Travel by Rail in Russia

choi

Travel in Russia | The Gauge of History; A train journey north shows how Russia has evolved—and regressed. Economist, Dec 19, 2015
http://www.economist.com/news/ch ... essed-gauge-history

Note:
(1) “At twilight * * * Moscow’s Yaroslavsky railway station is an alluring place: all floodlit modernist turrets, gaudy tiles, folkloric decorations and a fairy-tale castle gate, like a triumphal arch, opening the way to the north. The playful station (vokzal in Russian) reflects the sparkling origin of the word in London’s Vauxhall, the 17th-century amusement gardens beside the Thames.”  
(a) Moscow Yaroslavskaya railway station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo ... aya_railway_station
("It is the western terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest railway in the world. Its name originates from the ancient city of Yaroslavl, the first large city along the [Trans-Siberian] railway, situated 284 km along the railway from Moscow")
(b) Russian English dictionary:
* вокзал  (n; etymology; Romanized: vokzál): "train station)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/вокзал vokzal

(2) “Russia’s first railway line, built in 1837 by Franz von Gerstner, a Bohemian engineer, started in St Petersburg and ended in Pavlovsk, an English-style summer retreat for the Russian aristocracy.”
(a) Pavlovsk, Saint Petersburg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovsk,_Saint_Petersburg

Quote:

"In December 1777, she [Catherine the Great (reign 1762-1796)] assigned to her son, [the future] Paul I [a parcel of land]. This was a present to Paul [Catherine's elder son; reign 1796 - 1801] and his wife Maria Feodorovna on the occasion of the birth of their first son, the future Emperor Alexander I of Russia. This date is considered the founding date of the Pavlovskoye village (the name Pavlovsk derives from Paul's name in Russian, Pavel)

"In the 19th century, Pavlovsk became a favorite summer retreat for well-to-do inhabitants of the Russian capital. * * * To facilitate transportation, the first railway in Russia, the Tsarskoe Selo Railways, was built around 1836 [and opened in 1837].
(b) Pavlov (surname)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlov_(surname)
(from Christian [given] name Paul (Russian: Pavel; Ukrainian: Pavlo))
(c)
(i) Tsarskoe Selo Railways connected St Petersburg and Pavlovsk, through then Tsarskoe Selo (a town that “was founded in 1710 as an imperial residence named Tsarskoye Selo.  After the October Revolution, the town was renamed to Detskoye Selo (meaning Children's Village). Its name was further changed in 1937 to Pushkin to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.)
Pushkin, Saint Petersburg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushkin,_Saint_Petersburg
(ii) For meaning of Tsarskoe Selo, see History of Tsarskoye Selo. Tsarskoye Selo State Museum-Preserve, undated
eng.tzar.ru/museums/history

(3) “Yaroslavsky station was designed by Fyodor Shekhtel, Russia’s finest architect, in the art-nouveau style. He modelled it on a wooden pavilion he had built for the International Exhibition in Glasgow in 1901. The station opened a year later when the line was extended all the way to Archangel, the first port in the Russian empire to conduct trade with England in the 16th century, and an entry point for early travellers to Russia from Europe. Around the same time, Shekhtel was decorating the Moscow Art Theatre, where Anton Chekhov’s plays were staged. In that era, the Russian intelligentsia considered itself an integral part of Europe. Now, Russia has seldom seemed farther away.  The journey from Moscow to Archangel is 1,134km (705 miles; see map).”

Arkhangelsk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkhangelsk
(also known in English as Archangel and Archangelsk; the administrative center of Arkhangelsk Oblast; lies on both banks of the Northern Dvina River near its exit into the White Sea; "Arkhangelsk was the chief seaport of medieval and early modern Russia until 1703 [the year Peter the Great founded St Petersburg]. A 1,133-kilometer-long (704 mi) railway runs from Arkhangelsk to Moscow via Vologda and Yaroslavl")

