sank because the sand was heated by the sun and the permafrost layer underneath melted. Therefore, the embankment floated and eroded throughout the entire route.
Already built areas had to be constantly repaired. Wooden bridges swelled in winter and dried out in summer. Streams and rivers under the bridges had to be placed in reinforced concrete pipes, but their beds were constantly shifting.
The tundra lived by its own laws. On the constructed sections, trains moved at a speed of no more than fifteen kilometers per hour and often derailed.
Already in 1950, it was clear to both the prisoners and the authorities that the construction of a high-quality railway was impossible. Here is a conversation between prisoner Selivanov, appointed as a foreman, and engineer Pobozhiy:
- Until 1937, we built much cheaper
- Why? After all, keeping prisoners is cheap.
- It only seems so. After all, prisoners need to be fed, shoed, clothed somehow, they need to be guarded, and guarded well, areas with towers for sentries, condeas (punishment cells) must be built, and maintaining security is expensive. And then operche, kaveche. peteche and other "che", which, except for the camp, are not found anywhere. In general, the staff is large. The prisoners carry firewood and water, wash the floors, and heat the bathhouses. But you never know what else is needed for living people? And there are so many orderlies, cooks, kitchen servants, water carriers, wood splitters, accountants, carpenters, bookkeepers and other “morons,” as they are called in the camp, at the columns and camp posts. So, if we take it on average, there are one and a half servants for every hard worker...

IMPROVED PROJECT

But nevertheless, in May 1952, a new special commission was created at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which examined the supposedly improved project and proposed to allocate another three billion for further construction in addition to the three billion rubles already spent.
No one dared to report the true state of affairs at the “great construction site” to the “owner.” Only after the death of the “father of nations” did the USSR government stop the ruinous construction.
What has been done in almost four years?
Four hundred kilometers of track were laid from Salekhard to the east. From the village of Ermakovo on the Yenisei, they managed to cover only one hundred and sixty kilometers to the west. Sick or less reliable trains could travel on the Salekhard-Nadym and Ermakovo-Yanov Stan sections. The builders managed to master, and essentially waste, four billion rubles.
The number of highway builders was 70-100 thousand people, there were 400-500 people in the column. 1000-2000 prisoners worked on the construction of bridges over large rivers.
Oddly enough, there was socialist competition among the exhausted, hungry slaves. When completing urgent tasks, prisoners were rewarded with additional rations, shag, and sometimes alcohol.
At that time, the whole country competed “socialistically,” although this was expressed mainly in additions and manipulation. The camp authorities were also obliged to involve prisoners in the competition.
An insidious deception was the introduction of a working day of two or even three, subject to shock work and compliance with all regime rules. In 1947, many Gulag camps announced a voluntary recruitment of prisoners for this northern construction site.
From all over the country, thousands of long-term workers flocked to the Stalinist road. They traveled under the protection of guard dogs through stages and transit prisons. At this time, new convicts were also driven to this construction site, without asking their consent. When the influx of slaves became sufficient, already in 1948 the insidious decree on offsets was canceled. Instead, they ordered the central camps to be cleared of political prisoners.
They were all driven north, and the “volunteers” were deceived.
Civil servants also worked on Stalin's Dead Road. They were attracted by promises of high salaries and ten percent bonuses every six months. Although these people huddled in the same barracks, against the backdrop of general poverty, they considered themselves wealthier. Among the civilians there were many so-called special settlers. They were recruited from class aliens or persons of undesirable origin, such as German, who were exiled to Siberia.
Some prisoners who had served their sentences remained to work in construction, realizing that returning to their homes with their documents could result in a new sentence. But there were few of them.
Oddly enough, some prisoners who ended up on the Dead Road from other places of detention claimed that living conditions in these camps were better than in Central Russia. In Stalin’s camps of the 1940s, as in Hitler’s, people lasted no more than three months in general labor. If a person died, he went to the infirmary. After the “treatment” he was returned to the brigade. The second breakdown usually ended in death. The deceased, having attached a tag with a number to his leg, was thrown into a common pit. Having counted two hundred corpses, the pit was buried.
It is believed that on the Salekhard-Igarka highway the mortality rate was lower than in other Gulag camps. And the dead were buried here differently - more often one by one. On the tag, in addition to the number, the surname, article and term were indicated. A peg with a tablet was placed on the grave, on which a code of letters and numbers was written with a chemical pencil.
On our hike along the Stalin highway we saw many such posts. The pencil marks on them had long since been washed away by rain. Mortality data was encrypted and reported to superiors via intercom. Some desperate prisoners decided to escape. Most often this ended in starvation or return to the camp. Where to run in the middle of a huge dead space?

MONEY IN THE PIPE

The Council of Ministers of the USSR and the leadership of the Gulag seriously believed that by using slave labor it was possible to achieve extraordinary production efficiency. But, despite the unlimited influx of workers, insignificant expenses for food for prisoners, and for organizing social competitions between teams, it was not possible to achieve tangible results at the construction site.
The money seized from the miserable budget of the war-ravaged country went down the drain. Calculations showed that the consequences of this “great construction” alone caused irreparable harm to the country’s national economy, which was felt for decades. Other undertakings of communist rulers brought similar results.
These are the reasons why the world's richest country could not cope with hunger and poverty for decades.
___
The Dead Road became one of the symbols of Stalin's unlimited tyranny. In addition to the destruction of villages and cities and millions of human losses during the Great Patriotic War, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were lost in peacetime.
The victory did not bring our people the expected prosperity, because the country lived for many years under the yoke of communistism, which is unnatural to human nature.
ideology.

Published: International newspaper "X Files X-Files of the 20th Century" No. 20 (196), October 2006. - With. 12-13

From 1947 to 1953, on the personal order of Comrade Stalin, the construction of the so-called Transpolar Highway was underway. In a state of absolute secrecy, about 900 km of rails were laid on the Chum-Salekhard-Igarka section by 80 thousand prisoners in permafrost conditions. But with the death of Stalin, the railway, which was supposed to become part of a huge highway from Arkhangelsk (or Murmansk) to Chukotka (or Magadan), turned out to be unnecessary.

