Russian history is full of mysterious facts that have become known to society relatively recently. These include one of Stan's meaningless ideas - the Dead Road. It was laid along the route Salekhard - Igarka. The great adventurer ruler planned to lay a railway track in the Arctic Circle. And today, these buildings are a bewitching sight.
The Dead Road was a secret project of the Gulag, and it became known about it only under Khrushchev. Its builders were mostly prisoners. It was planned that the length of this facility will be 1263 kilometers. The utopianity of the entire project was primarily in the fact that the area where the Dead Road was laid was permafrost. To build a path, it would be necessary to cross a large number of streams, rivers. To solve this problem, bridges were built, ice was strengthened (even it was specially built up), swamps were poured so that building materials could be delivered.
To build a railway in the North is the dream of many engineers of that time. And only after Stalin began active repression against the Soviet people, they began to use forced labor to achieve this goal. The decision to build was 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 for its construction more than 290 thousand prisoners of the Gulag. The best specialists in the field of engineering worked at its construction site. Many people died on 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 stocks from abandoned warehouses. The Railway Museum is unlikely to be able to convey the horror of this abuse of power. Our compatriots suffered and died in order to satisfy the vanity of the "mighty of this world."
Labor was brought to the destination by the "big water" and after the project failed, it was considered too expensive to export them from there. Today, the Dead Road "tells" those who visit it about the hardships and suffering of that time. After all, equipment and paved paths have been preserved there until now.
The construction costs of the northern railway amounted to almost 6.5 billion rubles. Already then reports were drawn up that there was no demand for the services of this transport route. Nevertheless, the construction continued, obeying the order of the leader. Nowadays, after oil deposits were discovered in the North, the construction of the railway through Surgut was resumed, but using new technologies. At the same time, the previously built Dead Road was completely unclaimed.
Its construction was discontinued after the death of Stalin in 1953, and by that time 900 kilometers of track had already been built thanks to the prisoners. By this time, more than 300 thousand people died here. All state property was abandoned in the tundra. The history of the Russian railways contains many secrets, mistakes and accidents that have claimed the lives of people, but such activities to build unnecessary objects are more like exterminating the nation.