The dead road and the "Stalinist" utopia.

Russian history is full of mysterious facts, which became known to society relatively recently. One of Stanin's senseless ideas is the Dead Road. It was laid along the route Salekhard-Igarka. The great adventurer-king planned to build a railway along the Arctic Circle. And today these buildings are a fascinating sight.

The dead road was a secret project of the Gulag, and it became known only under Khrushchev. Its builders were mostly prisoners. It was planned that the length of this facility would be 1263 kilometers. The utopian nature of the whole project was, first of all, that the terrain 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, they built bridges, strengthened the ice (even specially built it), flooded the marshes so that it was possible to deliver construction materials.

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, forced labor was used 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 build a railway there.

The dead road required more than 290,000 Gulag prisoners for their construction. At the site of its construction, the best specialists in the field of engineering worked. Many people died on the ruins of this idea. Prisoners lived in barracks surrounded by barbed wire, although this was absolutely unnecessary, since it was simply impossible to escape from the camp. They fed on waste and supplies from abandoned warehouses. It is unlikely that the Railway Museum will be able to convey the horror of this abuse of power. Our compatriots suffered and died in order to satisfy the vanity of "the powerful of this world."

The labor force was brought to the destination by "large water" and after the project failed, it was considered too expensive to take them out. Today, the Dead Road "tells" those who visit it about the hardships and sufferings of that time. After all, the equipment and paved roads have been preserved there until now.

The cost of building the northern railway amounted to almost 6.5 billion rubles. Even then, reports were compiled that there was no demand for the services of this transport route. But nevertheless the construction continued, obeying the order of the leader. In our time, after the oil deposits were discovered in the North, they resumed the construction of the railway through Surgut, but by new technologies. At the same time, the previously constructed Dead Road was absolutely unclaimed.

Its construction was discontinued after Stalin's death in 1953, and by that time 900 kilometers of road had 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 took the lives of people with them, but such activities for the construction of anyone unnecessary objects more like the extermination of the nation.