Stalin's Railroad

About this book

"The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, brought not only trains to the steppes of the old Tsarist Empire, Kazakhstan, but also the promise of revolution." "One of the great projects of the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan, Turksib was part of a larger campaign of rapid industrialization to transform the country into the first socialist society on earth. The "building of socialism" was both metaphorical and literal. Turksib was not the largest, the most expensive, or the most prestigious of the large-scale building projects sweeping the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but the railroad captured the imagination of a people and seemed tangible proof of the country's breakneck "leap into communism." "Construction on Turksib spanned five years, from December 1926 to January 1931, at a cost of over 161 million rubles, with a peak workforce of nearly 50,000 men. Designed to fulfill Bolshevism's broken promise to end ethnic inequality and uplift formerly exploited colonies, Turksib became known as the "forge of the Kazakh proletariat." The colossal struggles involved - such as feeding and housing the project's many railworkers, building hospitals and schools along the rail line, fighting disease, eradicating illiteracy, and acclimating nomads to industrial work while sovietizing peasant seasonal workers - all cast the massive railroad project as an instrument of civilization in a supposedly uncivilized outback."--BOOK JACKET.