choi

(13) “Russian history was often viewed as a [rail]track that was fixed from past to future [‘If you get lost on a road, you don’t have to retrace your steps; you can turn off at the next junction and find an alternative route. But if history is a railway line, you have to go all the way back in order to get on the right track’] * * * This led thinkers over the decades to ponder where the country had taken a wrong turn. Petr Chaadaev, an early-19th-century intellectual, lamented that Russia had made no original contribution to world civilisation because it had erroneously absorbed its Christianity from Constantinople rather than Rome. His ‘philosophical letter’ was printed at the time of the first railway construction. Slavophiles saw the root of all evil in the reforms of Peter the Great, while Westernisers blamed the invasion of Russia by the Tatars and Mongols.
(a) Pyotr Chaadayev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Chaadayev
(or Petr; 1794 – 1856; a Russian philosopher; wrote eight "Philosophical Letters")
(b) Slavophilia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavophilia
(Slavophiles were especially opposed to the influences of Western Europe in Russia
(c) In chronological order.
(i) "After the establishment of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan in 1206, the Empire subjugated the Tatars."  Wikipedia
(ii) Mongol invasion of Rus' (1223-1240)
(iii) Golden Horde (1240s–1502)

(14) “Much of the energy of Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1980s perestroika generation was spent looking for that crucial point where the Soviet Union had set itself on the wrong course. For the communist reformers, that happened in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. (In 1968, however, it was Stalin’s ‘great leap forward’ of 1929 that was seen as the mistake; Russia had to go all the way back to Lenin’s roots, it was argued, in order to advance.) When communism collapsed in 1990, historians went even further back, fixing their sights on the short-lived era of Russian capitalism in the 1900s as the point from which they had to pick up again, as if 70 years of Soviet rule could simply be ignored.”

I do not know what Stalin did in 1929, but the term “great leap forward” -- notable for lack of capitalizaion, and thus not a proper name -- is something the Economist borrows from China.

(15) “After nearly 27 hours the train arrives in Archangel [from Moscow], a city in the delta of the Northern Dvina river through which the first European traders entered ‘Muscovy,’ and to which British ships delivered food as part of the northern convoys during the second world war. In the city’s elegant 17th-century merchants’ yard, overlooking the steely waters of the Dvina, an exhibition is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory against the fascists. It bristles with Stalinist posters and slogans and makes no mention of the Allies.”
(a) Northern Dvina River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Dvina_River
(section 1 Etymology: not to be confused with Western Dvina River that drains through Latvia into Baltic Sea)
(b) Grand Duchy of Moscow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchy_of_Moscow
("or Grand Principality of Moscow (also known in English simply as Muscovy)";1283–1547; Muscovy remained a tributary to the Golden Horde (under the "Tatar Yoke") until 1480)
(c) Arctic convoys of World War II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_convoys_of_World_War_II
(between August 1941 and May 1945)
(d) bristle (vi): "to be full of or covered with especially something suggestive of bristles <roofs bristled with chimneys>"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bristle

choi

(11) “The vast horizon outside the window contrasts with the confined space of the compartment, which makes the perfect environment for long conversations between strangers—a device widely used by Russian novelists. In Tolstoy’s ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’ the main character tells fellow passengers on the train the story of how he came to murder his wife. The Russian philosopher Fyodor Stepun [1884 – 1965], exiled after the revolution, noted how different Russian carriages are from those in western Europe, ‘both in the sound of the wheels and in the domestic atmosphere that reigns in them.’ “
(a) The Kreutzer Sonata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kreutzer_Sonata
(named after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata [see next]; The novella was published in 1889)
(b) Violin Sonata No 9 (Beethoven)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Sonata_No._9_(Beethoven)
(1803)

Quote: "The sonata was originally dedicated to the violinist George Bridgetower [of mixed blood (Afro-European]; born in Poland but his father possibly was from Barbado (independent from UK in 1966). * * * Beethoven and Bridgetower fell out: while the two were drinking, Bridgetower apparently insulted the morals of a woman whom Beethoven cherished. Enraged, Beethoven removed the dedication of the piece, dedicating it instead to Rodolphe Kreutzer [French], who was considered the finest violinist of the day.