Northern railway track

The first projects of the great northern railway route appeared about a century ago - at the very beginning of the 20th century. Here is what V. I. Suslov writes about this in his book “The North Siberian Railway: from the 19th to the 21st Century”: “Now it is difficult to say who was the author of the VSP [Great Northern Route] project, if only because the project options there were many. But one of the most consistent supporters of the project, an energetic organizer of the development of its feasibility study, was the artist A. A. Borisov.” The VSP project was raised and discussed several times, but Borisov did not live to see even its partial implementation begin.

Construction 501, 502 and 503

By order of Stalin, work in three directions at once began in 1947. The ambitious goal of connecting the Ob and Yenisei by railway tracks with a total length of 1,200 kilometers had no economic justification. At the time of construction, there was simply nothing and no one to transport along this road. It was planned that the railway would be needed to develop vast territories rich in minerals.

All work was classified and in official documents different sections of the road were referred to as “Construction 501, 502 and 503.” As part of Construction 502, it was planned to create a port on the Yamal Peninsula with associated infrastructure and access railways. But in 1949, it turned out that the Gulf of Ob was too shallow for ships to enter, and it was impossible to deepen it. The “Building 502” project was cancelled. In this regard, construction sites 501 and 503 lost their original significance, but work continued until March 1953.

What was life like for prisoners at a construction site?

For the construction of the railway road, it was decided to involve only political prisoners and short-term prisoners (convicted of minor crimes), since they were more loyal. Their enhanced security and control were not required, as in the case of prisoners on serious charges and theft. Prisoners were not prohibited from communicating with civilians (mainly engineers and doctors), and camp settlements were often located near populated areas.

In the collection “BUILDING No. 503” (1947-1953) Documents. Materials. Research,” for example, cites the memoirs of one of the prisoners: “In Igarka and Ermakovo, we lived better than civilians. They fed us well, we worked in our specialty in the theater, what else do you need?”

The fate of the project

After Stalin's death, it was decided to grant amnesty to more than a million political prisoners and short-term prisoners. Therefore, there was simply no one to complete the road. And it was considered too costly to complete the project with civilians. In addition, many sections of the Transpolar Railway were already in poor condition by 1953 due to the lack of preliminary geological surveys and the unprofessionalism of the builders. At first they tried to mothball the project, but then they simply abandoned it. And in 1960, through the efforts of journalists, the name “Dead Road” stuck to it - due to its abandonment and lack of demand, as well as due to the large number of prisoners who died during construction.

ON THE WAY TO A GLOBAL RAILWAY NETWORK

TKM-World Link will connect Eurasia and America into a single transport system (Fig. 1): from London through Moscow to Anchorage and Washington, Tokyo and Beijing and the like.

Transcontinental Highway across the Bering Strait will become the main element of the transport and energy infrastructure of northeast Russia. Length of new railway tracks from Yakutsk to Cape Uelen will be about 4000 km, and about 2000 km more will need to be built in North America. It is proposed to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait or build a bridge across it.

In 1945 I.V. Stalin discussed the idea of ​​uniting the transport systems of the USSR and the USA, but due to rivalry between the countries, the project turned out to be inappropriate. In the post-war years in the USSR, construction of separate sections of the Circumpolar Railway from Vorkuta to Uelen was carried out and construction of a tunnel to Sakhalin Island (10 km under the Tatar Strait) began, but in 1953 the work was stopped.

1. TRANSPOLAR BACKWAY

Section from Salekhard to Igarka

Construction sites No. 501 and No. 503

1949 – 1953

CONSTRUCTION OF THE POLAR ROAD

SALEKHARD - IGARKA

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SITE MATERIALS:

Yamalo-Nenets District Museum and Exhibition Complex named after. I.S. Shemanovsky

Sergey MASLAKOV."Beep" (10/22/2005)

TRANSPOLAR HIGHWAY

Was the labor of the forced builders of the Transpolar Railway in vain?

Will the “dead” road come to life?

At the beginning of the 20th century, Academician Mendeleev determined the geographical center of the Russian Empire. It is located on the territory of the Krasnoselkupsky district - on the right bank of the Taz River, one and a half kilometers below the mouth of the Malaya Shirta River. It is the central point between Warsaw and Wellen. And next to the village of Kikke-Akki, the geographical center of the Soviet Union was later determined - the central point between Uellen and Brest. At the end of the 70s, memorial signs were installed in each of these geographical centers by an expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences. One can imagine the size of this area if the distance between Brest and Warsaw fits within its borders...

In April 1947 year, by resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, a decision was made to begin construction of the railway from Ob to Yenisei length of almost one and a half thousand kilometers with the prospect of its further access to the Bering Strait. It was planned to build a naval submarine base at the mouth of the Ob. Exploratory drilling of oil and gas wells has also begun.

In 1949 in order to increase the pace of construction of the Polar Railway, the 501st Construction Directorate of SULAGZhDS (Northern Directorate of Camp Railway Construction) was divided into two camps - Ob and Yenisei. The work was generously financed. Any equipment was delivered to the construction site, from excavators to bulldozers and Lend-Lease trucks. It was busy here about thirty thousand people, including twenty thousand prisoners.

Already since 1950 trailer cars began to run as part of Vorkuta trains from Moscow to Labytnanga. In August 1952, traffic opened from Salekhard and Moscow to Nadym. For direct communication with Moscow, telephone poles were installed along the highway. These lopsided larch pillars, clinging to the ground, still stand to this day.

By March 1953 The volume of construction and installation work performed amounted to 4.2 billion rubles. At the then salary of 50 rubles, civilian builders here received double salary, every six months a 10% increase in salary plus northern allowances. They did not spare money for the construction, hoping to more than recoup all costs within a few years after the Polyarnaya was put into operation. Academician Gubkin's forecast about the gas and oil riches of Yamal was known even then. We can say that under each sleeper of the Polar Highway there is a golden chervonets buried.

