Where does the Dead Road lead?
One of the most pointless projects in the history of the USSR, abandoned a few days after Stalin's death.
Author: Sergey Tashevsky
Imagine a map of Russia and draw a line from Salekhard on the Yamal Peninsula to Igarka on the Yenisei River—almost due west to east, along the Arctic Circle, through tundra, swamps, rivers, and permafrost. It's about 1200 kilometers. In the summer, there's swamp and midges; in the winter, temperatures drop to -40 degrees. There are almost no settlements. There's no industry. There are no roads. Why exactly this was the location of the largest railway line of the late Stalin era is a question that remains unanswered.
Yes, of course, the idea of a "Great Northern Railway" has been raised and discussed in Russia countless times. After the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, it seemed tempting to cut several more railway lines across northern Russia, covering the country with a kind of web of railways. Logistic parallels and meridians, like on a map. Even before the revolution, projects arose for the Polar-Ural Railway, the East Ural-White Sea Railway, the Obdorsk Railway, and so on. And already in the USSR, since 1928, a global project for a future railway running through the north of the USSR and, as it were, connecting three oceans—the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific—was seriously being developed. But each time, after calculating the costs and economic feasibility (Who actually needs these roads in almost unpopulated areas?), the projects were shelved. However, governments changed, wars erupted, and the idea persisted. Finally, the aging, nearly senile Generalissimo, with only a few years left to live, suddenly gave it the green light.
Officially, the construction was justified by two considerations: economic—developing the northern territories, rich in minerals (uranium! aluminum! This had previously been neglected)—and strategic—protecting the Arctic. According to one theory, the ultimate goal was the Norilsk Combine: the road would provide it with reliable access to the sea, regardless of seasonal navigation on the Yenisei River. According to another, the plan was to build a military base and a large seaport in Igarka, which would transform the city into a "gateway" to the Soviet Arctic, protected by a system of fortifications along the Northern Sea Route (all Russian authorities constantly dream of "Arctic outposts," and the current one is no exception).
But there's also a more concise explanation, based on the words of Pyotr Tatarintsev, head of the Northern Expedition. At one of the meetings, Stalin heard a summary of the survey data and delivered his verdict: "We will build the road." He added something significant: there would be no labor shortage—there were enough prisoners in the Gulag. That was the entire economic calculation.
And so the work began. In April 1947, "Construction Project 501" began—the construction of a highway from Chum station to the future seaport in the Gulf of Ob. Even as construction progressed, it became clear that the planned Kamenny Cape was completely unsuitable for handling ocean-going vessels. The entire western section had to be redesigned, and personnel and equipment were redeployed. Some parts of the "canceled" section were left behind, meaning the road began to be "abandoned" literally from the very first days of construction. But its ill-fated history was only the beginning.
By the Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated January 29, 1949 A new route was established: Chum-Obskaya-Salekhard-Ermakovo-Igarka, 1263 kilometers long. Construction was divided between two Ministry of Internal Affairs departments: "Construction Site No. 501" (Obskoye, the western section of the route from Labytnangi to the Pur River) and "Construction Site No. 503" (Yeniseyskoye, from Pur to Igarka). This meant that, as was customary in Soviet times, the builders were to travel toward each other—from Yamal and from Igarka. They would meet and solemnly report on this meeting. Stalin loved that kind of thing.
And, so as not to keep the leader waiting, construction began immediately, without waiting for any plans or geological surveys. The pace of work was determined not by engineers, but by the GULAG and its guards. The prisoners had been brought in, the barbed wire had been strung up—so it was time to get to work! According to the camp authorities, it was impossible to leave the prisoners without hard labor for even a single day. So it's no surprise that by the beginning of 1950, when the technical documentation for the route's characteristics was finally compiled, construction had already been underway for a year. It was all done by eye, as the guards saw fit. And the rails were laid wherever they could.
Archival documents list "loams, sandy loams, or peat, heavily waterlogged or frozen and ice-saturated," "frost heaves, thermokarst depressions, marshy areas where peat bogs do not freeze even after a month of sustained forty-degree frosts." But all of this was determined after the fact.
