Russian history is full of mysterious facts that have become known to society relatively recently. These include one of Stanin's senseless ideas - the Dead Road. It was laid along the Salekhard - Igarka route. The great adventurous ruler decided to build a railway line along the Arctic Circle. And today these buildings are a bewitching sight.
The Dead Road was a secret Gulag project and only became known about it under Khrushchev. Its builders were mostly prisoners. It was planned that the length of this object will be 1263 kilometers. The utopian nature of the whole project was, first of all, in the fact that the area where the Dead Road was laid is permafrost. To build a path, it would be necessary to cross a large number of streams and rivers. To solve this problem, bridges were built, ice was strengthened (even specially increased it), swamps were flooded so that building materials could be delivered.
To build a railway in the North was the dream of many engineers of that time. And only after Stalin began active repressions against the Soviet people, forced labor began to be used to achieve this goal. Building decisionwas so fantastic that its failure was obvious. But the government planned to build a seaport in Igarka and, therefore, it was necessary to lay a railway there.
The Dead Road required more than 290,000 Gulag prisoners for its construction. The best specialists in the field of engineering worked at the site of its construction. Many people died in the ruins of this idea. The prisoners lived in barracks surrounded by barbed wire, although this was absolutely unnecessary, since it was simply impossible to escape from the camp. They ate waste and supplies from abandoned warehouses. It is unlikely that the Railway Museum will be able to convey the full horror of this abuse of power. Our compatriots suffered and died in order to satisfy the vanity of the “powerful ones.”
The labor force was brought to the destination by the "big water" and after the project failed, it was considered too expensive to take them out from there. Today, the Dead Road "tells" those who visit it about the hardships and sufferings of that time. After all, the equipment and the laid paths are still preserved there.
Costs for the construction of the northern railway amounted to almost 6.5 billion rubles. Even then, reports were made that there was no demand for the services of this transport route. Nevertheless, construction continued, obeying the order of the leader. In our time, after oil deposits were discovered in the North, the construction of a railway throughSurgut, but with new technologies. At the same time, the previously built Dead Road turned out to be absolutely unclaimed.
Its construction was stopped after Stalin's death in 1953, and by that time, thanks to the prisoners, 900 kilometers of track had already been built. By this time, more than 300 thousand people had died here. All state property was thrown into the tundra. The history of Russian railways contains many secrets, mistakes and accidents that claimed the lives of people, but such activity in the construction of unnecessary facilities is more like the extermination of a nation.