In the spring of 1953 business was open train movement from Salekhard to the Turukhan River. It was planned to put the highway into operation in 1955. However, just a few days after Stalin’s death, a decision was made to stop construction. For some reason, the incredibly promising road was no longer needed.

They only remembered her in the late 1970s, in the midst of the development of gas fields in Yamal. The area was restored from Nadym to Novy Urengoy. In the mid-1980s, a railway from Surgut was brought from the south to Novy Urengoy. So what is next… Further, as in 1953, there is a fork in time...

...Will it be possible to eliminate the “fork in time” and revive the “dead road”? The answer can only be “yes”, because Without the Polar Highway, the development of Yamal is unimaginable even today. But when - it depends on many factors. But the first step has already been taken.

SALEKHARD. At the height of summer, troops landed in the Krasnoselkupsky district in the southeast of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. It was one of two groups joint expedition of MIIT and JSC Russian Railways to the Salekhard - Igarka railway. The second group, led by MIIT professor Valentina Tarasova, landed on the banks of the Yenisei, in the village of Ermakovo. Our goal was to find out what remains of the “dead” road, which is destined to be reborn.

Despite the humid stuffiness reigning under the trees, the switch, corroded by rust, was as cold as the permafrost itself. It has not been translated, at least since the “cold summer of 1953.” The railway line, one of two leading from the fork, broke off at the edge of the ravine. The surviving rail was visible, turned out like a mammoth tusk and aimed at the clear northern sky . There was no further road, the rails led to nowhere, into emptiness. Mechanically, I grabbed the switch lever with both hands and pulled it towards me. Grinding, he changed the position of the rails. Now, instead of the dead end where the tracks had led for the past fifty years, they were directed east, as planned from the very beginning. Like the lever of a time machine, the old railroad switch took us to the beginning of construction The Great Polar Road, in 1947.

...Leaving us on a completely uninhabited shore, tens of kilometers from the Arctic Circle, the Yamal boat, churning up crystal-white breakers behind the stern, rushed back to Krasnoselkup. The pebble beach of the steep bank of the Taz was strewn with rusty railroad spikes, rails, and overlays. It seemed that half a century ago a disaster similar to Chernobyl had occurred in the vicinity: remnants of civilization and not a single living soul around.

At first the silence was deafening, but the silence was soon broken by midges, attacking us with frenzy, as if they had been waiting for us for the last fifty years. We walked through places where no human had set foot for several decades. And they puzzled over riddles. For what purpose was the rail and sleeper grid dismantled here? Why did bulldozers level about fifty meters of the embankment from the locomotive depot to the Taz station? Did someone try to prevent the removal of equipment? Or make it difficult to access? Instead of answers, there are local legends about how hunters saw railway platforms with Studebakers and ZISes in the remote taiga, and stories about mysterious reinforced concrete bunkers with blown-up entrances. The rails are neatly stacked along the overgrown road. Looking at them, we can safely say that all of humanity participated in the construction of the Polar Highway. At least, there were rails made in Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia, in the British Empire and Kaiser Germany. Nearby lay the rails of the Nazi Reich and the North American States. Having passed Sedelnikovo, from which two dilapidated houses and the “skeletons” of communication switchboards remained, the expedition came to a well-preserved section of the road with a double-track siding. Here the Miitovites carried out a geodetic survey. The last time the route was picketed was in the late 40s.

... The most amazing feeling is the effect of the presence of living people. It seems as if any moment from behind the nearest platform a guard, forgotten here half a century ago, will come out and bark: “Stop, whoever is coming!” No, the Polar Road is not dead; such a feeling does not arise on dead objects. Here everything is frozen, waiting in the wings.

Having made our way through the bushes with which the embankment is densely overgrown, we come out onto a canvas covered with a carpet of white polar moss. The roadbed leads upward, in one of the sections its height reaches 12 - 15 meters. It seems that the Polar Road goes into the sky. We pass by a huge quarry - soil was mined there for backfilling. Then the road ends abruptly, followed by bushes and clearings strewn with metal debris - all that remains of the repair shop equipment and two tractors. And finally, the outlines of steam locomotives appear through the foliage ahead. Seeing them here is the same as meeting live elephants, they look so strange surrounded by birch and larches.

Yamalo-Nenets District (Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug). 501 construction

Was there a 501 construction project that, unfortunately, despite all its costs, was never completed? only by Stalin's extravagant project or there were similar projects before it and what is happening with the Transpolar Railway these days.

The impact made on the development of the capital of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug by construction No. 501, better known to the general public as "Stalin's" or “Dead Road” is difficult to overestimate even today. Many Salekhard residents still live in houses built during the railway epic of the mid-twentieth century.

The term “dead road”, which appeared in 1964 thanks to the light hand of journalists, made it possible to present it to the public for a long time construction No. 501-503 solely as a monument to the Soviet totalitarian regime. At the same time, the attitude of many people towards railway construction itself has never been unambiguous, especially after the country’s triumphant discovery of countless reserves of oil and gas in Western Siberia (including the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug). The exhibition features exhibits delivered by expeditions to construction sites 501, photographs, maps and documents from the MVK funds, samples of minerals and stories about companies that build railways in the Arctic today.

2. TUNNEL and FERRY on the island. Sakhalin

Construction sites No. 506 and No. 507

1950-1953

Immediately after Stalin's death, the construction of the tunnel on the island was also stopped. Sakhalin along the bottom of the Tatar Strait. My grandfather, Yu.A. Korobin, at that time worked in Komsomolsk-on-Amur and was building a railway to Sovgavan. It was built by captured Japanese and managed to finish it. In 1965 I had the opportunity to drive along this road. The writer V. Azhaev (1915-1968), a former prisoner, wrote a book “Far from Moscow” about the construction of the tunnel, for which he received the Stalin Prize.

Both roads are marked on the map - both to Sovgavan and to the tunnel site, and from there to the south to Korsakov. Instead of a tunnel, a ferry crossing across the strait was later installed. It still works today.

SAKHALINSK TUNNEL- unfinished construction of a tunnel crossing through the Tatar Strait, one of the construction projects of the Gulag of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and the USSR Ministry of Railways.