Historian Vadim Gritsenko, An expert at the Arctic Research Center writes: by the time construction began, not only was the design documentation unfinished, but even the surveys hadn't been completed. The road was built literally blind, by feel, at a rate of up to fifteen kilometers per month.
And it was built literally on bones.
By February 1, 1949, there were nearly 49 prisoners at Construction Site 501. By the end of that year, approximately 35 had been transferred to Igarka, to Site 503. Albina Galeeva, director of the Igarka Permafrost Museum, cites figures: between 40 and 100 people were held at each site at any one time. Camp sites were located every five to ten kilometers, each holding between 500 and 1500 prisoners.
Among the builders of the "Dead Road" were people of diverse backgrounds and nationalities. A 22-year-old merchant navigator, Alexei Salangin, received 13 years for food shortages on a steamship where he served as second mate. Reinhold Reich, an ethnic German from the Volga region, arrived here as a deportee, sent "to the disposal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs." He only learned what exactly he was building in 2011, when he returned to Igarka from Germany and visited the local museum. Back then, they were simply laying rails—from an unknown source and to an unknown destination.
The secrecy regime was truly taken to the extreme. On June 20, 1949, an order was issued to wash chalk markings off train cars to avoid leaving traces of the cargo's ownership. A separate order replaced the entire postal address of the camp administration with the phrase "Medvezhy Log Post Office." Radio communications were prohibited from mentioning facilities, talking about prisoners, reporting accidents, and—in a separate clause—transmitting weather forecasts more than three days in advance (probably to prevent potential escapes into the taiga). The list of information classified as state secrets numbered over 100 items. The country was building a road of which it was officially unaware.
Living quarters at "Construction Site 503" initially consisted of twenty-meter-long canvas tents with two-tiered bunks lined with moss on the outside, and one stove for every two hundred people. According to Alexei Salangin, the standard space was forty centimeters per person, and in the mornings, hair froze to the walls. This is how the first winter passed, and not all prisoners survived.
Later, dugout barracks appeared—sunken into the permafrost to a depth of one and a half meters, divided into two sections with sixty beds. Uniforms were issued from decommissioned military equipment: padded jackets and padded trousers wore out within two months, and waterproof footwear for swamps and floods was completely lacking. The result was predictable: widespread frostbite (dozens of cases during a single transfer of people from one section to another), malnutrition, and scurvy.
The construction technology was suited to the circumstances. Armfuls of brushwood and willow were thrown and compacted under the embankment—it was believed the "cushion" would hold the road in place on the permafrost. It didn't. Within a year, the constructed sections had subsided, sunk into the water, and new swamps had appeared in place of the roadbed. The prisoners, however, devised their own ways to meet the quota: they dumped branches and tree trunks into the embankment and covered it with earth—on the surface, the excavation was complete, but another crew would correct the subsidence. They drove the road forward without looking back.
The incentive system was sophisticated. Historian Vadim Gritsenko describes a prisoner's "record book"—a document where data on quota fulfillment and overfulfillment was recorded: for a certain result, one day's work could be counted as two or three, reducing the prisoner's sentence. The museum preserves such a book—that of prisoner Kondratyev. It's a simple cardboard cover with penciled numbers, each representing backbreaking labor in forty-degree frost.
Alexey Salangin described The life of "Construction Site 503" is described with the dispassionate eyewitness: "The camp had its own Honor Roll—no photographs, just the numbers and names of distinguished prisoners. But there were no cemeteries. The dead were dumped in swamps and ravines. Those who died or were shot in the columns were left untouched and undisturbed. Wild animals, which accompanied the prisoners to and from work every day, especially in winter, tended to the corpses. Those executed were listed on the departure lists as having died of exhaustion or heart attacks."
The watchtowers were manned by "self-defense guards"—recruited from the criminal underworld who had agreed to protect their own. According to Salangin, no normal person would join the self-defense force. There were stories, for example, of them killing people simply for fun; one prisoner was shot for reaching for a ladle of water and accidentally tripping on the "forbidden" area. He had two months left on his sentence.
Precise figures on the number of dead and executed, of course, have not survived—but historians estimate at least three thousand victims. That's three dead for every kilometer of highway built.
