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Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Hindustan Times
A sky train, a death rail, a station with no staff: 200 years on, trains have come a long way
The fastest commuter train in the world, in Shanghai, China, has no wheels; it uses magnetic levitation for a smoother, faster ride. The longest route in the world sits within just one country: Russia. It spans nearly 9,300 km. The world's highest railway station, part of the Qinghai-Tibet railway line built by China, sits more than 4,000 metres above sea level. Tucked amid the Himalayas, one of its stations is so remote, it has no staff at all. The air is so thin, passengers cannot alight. (Read on for more on this). Where else do the railways create a little bit of history every day? Take a tour. Largest rail network: USA The railroad was so pivotal in the US that towns lived and died by its proximity (until the roads took over, hurling themselves across the vast expanses with greater ease, and taking over where the trains had once ruled). Between the 1830s and 1850s, the reach of these tracks expanded so rapidly, it birthed a generation of rail barons — people who had invested in these ventures, and were now raking it in. It also birthed the Panic of 1873, as overextended banks and companies now facing a dip, took a tumble together. The tracks laid down still serve the country, though. The US has the largest rail network in the world: over 250,000 km of track. Today, this vast network is used overwhelmingly for freight, in a country where cars, private transportation and cheap oil take precedence. The longest line: The Trans-Siberian link, Russia This is a single line that essentially spans a continent. It reaches from Moscow in western Russia all the way to Vladivostok in the far east. It was built as a power move, by the Russian tsar Alexander III and his son and successor Nicholas II. But really, it was built, between 1891 and 1916, by generations of prisoners. To keep costs down, convicts were put to work on the project. Parts of it came to be nicknamed the Death Road because of its high toll. The model would be so successful that it would live on as Russia turned communist and Joseph Stalin took over. Dissenters, resistant landowners and political prisoners were sent to camps scattered across this vast land, to work on roads, canals, railroads and in mines. The horrors of this punishment, with many labourers never heard from again, inspired Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's remarkable non-fiction work, The Gulag Archipelago, released in 1973, two decades after Stalin's death. The Trans-Siberian Railway remains the longest single rail link in the world, spanning nearly 9,300 km. The journey from Moscow to Vladivostok takes up to eight days (depending on the route and rake), and passes through eight time zones. The world's busiest station: Shinjuku, Japan Serving over 3.5 million passengers a day, the Shinjuku station sits in Tokyo's busy business and entertainment district, linking the densely populated city and its suburbs, and connecting commuters with major hubs of bus transit and the airport. In an indication of its scale, the station has more than 200 exits. World's highest railway station: Tanggula, Tibet This unstaffed station is also the highest in the world, sitting 5,068 metres above sea level. Built by China as part of the Qinghai-Tibet line, the 'sky train', as it has been nicknamed, halts here for a few minutes, so that passengers can take in the breathtaking views. They cannot alight; the air is too thin. The train itself has an internal air-pressure system, and supplemental oxygen piped through it. Busiest railway system: India (With input from Vandana Dubey)
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘We Have Ceased to See the Purpose' Review: Solzhenitsyn Against Liberty
Like many who lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, I have a personal relationship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom I never met. It is one of boundless admiration. As a college student in Moscow, I was dazzled by samizdat versions of his works: 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,' a rough-edged gem of a novella that brilliantly introduced Gulag vernacular to Russian literature; 'The Gulag Archipelago,' an account of the Soviet Union's system of labor camps that is at once beautiful and horrifying; 'The Oak and the Calf,' an often very funny memoir of Solzhenitsyn's duel with the regime, withering in its disdain of the Kremlin's masters; and, of course, 'In the First Circle'—Tolstoyan in its in sweep, it is among the greatest Russian novels. Remembering these treasures, I approached Solzhenitsyn's post-Soviet orations with apprehension. And indeed, like his literary peers Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn turned out to be less persuasive as a prophet than as an artist. Most of the pieces included in 'We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,' a collection of the great man's speeches edited by his son Ignat, were delivered while Solzhenitsyn lived in America—after his exile from the U.S.S.R. in 1974 and before his return to his homeland in 1994. His critique of modernity closely echoes those whom the great historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin called 'Counter-Enlightenment' thinkers: the Prussian theologian and Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfired Herder, for example, or the counterrevolutionary Christian writer François-René de Chateaubriand. In the speeches collected in this volume, Solzhenitsyn similarly bemoaned what he calls the 'ruinous tilt of the Late Enlightenment' and excoriated the godless 'humanistic individualism,' liberalism and rationalism of the philosophes and their ilk for elevating Man—with a capital M—as 'the measure of all things' and the 'crowning glory of the universe.' He blamed 'the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment' and 'the tide of secularism' they precipitated for making human happiness the central purpose of existence and, critically, for the loss of 'accountability' to God and society.