The idea of ​​building a tunnel to Sakhalin was put forward at the end of the 19th century, but was never realized. Research was carried out already in 1929-1930.

In 1950, I.V. came up with the idea of ​​connecting Sakhalin with the mainland by rail. Stalin. Options were considered ferry crossing, bridge and tunnel. Soon, at the official level (secret resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated May 5, 1950), a decision was made to build tunnel and reserve sea ferry.

The length of the tunnel itself from Cape Pogibi on Sakhalin to Cape Lazarev on the mainland should have been about 10 km (the narrowest section of the strait was chosen), its route ran north of the ferry crossing. It was planned to build a branch on the mainland from Cape Lazarev to Selikhin station on the Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Sovetskaya Gavan section with a branch to a temporary ferry crossing. It was planned to build a traction power station near Lake Kizi. The completion of construction with the organization of a temporary ferry crossing was scheduled for the end of 1953, and the commissioning of the tunnel is planned at the end of 1955. The total cargo turnover of the designed line in the first years of its operation was envisaged at 4 million tons per year.

Construction of railway lines to the tunnel conducted mainly by freed Gulag prisoners. In agreement with the USSR Prosecutor's Office, with the permission of the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Internal Affairs released from forced labor camps and colonies up to 8 thousand people, by sending them to the Ministry of Railways before the end of their prison term. The exceptions were persons convicted of banditry, robbery, premeditated murder, repeat thieves sentenced to hard labor, prisoners in special camps of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to whom permission from the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not apply.

It was on Sakhalin Construction 506(Tymovskoye village), on the mainland - Construction 507(village of De-Kastri). By the beginning of 1953, the total number of railway builders on both sides of the strait was more than 27,000 people.

Preparations for the construction of a tunnel on the mainland were carried out by parolees, civilian specialists and military personnel(Construction of 6 MPS). The number of builders by the spring of 1953 was 3,700 people.

After Stalin's death, work on the entire project was curtailed.

Quote from the memoirs of engineer Yu.A. Kosheleva, who supervised the construction of the first shaft to the tunnel axis:

“In December 1951, I graduated from MIIT. I was sent to work at Construction No. 6 of the Ministry of Railways on Sakhalin Island... The contingent of builders was difficult. The bulk were those released early. The only way they differed from those who came here from the outside was that they were given a written undertaking not to leave.

In the spring of 1953, Stalin died. And after some time the construction site was closed. They didn’t fold it, they didn’t mothball it, but they closed it. Yesterday they were still working, but today they said: “That’s it, no more.” We never started digging the tunnel. Although everything was available for this work: materials, equipment, machinery and good qualified specialists and workers. Many argue that the amnesty that followed Stalin’s funeral put an end to the tunnel - there was practically no one to continue construction.

It is not true. Of our eight thousand early released, no more than two hundred left. And the remaining eight months waited for the order to resume construction. We wrote to Moscow about this, asked and begged. I consider stopping the construction of the tunnel to be some kind of wild, ridiculous mistake. After all, billions of rubles of people’s money and years of desperate labor were invested in the tunnel. And most importantly, the country really needs the tunnel...”

3. KOLA RAILWAY

in the Murmansk region. from Apatity to Ponoy on the White Sea

Construction No. 509

1951 — 1953

KOLA RAILWAY- modern unofficial name construction No. 509. This is an unfinished railway in the Murmansk region, one of the construction projects of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The route of the Kola Road is shown in green.

Murmansk railway is shown in black

D. Shkapov . From the reference book: “The system of forced labor camps in the USSR”

The construction of a broad-range railway across the Kola Peninsula was prompted by plans to create two naval bases on its eastern coast. Additional naval bases were needed due to the experience of the Great Patriotic War. The Northern Fleet base, Rybachy Peninsula, was cut off from the country during the war and found itself in a state of blockade, and the Murmansk base was subjected to air bombardment.

A road was laid for the construction of bases and their future supplies Apatity - Keivy - Ponoy length about 300 km with branch to Yokanga Bay. The Apatity-Iokanga railway route crosses aluminum ore deposit areas.

In 1951, an aluminum plant was launched in Kandalaksha. Due to the fact that the construction of the Kola Road was not completed, the Kandalaksha plant operates on raw materials from the city of Pikalevo, instead of using the raw material base of the Kola Peninsula.

At the same time it was being built Umbozero-Lesnoy road(using the labor of soldiers). For road construction at the end of 1951 near the Titan station, an ITL was created, which contained up to 4900 prisoners, in further distributed at seven camps along the route(45, 59, 72, 82, 102, 119 and 137 km).

According to some sources, in just over a year 110 km of rails were laid, for another 10 km - the track has been prepared. According to others, by 1952, 60 km of road had been built, an embankment had been laid for another 150 km, and a temporary road and communication line had been laid to Iokanga.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER STALIN'S DEATH IN MARCH 1953, CONSTRUCTION WAS STOPPED, mothballed and abandoned for several months, like all other railways that were mothballed after Stalin's death.

The section of road from Titan station to point 45 km is still in use (in particular, a branch line to Revda departs from it). In 2007, the railway was destroyed. The remaining laid rails were removed, probably shortly after construction ceased. The railway embankment and dirt road were partially preserved until at least 1963.

Construction site No. 509 Ministry of Internal Affairs

Iron road to the very ends of the Earth
Was mercilessly laid down by the fate of people...
Inscription on the monument in Salekhard.

After another two hours of travel, Alexey reported that we were about to cross “three tundras” and the tent would be visible. He called “tundra” a treeless area, which is indeed “an elastic concept” - it could be three or twelve kilometers wide.
And then it seemed to me that I was going crazy. A locomotive with a tall chimney emerged from behind a hillock, followed by another, a third, a fourth...
- What is this? - I burst out.
“A long time,” answered Alexey.
- What kind of Long?
- City.
- They didn’t tell us about this.
- A dead city, actually. There's a railroad there. We don’t go there – we’re afraid.
- What are you afraid of?
Alexey did not answer this question.
From the notes of an ethnographic expedition to the Taz River in the spring of 1976.

