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. Error 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.

Dorogi

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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. 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.