Opening of the Murmansk railway

On 8 December 1916, according to the British official history of merchant shipping (Fayle, Seaborne Trade), the Murmansk railway was officially declared open. The new line linked the Russian railway network with an ice-free port on the Kola Bay, on the coast of the Barents Sea. Russian sources give other dates for the individual stages. The last rails were laid on 16 November (3 November by the Julian calendar), when two track-laying gangs working towards each other from the north and the south met on a section in central Karelia. The last, “golden” spike was then ceremonially driven in and through traffic over the whole route was opened. The act accepting the line for temporary operation was signed on 28 November (15 November by the Julian calendar). The British chronology of the war, following the official history, records the opening under 8 December.

A port that does not freeze

From the autumn of 1914 Russia was almost cut off from her allies. The way out of the Baltic was closed by the German fleet, and the way out of the Black Sea by Turkey, which controlled the Straits. Two routes remained. The first ran through Archangel on the White Sea, a port frozen for about half the year and linked to the interior only by a narrow-gauge railway to Vologda. The second led through Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway, which could not keep up with moving the supplies inland. According to the British official history, by the end of 1916 about 2 million tons of munitions and war material had piled up at Vladivostok.

The coast of the Kola Peninsula, although it lies beyond the Arctic Circle, does not freeze all winter thanks to the warm waters of the North Atlantic Current. But there was neither a port nor a railway there. In December 1914 the Council of Ministers decided to build without delay a line northwards from Petrozavodsk on Lake Onega, and on 1 January 1915 Tsar Nicholas II approved it. Petrozavodsk was linked with Petrograd by the private Olonets railway, built in 1913–1914.

Construction

The route was divided into sections: from Petrozavodsk to Soroka Bay on the White Sea (today’s Belomorsk), from Soroka to Kandalaksha, and from Kandalaksha to the Murman coast. In all, more than a thousand kilometres of track were laid in about a year and a half through forests, rocks and swamps. On the section from Petrozavodsk to the Kola Bay alone, marshland made up about a quarter of the route. Work speeded up when, in November 1915, Alexander Trepov took over the Ministry of Communications; from November 1916 he was also prime minister. At the end of the line, on Semyonov Bay, a port and a station were built from scratch, and on 4 October (21 September by the Julian calendar) 1916 the town of Romanov-on-Murman, today’s Murmansk, was founded there.

Men were as scarce as materials. According to Russian figures, on average more than 70,000 people a month worked on the construction, and as many as 170,000 in all. More than 100,000 of them were peasants hired for seasonal work. About 10,000 Chinese from Manchuria, about 2,000 Kazakhs from Semipalatinsk Oblast, workers from Finland and a few hundred Canadians were also recruited. The hardest work was done by prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian and German armies: more than 40,000 according to Russian sources, about 60,000 according to the German historian Georg Wurzer.

Conditions were terrible: the polar winter, makeshift barracks, scurvy and typhus. Estimates of the losses vary widely. According to Russian figures, by August 1916 more than 10,000 sick had been evacuated from the line, and more than 600 people had died in the small hospitals along the construction. Wurzer, by contrast, estimates that as many as 25,000 prisoners may have died. The exact number of victims cannot be established today.

A temporary line

The railway opened in December 1916 was only a makeshift. It had a single track, wooden bridges and provisional stations. Trains ran at 11–12 km/h, and the whole line could pass 60–90 wagons a day. The British official history calls it a line “badly laid and badly equipped”, but stresses that for the first time in this war it gave Russia a supply route open all year round. The Russian government therefore asked its allies for a winter programme of supplies from Britain, France and the United States. It estimated that 380,000 tons of munitions and other cargo would pass through Murmansk over the winter, although the British doubted the capacity of the port and the railway. On 24 October the British Shipping Control Committee assigned fifteen requisitioned ships to this service.

In the following months the wooden bridges were replaced with steel and concrete ones, and workshops and watering points were built. From March 1917 at least 200 wagons a day were already being dispatched from Murmansk, and regular passenger traffic began in September 1917. It was too late, however, to save the Russian front. In 1918 the railway and the port became the target of Allied intervention in northern Russia, and in the 1930s the line was renamed the Kirov Railway.