Dead road... This eerie epithet appeared in everyday life relatively recently, when articles, books, and stories began to be written about this story. It just so happened that, unlike the Trans-Siberian Railway, BAM and even the Pechora Railway, the construction of the Salekhard-Igarka highway did not have its own established name. Polar, polar, transpolar road - as they called it. It went down in history by the numbers of construction departments - No. 501 and 503 GULZhDS NKVD of the USSR, and most often they remember the “five hundred and first”, spreading this number throughout its entire length. But what suits it best is the name “Dead Road,” which reflects the fate of both the highway itself and many of its builders.

After the Great Patriotic War, the country's leadership and I.V. Stalin clearly realized the vulnerability of the strategic route - the Northern Sea Route. Its main ports, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, were located too close to the western borders of the USSR, and in the event of a new war, communication along the NSR could easily be paralyzed by the enemy. It was decided to create a new port in the Gulf of Ob, in the area of ​​Cape Kamenny, and connect it by a 700-kilometer railway with the already existing Kotlas-Vorkuta line. The main provisions for future construction were determined by Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 298-104ss of 02/04/1947, and by Resolution No. 1255-331ss of 04/22/1947 construction was entrusted to the GULZhDS (main department of camp railway construction) of the NKVD-MVD of the USSR.
Construction of the line began simultaneously with the search for a site for the future port. After some time, it became clear that the Gulf of Ob is completely unsuitable for such construction - very shallow depths, large wind surges and water surges do not allow the construction of any large port on its shores. Already in January 1949, a fateful meeting between I.V. Stalin, L.P. Beria and N.A. Frenkel, the head of the GULZhDS, took place. It was decided to curtail work on the Yamal Peninsula, stop construction of the line to Cape Kamenny, and begin laying a 1,290 km long railway. to the lower reaches of the Yenisei, along the highway Chum - Labytnangi - Salekhard - Nadym - Yagelnaya - Pur - Taz - Yanov Stan - Ermakovo - Igarka, with the construction of a port in Igarka. This was enshrined in decree No. 384-135ss of January 29, 1949. In the future, it was planned to extend the line from Dudinka to Norilsk.
Construction Department No. 502, which was involved in laying a line from Chum station of the Pechora railway to Cape Kamenny with a branch to Labytnangi, was abolished, and two new departments were created - western No. 501 with a base in Salekhard, which was in charge of the section from Labytnangi to the river. Pur, and eastern department No. 503 with a base in Igarka (later moved to Ermakovo), which built the road from Pur to Igarka. The concentration of manpower and materials between these constructions was distributed approximately 2:1.
The technical conditions for laying the line were extremely easy; bridges across the Ob, Pur, Taz and Yenisei were not planned at the first stage - their function was to be performed by ferries in the summer, and ice crossings in the winter. Excavation work was carried out mainly by hand, long-distance transportation of soil was carried out using a few vehicles, and filling of the embankment was carried out using hand wheelbarrows. 100-140 km of the route were completed per year on the western section, much less on the eastern section: due to the lack of people and the difficulty of transporting materials.

At this construction site, the terrible phrase that was born during the construction of the Pechora Railway - about “a man under every sleeper” - acquired its literal meaning. Thus, I. Simonova from Tashkent, who worked as an engineer in the 1970s on the survey and completion of the Nadym-Urengoy section, personally saw piles of skeletons after the banks of the Hetta River were washed away, and corpses in the embankment 616-620 kilometers of the line.
In October 1949, ice bound the Ob, and in early November sleepers and rails were already laid on it. A daredevil was needed who would be the first to experience the “ice”. This was not the case among civilian drivers. “Whoever overtakes the locomotive is free,” ordered the construction manager. A volunteer prisoner was found who took it upon himself to drive the locomotive. At first everything went well, but towards the middle of the river the ice began to crack and break. The driver looked out of the booth and was stunned - the Ob abyss, swallowing sleepers and rails, was menacingly approaching the locomotive. But the ice and rail lashes survived. The driver reached the shore and received the longed-for freedom. On the eve of November 7, the authorities reported to Stalin about a new labor victory in the 501st.

Traffic from Salekhard to Nadym was opened in August 1952, and a work-passenger train began running. By 1953, the embankment had been filled almost to Pura, and part of the rails had been laid. In the eastern sector, things were not going so well. A 65-kilometer section from Igarka to Ermakov, as well as about 100 km, was filled and laid. In a westerly direction to Janow Stan and beyond. Materials were brought to the Taz River area, and about 20 km were built here. main passage and depot with repair shops. The least developed was the 150-kilometer section between the Pur and Taz rivers, which was planned to be built by 1954.
A telegraph and telephone line was built along the entire route, which until the 70s connected Taimyr with the outside world. The operation of its section from Yagelnaya to Salekhard was stopped only in 1992.

After the death of I.V. Stalin, when more than 700 of the 1290 km had already been laid. roads, almost 1,100 were filled, about a year remained before commissioning, construction was stopped. Already on March 25, 1953, Decree No. 395-383ss was issued on the complete cessation of all work. Soon, 293 camps and construction departments were disbanded. An amnesty was declared for hundreds of thousands of prisoners, but they were able to go south only with the beginning of navigation - there were no other routes yet. According to some estimates, about 50 thousand prisoners were taken from construction sites 501 and 503, and about the same number of civilian personnel and members of their families. They took everything they could to the “Mainland,” but most of what was built was simply abandoned in the taiga and tundra.

