The Soviet Union was heavily dependent on rail transport, not least during the Russian Civil War and World War II, but also for industrialization according to the five-year plans.
During the Soviet era, freight rail traffic increased 55 times (over that of the Russian Empire just before World War I), passenger traffic increased by almost 10 times and the length of the rail network almost doubled in size in this time as well.Громов, p.170 The Soviet Union had a railway network of (excluding industrial railways), of which were electrified.
Pre-war industrialization period, 1928–1942
After the foundation of the Soviet Union the People's Commissariat of Railways (NKPS) (after 1946 renamed the Ministry of Railways (МПС)), the railway network expanded to a total length of 106,100 km by 1940 (vs. 81,000 km in 1917 which was exceeded in length only by the United States).Гормов pp. 15,17 The volume of freight hauled (in tonne-km) increased over fourfold during this period.Аксененко v.2, ch.30, table 30.4 Railways and control of railways had been a major factor in the Russian Civil War and the Red Army's eventual victory in the conflict. A notable project of the late 1920s, which became one of the centrepieces of the first five-year plan, was the Turkestan–Siberia Railway, linking Western Siberia via Eastern Kazakhstan with Uzbekistan.
In the late 1920s, the young Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin embarked on a programme of rapid industrialization. In a 1931 speech, in which Stalin promoted intensive industrialization, he concluded that "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed."J. V. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953) pp. 454-458. Stalin on Rapid Industrialization: Speech to Industrial Managers, February 1931 From "Documents in Russian History" a website whose "about" page is currently blank. But if industrialization generally was to be given first priority, the question arose as to what priority should be given to railway development specifically, keeping in mind that industrialization requires greatly increased rail transportation of goods, e.g. iron ore and coal for steel mills. An example of this was the "Ural-Kuznetsk metallurgical combine" (approved in 1928) where the source of coal was located over 2000 km from the source of iron ore.Westwood 1994, p. 163. Not only that, but the steel output had to be transported long distances to its final point of use.
A British railway historianWestwood 1994, p.158 claims that the Soviet objective was to limit investment in railway improvements so that railways could barely meet the new and heavy demands for increased transport placed on them by industrialization, thereby allowing more capital for such industrialization. While there were significant investments made in railways, they were not enough to avoid the failure at times to transport all the goods, especially in early 1931 and 1933. Some of the resulting supply-line crises resulted in production shut-downs.Westwood 1994, pp. 165-7 However, in other cases "crisis" was used to describe a situation where the stocks of inputs stored at a plant (such as iron ore at a steel mill) almost ran out due to the railway's failure to deliver on time; no substantial harm would be done to production output, but it would be a close call.
Near the start of first five-year plan of industrialization (1928) there were four main railway decision makers: the government, the party, Gosplan (the Soviet central planning agency), and the railway ministry (known as NKPS).Аксененко, v.2, ch. 2.3 3rd para. Westwood 1994, p.159 When the NKPS didn't seem to be able to cope with a situation, the party or government would intervene.Westwood 1994, p. 159–60. The majority agreed on increasing investments, but there was no clear consensus on how these investments were to be used. Gosplan advocated the rationalization of the railways, coupled with tariffs based on actual cost, which would reduce traffic demand and provide funds for investment. In 1931, in a Central Committee (CC) resolution proposed recapitalizationЛехно p.31+ explains the meanings of various names given to track work (replacing all the ties, rails, and renewing the ballast by either cleaning or new ballast) to create some "super mainlines" which would be electrified. This resolution was never adequately carried out, and the actual electrification achieved was only about a tenth of that proposed.
The Central Committee sent Lazar Kaganovich to solve the railway crisis in 1935. Kaganovich first prioritized bottleneck areas over other less-traveled lines; his second priority was investing in heavy traffic lines, and thirdly, other lines (which were also burdened with increased traffic) were left to fend for themselves.Westwood 1994, p. 160–61. Another problem facing rail transport was the massive industrialization efforts pushed on by the authorities. This industrialization placed a heavy burden upon the railways, and Vyacheslav Molotov and Kaganovich even admitted this to the 18th party congress.