Yes, it was almost completed, albeit hastily, disregarding all norms and regulations. By early 1953, 911 kilometers of track had been laid. In August 1952, service opened from Salekhard to Nadym, and in the fall, the section from Igarka to Yermakovo. It seemed the line was coming to life: 56 locomotives, 262 cars, and service on schedule.
But on March 5, 1953, Stalin died. And already March 25 — that is, just twenty days later — a closed decree was issued to mothball the construction. May 26 An order was issued to completely shut down the construction site. Everything had to be shut down by September 1st.
The calculations of the country's new masters were simple: completing the line would cost more than closing it. 700-800 million rubles versus 600-700 million rubles—not in favor of construction. Most importantly, they knew what they were afraid to report to Stalin: essentially, everything had been built "from scratch." Maintaining the completed track in working order was impossible: the highway, built without a plan, on permafrost, was crumbling even before completion. In some sections, the rails were already suspended in mid-air. In others, they had sunk so much that a locomotive would have to pass underwater. There was nothing to complete, and no reason to.
And so the construction site began to be demolished. But this demolition dragged on for decades and was ultimately never completed. Only the most valuable assets were removed, primarily the metal.
The rails from the eastern section of the route—from the Bludnaya River to Ermakovo—were removed in 1964 for the needs of the Norilsk Combine. A kilometer of the polar route contained approximately 70 tons of steel; in total, approximately 150 kilometers of rails from this section, or about 85 percent of the total metal, were removed for remelting. Only seven locomotives remained, weighing 53 tons each, from the pre-revolutionary "Ov" series. They were simply abandoned in the taiga, as removal was too expensive.
The western section, from Salekhard toward Pur, was not dismantled at all—partly because even decades later, there was still hope that construction would resume. The oil boom began in the 60s, and the road could have been useful. But no, it wasn't.
Formally, the dismantling dragged on until the late 1960s. In 1959, former Norillag prisoner Yevgeny Zhigalin was appointed head of the track dismantling expedition, a position he held for six years. His son, Pavel, who had sailed to join his father on vacation in 1962, later wrote to the Permafrost Museum: "I wandered through the empty village of Yermakovo and couldn't understand where the residents had gone. The irony: some prisoners built the road, and six years later, others, now former prisoners, dismantled it."
But not only did the "Dead Road" become a symbol of pointless labor and senseless sacrifice, it also proved to be one of Stalin's most costly projects. More than 42 billion rubles (at the time) were spent on the construction, maintenance, and logistics of the camps. Of this, approximately 78 million were spent on the closure of the construction site by the end of 1953. The value of the property stored in warehouses in the taiga also exceeded a billion rubles—and most of it was never removed.
In fact, eliminating the "dead road" became an operation worthy of special mention. The bases were remote, navigation limited. Meanwhile, the main recipients of the equipment—the Norilsk Combine and Yamal trading organizations—one after another refused to accept the cargo: the equipment was inoperable, and the food had spoiled due to delays. In the summer of 1953, large food supplies simply rotted. And anyway, no one needed it anymore.
Therefore, everything that couldn't be removed and transferred to other agencies was destroyed. Albina Galeeva, director of the Igarka Permafrost Museum, recounted how prisoners were forced to chop up felt boots, sheepskin coats, good clothing, and equipment with axes—in full view of local residents, who could have easily given it all away. But this was fundamentally at odds with the rules of the socialist economy. Quite insane rules, by the way.
The warehouses in Yermakovo, for example, contained, among other things: 11 tons of face powder and baby powder, over 13,000 bras, 5,000 pairs of stockings, 5 tons of medical cotton wool, and countless aprons and pantaloons. These were items that were in constant short supply even in Moscow and Leningrad! How did they end up in the Arctic Circle, in the camp settlements where women and children were rare visitors?
That's how.
All of this was likely sent to the Arctic camp construction site under a standard quota, or some other rule of the planned economy. Today, this seems outlandish to any sane person, but in Soviet times, the migration of consumer goods across the country was as chaotic as the migration of Colorado potato beetles across potato fields. And this surprised no one. On the contrary, unexpectedly finding something as rare as a pair of women's panties in a village shop was considered commonplace. The author of this article himself vividly remembers how, once, during an expedition to Dagestan, in the Terek delta, among the poor Cossack villages, he and a group of other students discovered in the village bookstores magnificent editions of Khlebnikov, Khodasevich, Pliny the Elder, and even a three-volume work by Zabolotsky, the existence of which was unknown to many bibliophiles in Moscow. For some reason, these books, "according to party orders," were sent to the Soviet republics, "in the hinterlands," instead of to the capitals, where there was no one to read them. It's likely that the same logic led to the bras being sent to the "dead road," where there was no one to wear them. And, of course, all these "exclamations of Soviet fashion" discovered in the village of Ermakovo were mercilessly burned—nothing was to remain of the secret construction site.