(12) “An hour into the journey [the Economist journalist by rail from Moscow to Archangelsk], the train passes through the village of Khotkovo. From here it is only a few miles to Abramtsevo, an estate once owned by Savva Mamontov, a 19th-century millionaire, philanthropist and railway tycoon who was responsible for building the line to Archangel under concession from the government. Mamontov was born in 1841 in western Siberia, one of nine children of the rich merchant who built the first part of the northern railway line from Moscow to Yaroslavl. * * * Mamontov started a private opera in Moscow which presented Fyodor Chaliapin to the world and first performed ’s ‘Snow Maiden.’  At home he composed and staged his own comedies for his family and friends, competing with another amateur from a rich merchant family—Konstantin Alekseev, better known as Stanislavsky, who transformed the art of acting. Stanislavsky wrote of Mamontov: ‘We, the children of the great fathers and creators of Russian life, tried to inherit from them the difficult art of being rich. To know how to spend money properly is a very great art.’ * * * He turned Abramtsevo into an artists’ colony * * * In the 1890s, a time of extraordinary cultural and economic vitality, Mamontov invested in the extension of the railway between Yaroslavl and Archangel.  He was part of an expedition led by Witte. They travelled by railway to the medieval Russian city of Vologda, sailed up-river [Northern Dvina River] to Archangel * * * The Russian north was never conquered by the Tatars and Mongols and was free of serfdom, allowing farmers to own their land. Of all its regions, the north of Russia retained the most vivid memories of life before the Tatar invasion in the 13th century, and remained culturally close to Scandinavia.  Unlike the Trans-Siberian railway, a state project built from 1891 to 1916 that followed the track trodden by prisoners to Siberian exile, the privately financed railway to Archangel was a road to the free land, to private initiative, to the dream of Russia as akin to prosperous Norway. “The road to the north was a road to the Russian West,” says Inna Solovyova, a historian.”
(a) Savva Mamontov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savva_Mamontov
(1841 – 1918; In 1870, Mamontov purchased the Abramtsevo Estate, located north of Moscow)
(b) concession (n): "2c (1) :  a grant of land or property especially by a government in return for services or for a particular use (2) :  a right to undertake and profit by a specified activity (3) :  a lease of a portion of premises for a particular purpose; also :  the portion leased or the activities carried on"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concession
(c) Fyodor Chaliapin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feodor_Chaliapin
(d) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Rimsky-Korsakov
(1844 – 1908; Russian composer; The Snow Maiden (first performance 1882 at St Petersburg)
(e) Konstantin Stanislavsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Stanislavsky
(1863 – 1938; a Russian actor and theatre director)

choi

(8) “As a result, trains rumble through Russian literature and poetry with remarkable frequency. Rail travel occupies the same place in Russian culture as the road trip in America. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina meets Vronsky at a railway station at the beginning of the novel and ends her life under a train. (Tolstoy, too, happened to die at a station.)”
(a) Leo Tolstoy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy
(1828 – 1910; Anna Karenina (1877))

Born, living and buried in Yasnaya Polyana (literally "Bright Glade" -- 200 kilometers (120 mi) south of Moscow), at 82 Tolstoy left his wife (Sophia) and home in the middle of Winter, in the dead of night. On Nov 7, 1910 Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo railway station (named after a nearby selo of Astapovo), after a day's rail journey south.
(b) glade (n): "an open place in a forest; clearing"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/glade
(c)
(i) Tolstoy (family)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolstoy_(family)
(or Tolstoi; is a prominent family of Russian nobility, descending from Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy ("the Fat"))
(ii) "Tolstoy is an old Russian adjective for 'fat.' "

(9) “In Boris Pasternak’s ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ the comfortable, softly upholstered trains at the beginning of the novel give way to the freight trains in which Zhivago and his wife escape a Moscow devastated by revolution and civil war.”

Yuri Zhivago
(a) Yuri/Yury: "the Slavic form of the given name George"
(b) Fr Andrew, Doctor Zhivago. Orthodox England (Diocese of Great Britain and Ireland, Russian Orthodox Church), May 8, 2009
orthodoxengland.org.uk/zhivago.htm
("the name ‘Zhivago’ is not a Russian name at all. It is a Church Slavonic (not Russian) word which means ‘the living.' It is this word which is sung at Sunday Matins in the Orthodox Church, when the angel addresses the myrrhbearers with the words: ‘Why seek ye the living (‘zhivago’) among the dead?’ As Zhivago says: ‘Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself – the gift of life – is such a breathtakingly serious thing’ ([footnote] 1). ‘Oh, how sweet it was to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life! (2)")
(i) Fr = Father
(ii) Eastern Orthodox Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church
(Bishops must remain unmarried; "Widowed priests are not allowed to remarry (no priest may be married after his ordination)")