Modal shares in 1940; rail dominates At the end of the pre-war periodАксененко, v.2, ch. 30, table 30.6 in 1940, railroads held an 85% share of freight transport (tonne-km) and a 92% share of intercity passenger transport (passenger-km). For non-rail transport it was: Freight (in tonne-km): river 7%, seaShipments between Soviet ports 5%, truck 2%, pipeline under 1%. For passengers: Bus 3.5%, river 3%, seaTravel between Soviet ports 1%, air 0.2%. So rail was by far the dominant mode of transportation for both passengers and freight. In the United States in 1940, rail still dominated freight with a 61% share, but only had a 7.5% share of passenger travel, having lost most of this traffic to the automobile.Transportation in America, pp. 12, 14
Rail traffic in the Soviet Union Rail freight traffic in the Soviet Union
The graph compares the freight traffic (in tonne-km) of the USSR to the US.Data points in the graph come from many sources listed in the pageWikimedia: RailUSAvsUSSR.svg. A single source book "International historical statistics" (various editions), vols. "The Americas" and "Europe" also has this data (see Ch. on "Transport" in each of the 2 vols.) The USSR rebuilt its rail system and industrialized with five-year plans. As a result, railway freight grew about 20 times from 20 to 400 billion tonne-km by 1941.See statistics references by Госкомстат But then disaster struck again, World War II began. In the first year or so of the war, traffic plummeted to about half its prewar value. But then the USSR started restoring and constructing railways during wartime so that by the end of the war about half of the lost traffic had been recovered. After the war was over it took a few more years to restore the railways and get back to the pre-war level of traffic.
Then the USSR embarked on a series of more five-year plans, and railway traffic rapidly increased. By 1954 their rail freight traffic (about 850 billion tonne-km) surpassed that of the United States and the USSR then hauled more rail freight than any other country in the world.UN 1958, pp. 297, 300 Railway freight continued to rapidly increase in the USSR so that by 1960 the USSR was hauling about half of all railway freight in the world (in tonne-km)UN 1985/86 Table: World Railway Traffic, p. 55 and they did this on a rail system consisting of 10% of the world's railway kilometrage.Плакс, p.5 The status of hauling half the world's railway freight continued for almost thirty years, but in 1988 railway freight traffic peaked at 3852 billion tonne-km (nearly 4 trillion). This rapid growth may seem impressive, but it was also in some senses a failure, since railway traffic at times did not grow fast enough to satisfy demand, partly due to congestion.
In 1991 the Soviet Union fell apart and its largest republic, the Russian Federation, which then hauled about 2/3 of the traffic of the former USSR, became an independent country.UN 37th p. 690; UN 43rd p .548; (both for 1998) For the USSR in 1989, shortly before the collapse of Soviet Union, the railway hauled nearly eight times as much tonne-km of freight by rail as they did by lorry.Филиппов 1991 p. 7 (table 1.1) In 1991 a law was passed which declared that railways were the basic transport system of the USSR.Филиппов 1991 p. 4
While highways were more popular in the United States rather than railways, in contrast the Soviet Union had little or no highway system to speak of.
Rail passenger traffic in the Soviet Union
This graph compares the volume of rail passenger transportation in the Soviet Union and the United States (United States).Except for some Soviet data, plot data is from: Brian Mitchell, "International Historical Statistics" Vols. "The Americas", "Europe"; Palgrave Mecmillian, 2007. For the US: table F3 in "The Americas". For the USSR: also table F3 in "Europe" Table F3 is "Passenger traffic on railways". For the USSR 1914–1920 data on pass-km is not available. But such unknowns were estimated from data on the number of passengers carried, by multiplying such values by 135 km, the estimated average distance traveled per passenger. The 135 km estimate (for 1914–1920) was obtain using the average of the actual values for 1913 and 1921. Actually, values slightly different than 135 km were used for each year based on linear interpolation. "Народная хозяйство СССР" gives USSR data for the war years (1941–1944) and it is also an alternative source to Mitchell (above) for other years Since the Soviet Union was created in late 1922, the curve prior to this is the estimated volume of passenger transport in the "pre-Soviet territory" defined as being within the borders of the Soviet Union of the late 1930s (before the annexations per the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact).The "pre-Soviet territory was at first just a large part of the Russian Empire but then Germany invaded some of it during the First World War, next there was the October Revolution followed by the Russian Civil War and the victorious reds created various Soviet Republics which then merged to create the Soviet Union.
In the early years of the 20th century rail dominated passenger transport so the start of this graph implies that there was about twice as much passenger transport in the United States as in the pre-Soviet Russian Empire. But in the early 1920s in the US, the automobile started to provide more passenger transportation than rail.See Bus Facts. 1935. p.9: chart: "Passenger-miles in United States by Various Means of Transport" (1890–1935). The chart is by H. E. Hale & Co., consulting engineers, 32 Nassau St. Bus Facts was published by NAMBO = National Association of Motor Bus Operators.
This chart is likely quite inaccurate for the automobile "curve" which is a series of straight line segments, one of which is several years long. The source for it is the "Automobile chamber of commerce" without stating any publication name, and no data is available re passenger-miles.