But some things, of course, remain. Embankments, barracks, ruined bridges, abandoned locomotives. What remains is a monument to Soviet madness, one of many "Gulag preserves." Yes, there are many such abandoned places in Siberia—but here we are talking about a monument of colossal proportions, almost a thousand kilometers long. It is a kind of portal to the past, through which one can travel for many days. The founders of the Tomsk Memorial Museum, who have assembled an extensive collection of expedition materials, have perhaps found the perfect comparison: the Salekhard-Igarka highway today resembles the Zone from Tarkovsky's film "Stalker." Permafrost has warped the rails, uplifted bridges, washed away embankments, destroyed barracks, and overturned locomotives. Space exists according to its own laws, in which time moves differently than outside it—faster where metal is, slower where wood is.
In many areas, the embankments have sunk or eroded so much that they can only be recognized as roads by the nature of the vegetation: grass and shrubs grow differently along the former roadbed than on the sides. Where the rails haven't been removed, they jut out of the ground at the most unlikely angles—twisted by frost heaving, bent, crisscrossed. Wooden structures—barrack walls, watchtowers, bridges—are better preserved than expected: the northern air is dry, rotting occurs slowly. Here and there, barracks still stand, complete with bunks, rusty buckets on the floor, and scraps of clothing frozen to the walls from time immemorial. It's as if the people who left were yesterday, not seventy years ago.
Some sections of the route still retain barbed wire, warning signs, and even color safety posters commissioned by GULZhDS—the Main Directorate of Camp Railway Construction. The posters, half-worn and faded, look like messages from the other world.
It's therefore not surprising that the "Dead Road" began attracting travelers back in Soviet times—when it was not only difficult but also unsafe due to government reaction. In 1985, "Tourist" magazine published material about an expedition by explorers from the Moscow Model Railway Club along the route, causing quite a stir. Four years later, in 1989, a group of Moscow cyclists led by Valery Medovoy cycled along the "Dead Road" (well, they walked, not rode—they mostly had to drag their bikes). They traveled nearly a thousand kilometers across tundra, swamps, and former embankments. In their memoirs, they recounted how, in the middle of a tractor track, they suddenly encountered an old steam locomotive from the "Ov" series—standing directly on the ground, without its rails, which had long since been removed. "This veteran seemed very strange, somehow otherworldly to us," wrote one eyewitness to "Stalin's great construction project."
Another one, who visited the abandoned route in modern times, describes the my impressions are as follows:
A locomotive with a tall chimney emerged from behind the hill, followed by another, a third, a fourth. "What's this?" I blurted out. "Dolgoe," the conductor replied. "What's Dolgoe?" "A dead city, actually."
The depot building itself had already collapsed by that point. Four locomotives stood in the open air, on two tracks, along with a train of cars. The tundra was slowly but surely taking its toll…
In total, seven or ten steam locomotives remained rusting on the abandoned railway, the very same pre-revolutionary "OV" series—"Sheep," as their builders called them. Small, maneuverable, suitable for narrow-gauge railways. And with a very distinctive appearance, which has now made this locomotive a coveted prize for many museums. So it's no surprise that a couple of "Sheep" locomotives were taken apart by helicopter ten years ago. evacuated from the taiga and handed over to restorers. At first, they were being prepared for a railway equipment exhibition, but then the situation in the country changed. So did the order.
Now one of the locomotives is mounted as if at the head of a "military train" in the Verkhnyaya Pyshma Museum (near Yekaterinburg), and the other, they say, is planned to be armored and also donated to the military museum, as the locomotive of an armored train. But the restoration is proceeding at a sluggish pace, because no matter how hard you try, you can't weld armor onto this rust from the dead Soviet past.