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – ‘It was like fresh air'
In, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British journalist who'd heard that I was about to go to Moscow. 'A Russian friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. I don't suppose you'd smuggle it in for him?' I did, of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in Transition. A customs official at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport flicked through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn't spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a small 18th-century icon in exchange for it. It's only now, all these years later, that I've realised I was almost certainly a rather naive mule for a CIA scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. According to Charlie English's vibrant, beautifully researched and exciting The CIA Book Club, the Polish intellectual and political activist Adam Michnik read The Gulag Archipelago in prison; someone had managed to get a copy to him even there, courtesy of a CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL. Solzhenitsyn was far from being the only author whose works the CIA smuggled. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were probably the most popular among the dissidents the books were intended for, but a wide range of other authors including Adam Mickiewicz, Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam and even Agatha Christie also featured on the QRHELPFUL book list. The inspiration behind the scheme was a charming-sounding CIA boss called George Minden, who believed, quite rightly, that the freedom to read good literature was as important to the imprisoned minds of the Soviet empire as any other form of freedom. During most of the 1980s the CIA was run by a rather tiresome, boisterous adventurer called Bill Casey, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. This was one of Casey's more sensible efforts, and it was under him that Minden was able to pump books, photocopiers and even printing presses into the Soviet empire. They helped to keep people there in touch with precisely the kind of western culture the high priests of Marxism-Leninism wanted to block out. This was especially true in Poland, which is English's main focus. Poles never forgot that their country was essentially part of western Europe, and the flow of French, British and American literature in particular was an important part of keeping that awareness going. Michnik, the dissident who read Solzhenitsyn in prison, speaks for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people behind the iron curtain when he tells English: 'A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.' The rise of the Solidarity trade union, starting in the Gdansk shipyards in 1980, proved to be the beginning of the end for Moscow's empire in Europe. The efforts by the prime minister, General Jaruzelski, to clamp down on the demand for greater freedom only succeeded for a short while. The Soviet Union was being bled white by its war in Afghanistan, its ankylosed political structure was showing its weaknesses, a series of ancient zombies came to power and died out, and a new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was given the impossible job of trying to bring new life into a system that was essentially finished. But his good intentions and genuine decency were simply not enough. Soon the people of East Germany were following the lead of the Poles in their demand for better, freer lives, and on the night of 9 November 1989 a badly thought through decision by the East German politburo allowed tens of thousands of people to flood through the crossing points in the Berlin Wall. The Soviet empire in Europe was dead. It wasn't killed by smuggled copies of The Gulag Archipelago and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but they unquestionably did their bit to help the process along. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion As you might expect from English's previous The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, The CIA Book Club is a real pleasure to read – a finely written page-turner full of well-researched stories of smuggling, intrigue and survival. It would make an exceptionally good series for television, and it provides a powerful reminder of the extraordinary events of Poland's struggle for freedom. Suitably for such a literate nation, books played their part in it, and Minden got the result he wanted. It's always a bad idea for journalists to get too involved with spies: it eats away at their independence. If I had realised I was acting as an agent for Minden's scheme, I would probably have refused to smuggle my Solzhenitsyn into late-70s Russia. But after reading Charlie English I'm glad I did it. There's nothing more important than freedom of mind, and that's what QRHELPFUL provided. John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor. His programme Unspun World is broadcast at 11.05pm on Wednesdays on BBC Two. The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy Delivery charges may apply.