In Eastern Orthodox Church, here is no equivalent of pope in Catholic church.  Russian Orthodox Church is subsumed under Eastern Orthodox Church
(iii) Boris Pasternak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak
(1890-1960; Doctor Zhivago (1957); "Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988")

(10) "In 'Moscow Circles,' a late Soviet prose poem, an alcoholic intellectual reflects on history, philosophy and love as he travels by elektrichka—a suburban train—from Moscow to the provincial town of Petushki. The town becomes a Utopia 'where birds never stop singing and jasmine never stops blossoming.' (In the end Venichka, the narrator, oversleeps his stop and wakes up heading back to Moscow, where a gang of thugs murder him.)"
(a) Moscow-Petushki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow-Petushki
(also published as Moscow Circles; a novel; "The story follows an alcoholic intellectual, Venya (or Venichka), as he travels by a suburban train on a 125 km (78 mi) journey from Moscow to visit his beautiful beloved and his child in Petushki, a town" east of Moscow)
(b) elektrichka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrichka

choi

(4) “Railways cut deep through the Russian psyche, and train journeys are woven into the nation’s cultural life. They tell its story in ways large and small. A kink in the railway line from Moscow to St Petersburg, for example, is where—or so it is said—Tsar Nicholas I’s finger got in the way of his ruler 尺 when he drew a line between the cities. Whatever the truth of that, over the centuries railways have represented the will of an authoritarian ruler, the supremacy of state power, the boom of private capital, the modernisation of the country, the terror of Stalinism and the mania for ruinous grand projects of Soviet times. All Russian history is there.
(a) Saint Petersburg – Moscow Railway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_–_Moscow_Railway
(section 3 History)
(b) Nicholas I of Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_I_of_Russia
(1796 – 1855; Emperor of Russia 1825 - 1855)

* Nicholas II of Russia is the last emperor.

(5) “Sergei Witte, the railway chief from the time of Alexander III, saw trains as ‘social mixers.’  ‘A railway”, he wrote, ‘is a ferment that causes cultural brewing’ “

Alexander III of Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_III_of_Russia

(6) “These bringers of modernity [trains], like many others, had military roots. One of the first lines from Warsaw (then part of the Russian empire) to the border of Austria and Hungary, its strong ally, was used by Nicholas I to send Russian troops to help suppress a Hungarian rebellion in 1848. Lenin, who arrived from Germany by train to lead the Bolshevik revolution, considered railway stations, along with telegraphs, as major targets to be seized. After the revolution, armoured trains were used in the civil war by both sides: Trotsky turned one into his mobile headquarters. It is partly for defensive reasons, one theory goes, that Russian railway tracks have a wider gauge than European ones: whereas Russia could transport its troops to its borders, a train with foreign troops would not be able to roll into Russia. (To this day, a train journey from Russia to Europe involves a change of wheels.)
(a) “Warsaw (then part of the Russian empire)”

history of Warsaw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Warsaw
(section 4  1795-1914: to Kingdom of Prussia in 1795; to Napoleon in 1806, “Following the Congress of Vienna of 1815, Warsaw became the center of the Congress Poland, a constitutional monarchy under a personal union with Imperial Russia [until 1915 when German army entered Warsaw)”)
(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Warsaw
("Growth of railways turned Warsaw into an important railways hub, as lines were opened to Vienna (1848), Saint Petersburg (1862), Bydgoszcz (1862), Terespol (1867), Kovel (1873), Mlava (1877), Kalisz (1902), along with several shorter lines")

(7) “The job of railways chief was one of the most important in the country. Witte was also chairman of the Russian council of ministers under Nicholas II; Trotsky, who held the job [railways chief, starting 1920] after the revolution, was also in charge of the Red Army [which he founded in 1918].   * * * What makes trains weigh so heavily on Russia’s consciousness is the sheer size of the land mass. European railway journeys, with their short distances between stations and the constant sight of human life outside the window, leave little time or space for thought or soul-searching. In Russia, however, train journeys are measured in days and nights rather than hours. It takes six days to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok, a distance of more than 9,000km. All one sees is forest, occasionally interrupted by a clearing or uncultivated fields cloaked, in winter, with snow. You can go for hours, sometimes days, without seeing a settlement or a soul.”