Economists subsequently calculated that the decision to abandon construction at such a stage of readiness led to losses for the country’s budget much greater than if the road had been completed, not to mention its promising continuation to the Norilsk industrial region, where the richest deposits of iron and copper were already being developed , nickel, coal. The giant gas fields of Western Siberia have not yet been discovered - who knows, maybe then the fate of the road would have been completely different.
The fate of individual sections of the road varies greatly. The head section of Chum-Labytnangi was accepted into permanent operation by the Ministry of Railways in 1955. The fully completed Salekhard-Nadym line was abandoned and was not restored. Until the early 90s, signalmen servicing that same telegraph and telephone line rode along it on a semi-homemade handcar. The section from Pura (now Korotchaevo station) to Nadym was restored by the Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry in the 70s, and in the early 80s a new highway came to Korotchaevo from the south - from Tyumen. The condition of the route from Korotchaevo to Nadym was unimportant; in the mid-90s, passenger trains from the south were shortened to Korotchaevo station, and only in 2003 the Korotchaevo-Novy Urengoy (formerly Yagelnaya) section was put into permanent operation. The rails were removed from the eastern section of the road in 1964 for the needs of the Norilsk plant.

Only the “island” section in the area of ​​the Taz River remained practically untouched - about 20 km from the Sedelnikovo pier on the right bank. towards Ermakovo, with a branch to the Dolgoe depot and the ballast quarry. It was on this site, the most inaccessible of all the others, that the track, buildings, depot and four Ov steam locomotives - the famous “sheep” of pre-revolutionary construction - remained almost untouched. On the tracks near the depot there are several dozen cars - mostly flat cars, but there are also a few covered ones. One of the cars came here from post-war Germany, after being converted to the domestic 1520 mm gauge. 15 km. from Dolgoye, the remains of a camp have been preserved, and not far from the depot, on the other bank of the stream, there are the remains of a settlement of civilian workers and the construction administration, consisting of almost two dozen buildings, as well as a wooden ferry lying on the shore. We visited this area.

The future fate of the Dead Road no longer looks so bleak. The continued development of hydrocarbon reserves in adjacent areas forces Gazprom and the administration of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug to look for new ways to supply and transport materials. The issue of restoring the Nadym-Salekhard section and building a line from Korotchaevo to the Yuzhno-Russkoye field, passing also along the 503rd construction route, are already being considered. Only Norilsk, with the current volumes of ore production, looks at all this calmly, content with year-round icebreaker navigation along the NSR. But the reserves of its deposits are very large, and the world needs nickel and base metals. Who knows…

Steam locomotive Ov-3821 near the ruins of the Dolgoye depot.

Platforms on a dead-end track near the depot.

The path towards Igarka.


Rails and rolling stock were brought from different places for construction. There are also Demidov rails from the 19th century.

Steam locomotive Ov-6154.

Loneliness.

These locomotives will never stop at any depot again...

Steam locomotive Ov-6698.

Arrow in the depot.

Wheelset with spokes. Now there are almost no such people.

There was no war here. The government just lost interest...

This platform was apparently used by railway workers.

The remains of freight cars are densely overgrown with young forest. Another 50-70 years will pass, and the taiga will absorb everything else.

Platform in the swamp.

A two-kilometer dead-end line to the north along the bank of the Taz River. Why it was built is unclear, there are no quarries there, the line simply ends in the open forest.

Such overlays were also on the main course. On the other side of them were attached wooden plates, now almost rotten.

Again a pre-revolutionary rail. Demidov plant, Nizhny Tagil.

The line is overgrown.

Diesel on the bank of the Taz River. Possibly from more recent times. Not a single flood can move him from his place...

View from the driver's booth.

Depot Long. A few more years and he too will be gone.

Rust and cobwebs.

Despite the beginning of the introduction of automatic coupling, the rolling stock of GULZhDS still had a screw harness.

There were workshops here.

Radiator from the Stalinets tractor.

Near the depot, the rails were removed from the branch leading to the main passage. Apparently they were taken out along the river.

Turnout details.

Arrow details again.

Trees grow along the rails - there is a different local microclimate there. A similar picture can be observed in old mountain trails.

The 1879 rail is the oldest found. Where did it lie before?...

Strange vandalism.

Contrary to some opinions, metal ties were also used on the Polar Highway. They helped maintain the gauge when the sleepers and fastenings were weak.

Young boletus.

Exit to the embankment.

Gulch.

Trains haven't run here for a long time.

Many small bridges and pipes ceased to exist. You have to cross such gullies. The boards below are not only sleepers - the embankment was poured on a wooden base, in the image of medieval ramparts.

All-terrain vehicles of gas workers do not spare the Dead Road. She is nothing to them, a hindrance.

Another confirmation of the presence of wooden cages at the base of the embankment.

And this is the youngest rail found - 1937. For some reason we expected to see only these there.

There are also normal fastenings. But there were still not enough materials for the upper structure of the track.

The subsidence of depot tracks gives such misalignment.

Boxcar. The quality of the boards is enviable.

And here is the solution - the carriage is German. Apparently the trophy was converted to our track and transferred to GULZDS.

Barbed wire. We didn’t reach the camp, but there was plenty of it in the vicinity of the depot.

Steam locomotive Ov-4171 and expedition members. In the middle is yours truly)

A number of factual materials from V. Glushko’s essay in the book “Polar Highway” were used.

Immediately after the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union, which had not yet risen from devastation, began implementing a grandiose project. With the help of prisoners of the Main Directorate of the NKVD camps of the USSR, large-scale construction of the Great Northern Railway, a 1,400-kilometer-long highway that was supposed to connect the European part of the country with the Yenisei delta, began in the practically uninhabited subpolar tundra. Just six years after work began, tens of thousands of construction workers quickly abandoned the half-built road. Onliner.by tells how in the vast expanses of Western Siberia thousands of human lives and billions of Soviet rubles were buried in permafrost and why the construction of the century was abandoned unfinished.

Even before the revolutions of 1917, in the wake of the explosive development of railways in Russia, engineers were developing alternative routes that, to one degree or another, duplicated the Great Siberian Road, which we now know as the Trans-Siberian Railway. Almost immediately after the completion of the construction of this railway in 1916, which connected the European part of the empire with its Pacific coast, enthusiasts presented the first projects of a similar highway in the northern regions of the country, which, in turn, was supposed to connect Murmansk, an ice-free port in the Barents Sea, with Ob, Surgut, Yeniseisk, the northern shore of Lake Baikal and then reach the Tatar Strait, separating the mainland and Sakhalin.

Of course, the revolutionary disorder and the subsequent Civil War did not contribute to the practical implementation of the colossal financial and labor-intensive project. However, in 1924, the future Transpolar Railway, called the Great Northern Railway in official documents, was presented on a map of the long-term development of railways in the USSR. However, before the war, the state chose to concentrate on the development of another Great Northern Route - the sea one.

The beginning of the creation of the Transpolar Railway in a broad sense can be considered the construction of the Pechora Railway, which connected the city of Kotlas in the Arkhangelsk Region with the polar Vorkuta. Built by prisoners of the Main Directorate of Camps of the NKVD of the USSR (GULag) in 1937-1941, the road acquired strategic importance in wartime conditions, giving the Soviet metallurgy access to high-quality coking coal from the Pechora Basin.

The first train on the new line, late December 1941.

It is difficult to document the chain of events that forced the builders to go further east along the Arctic Circle; most of the documents are still classified. Nevertheless, almost all researchers are inclined to believe that the Soviet leader, teacher and friend of all children, I.V. Stalin, was personally behind the decision to begin active construction of the railway in completely inconvenient areas in 1947. He is even credited with a phrase that supposedly marked the beginning of a mighty construction project: “We must take on the North, Siberia is not covered by anything from the North, and the political situation is very dangerous.”

It is difficult to vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but the decree of the USSR Council of Ministers of April 22, 1947 remains a fact. According to the document, in the Gulf of Ob (the bay of the Kara Sea into which the Ob flows) in the area of ​​Cape Kamenny, a new large seaport with a residential village was to be built, and from the Chum station on the Pechora Mainline (south of Vorkuta) a railway with a length of 500 kilometers. On a fragment of the map, red dot No. 1 marks the starting point of the promising highway, and point No. 2 marks Cape Kamenny.

To carry out the work, already on April 28, within the framework of the Main Directorate of Railway Construction Camps (GULZhDS, one of the divisions of the Gulag system), construction departments No. 501, which was in charge of the construction of the main line, and No. 502, which was engaged in work on the seaport, were formed. The work was carried out at a pace characteristic of the times and even more accelerated by the close attention of the country's leadership. Already in December 1947, just eight months after the relevant decree was issued, labor traffic opened on the 118-kilometer section Chum - Sob, and the road crossed the Polar Ural river valley - the Sob crossing was already on the territory of the Tyumen region.

A year later, by December 1948, the builders had advanced all the way to the Labytnangi station on the left bank of the Ob, opposite Salekhard. However, at the same time it suddenly became clear that it was simply impossible to create a new seaport on the Gulf of Ob, in the area of ​​that same Cape Kamenny. Hydrographic studies carried out in parallel with general construction work showed that the bay is shallow and even after dredging the bottom will still be unable to accommodate large ocean-going ships.

So, from April 1947 to December 1948, the 196-kilometer Chum - Labytnangi highway was put into operation. It was completely unclear what to do next, given the futility of the previous northern “Ob” direction. On January 29, 1949, after a meeting between Stalin, Beria and the head of the GULZhDS Naftaliy Frenkel, another resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers was issued, which determined a new location for the construction of the same “large intermediate base of sea communications.” It was decided to move it to the area of ​​the city of Igarka, Turukhansky district, Krasnoyarsk Territory, that is, more than a thousand kilometers to the east, to the right bank of the Yenisei, where the seaport had been operating since the late 1920s. This is what this polar city looked like in the early 1950s, at which time about 20 thousand people lived here.

Instead of the relatively modest 500-kilometer road Chum - Cape Kamenny, a grandiose plan was born to build a truly Great Northern Route Chum - Salekhard - Igarka with a total length of 1,482 kilometers, of which 1,286 had yet to be built. The road on the map of Russia is marked with a red line (click on it to open a larger image).

So, why, with persistence perhaps only possible under Stalin, did a man, in the not-so-technologically advanced 1940s, begin to build a colossal-length railway in the deserted subpolar tundra? Soviet geologists were still just guessing about what rich deposits of mother oil and father gas the subsoil of Western Siberia contained. Probably, the main motivation of the Soviet leadership and the leader of the people in particular was the desire to create a backup of the Northern Sea Route, not subject to seasonal freezing, with access to a new main Arctic sea port, remote from the country’s borders.

The events of the Great Patriotic War showed the vulnerability of the Soviet Arctic from external attack. Surely, Operation Wunderland (“Wonderland”), carried out by the Kriegsmarine in the summer of 1942 in the Kara Sea with the aim of preventing the passage of Allied convoys from the east to Murmansk, was still fresh in Stalin’s memory. German submarines torpedoed several Soviet ships, and the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer even bombed the port of Dikson, located at the entrance of the Yenisei Bay to the Arctic Ocean.

The new port in Igarka, which was quite possibly considered as a promising base for the Northern Fleet, looked much more reliable in this sense. In addition, in close proximity to it was the Norilsk industrial region with its largest nickel reserves in the country and strategically important for the defense industry. It could also be connected to the unified railway system of the USSR with the help of a new highway.

By the way, these places were not alien to Stalin. At one time, in 1914-1917, here, in the village of Kureika, Turukhansk Territory, 170 kilometers south of Igarka, he served exile. After the war, the surviving hut, where the future generalissimo lived by the will of the bloody tsarist regime, was covered with a special pavilion, turning into a museum, which, however, did not survive the fight against the cult of personality.

The second stage of construction of the Transpolar Railway has begun. Construction Department No. 502, which previously dealt with the port in the area of ​​​​Cape Kamenny, was included in a similar unit No. 501 and assigned the combined structure to carry out work on the Salekhard - Nadym - Pur River section. At the same time, construction department No. 503 was formed in Igarka, which was supposed to pull the railway from the opposite, eastern side. Both armies of builders were supposed to meet on the Pur River. In documents and literature, the Transpolar Railway has since often been called “construction-501” or “construction-503” - depending on which section of it we are talking about.

The main problem with the Transpolar Railway was the speed with which it was built. Now it is difficult to say what caused such storming and rush. Other researchers, prone to conspiracy theories, even consider the construction of this railway as one of the stages in the preparation of the USSR and Stalin personally for the Third World War. Be that as it may, the same January resolution of the Council of Ministers, which determined the new highway route, contained another fundamental thesis: it was to be built according to “lighter technical conditions.” It was planned to open working train traffic in some sections in 1952, and the entire road was supposed to be ready by 1955.

It was assumed that the new 1,300-kilometer route would run parallel to the Arctic Circle, would be single-track with sidings every 9-14 km (106 sidings in total) and stations every 40-60 km (28 stations). The average speed of the train with stops at sidings was assumed to be about 40 km/h, including acceleration and braking. Capacity - 6 pairs of trains per day. At the stations Salekhard, Nadym, Pur, Taz, Ermakovo and Igarka, the main depots were set up, and at the stations Yarudei, Pangody, Kataral, Turukhan - revolving depots.

The work was carried out virtually without design estimates, mainly by the Main Directorate of Railway Construction Camps. In total, there were 290 thousand prisoners in this Gulag unit, a significant part of whom were concentrated at construction sites 501 and 503, the northernmost in the country.

A winter road was laid along the entire highway by special tractor trains. The production columns of two GULZhDS departments were located along it. They were built mainly in the short summer season. To begin with, a relatively low two-meter embankment was built (mainly from imported stone-sand mixture), on which sleepers and rails were then laid. All work was carried out in a sharply continental climate with harsh, long winters (up to eight months) and short, cold and rainy summers and autumns. On average, builders managed to build about 100 kilometers of railway per season.

The transpolar highway was built in extreme permafrost conditions. The technologies of the 1940s and the required speed of construction did not allow for the proper development of the railway, as, for example, the Chinese did 70 years later. After the onset of above-zero temperatures in Western Siberia, active melting of the top layer of soil and permafrost underneath began, which led to regular and widespread deformations of the road surface and its engineering structures. In fact, a significant part of the road, made over previous seasons, had to be reconstructed with the onset of the new one. Repairs to the embankment, strengthening of the roadbed, bridges and other infrastructure continued continuously, every year.

The climate made work in the highway construction area extremely difficult. In winter, prisoners working at construction sites 501 and 503 were covered in snow and tormented by frost; in summer they were plagued by rain, impassable mud and ubiquitous clouds of insects of varying degrees of bloodthirstiness.

Along the entire route, small settlements of civilian construction workers, administration and camp prisoners were set up. There were few local building materials in the conditions of the polar tundra; in most cases, timber was imported from outside. While it came to the construction of more or less permanent housing, the builders were forced to live in tents and dugouts. Gradually they were replaced by barracks by the forces of their future inhabitants. The remains of many camps and settlements are still regularly found along Transpolyarnaya.

The average camp here was a 500x500 meter perimeter fenced with barbed wire with guard towers, one-story residential barracks, a canteen and a punishment cell. One such formation accommodated from 500 to 1000 people. Outside the perimeter there were houses for guards and civilian workers, a store, a bathhouse, warehouses, and a club.

And this is what the village of Ermakovo looked like before and looks like now, one of the largest at the construction site (up to 15 thousand inhabitants), located on the left bank of the Yenisei, not far from Igarka. Here, in fact, was the headquarters of construction No. great land, but such rare infrastructure here.

Compared to other camps of the Gulag system, the construction of Transpolar was relatively good. Here, the extremely difficult working conditions of prisoners were somewhat compensated by a higher standard of nutrition. The construction site even had its own mobile theater. The mortality rate, according to the recollections of surviving eyewitnesses, was relatively low.

In addition to the tens of thousands of people provided by the GULZhDS, there were many Komsomol members and other enthusiasts who arrived here, essentially, at the call of their hearts and the corresponding voucher.

In addition to the climate, work on the Salekhard-Igarka line was complicated by its remoteness from the mainland. There were practically no high-quality building materials “on site”; they had to be delivered from Salekhard along already built kilometers of road or using the Northern Sea Route through Igarka.

The road crossed small rivers on wooden bridges. Bridges across the large rivers Barabanikha and Makovskaya were built much more thoroughly: from metal on concrete supports 60 and 100 meters long, respectively. However, none of the structures built according to “lighter technical conditions” escaped deformation and destruction due to the melting and subsequent freezing of soils.

No bridges were built across the great Siberian rivers Ob and Yenisei. In summer, special ferries were used, and in winter, ice crossings were established.

Rails, of course, were also delivered from the mainland. In total, researchers discovered 16 different species of them on the route, including pre-revolutionary and trophy ones.

In August 1952, as planned, work traffic was opened on the Salekhard-Nadym section, and by March of the following year there was even a passenger train running between the settlements. However, its speed (and the speed of the freight trains used to supply the construction) due to the extremely low quality of the railway track was low and averaged 15 km/h, not even close to reaching the standard indicators. But even in such a situation, train derailments were frequent and widespread.

By the spring of 1953, a total of about 700 kilometers of the Great Northern Route had been built, more than half of the entire length of the highway, but on March 25, 1953, another resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers was issued, according to which the construction of the Salekhard-Igarka railway was stopped. An immediate and rapid evacuation of the workforce began. According to most estimates, within a few months, up to 100 thousand people were taken to the mainland from the area between the Ob and Yenisei rivers.

This decision, which was voluntaristic at first glance, was explained very simply: on March 5, 1953, Stalin died, and with him the Transpolar Railway was first seemingly mothballed, and then finally abandoned. The railway, which was being built at an unprecedented pace in extreme natural conditions, turned out to be not needed by the country.

In total, 3.2 billion rubles were literally buried in the ground and swamps of the Western Siberian subpolar tundra, so necessary for the Soviet Union, which was rising from the ruins. This amount amounted to 12.5% ​​of the USSR's capital investments in railway construction during the five-year plan of 1946-1950 and about 2% of all USSR capital investments for the same period. It is no longer possible to determine exactly how many lives were lost to construction sites 501 and 503.