In one of the halls of the Museum of Almaty, a quiet corner is dedicated to the railway—not just any railway, but the legendary Turkestan–Siberia Railway, Turk-Sib. Naturally so, for it was largely thanks to this great line that the city transformed into a capital.
What made the Turk-Sib so famous? First, it was one of the crowning mega-projects of the Soviet First Five-Year Plan. Second, it found its way into literature—captured with a distinct blend of awe and wry amusement. But let us take things in order.
The notion of a trunk line connecting the densely populated agricultural expanses of Central Asia with Siberia was originally conceived “under the cursed tsarist regime.” The railway was intended, on the one hand, to reinforce military presence near the Chinese border, and on the other, to facilitate the export of Turkestan cotton alongside the delivery of Siberian grain and industrial goods.
The first segment of the future Turk-Sib—the Altai Railway from Novosibirsk to Semey—was completed in 1915. Concurrently, construction began on the Semirechye Railway, a stretch running from Arys (a junction on the Orenburg–Tashkent line) up to Verny, now Almaty. However, the cataclysms of revolution and civil war delayed its completion until 1921.
The decision to resume large-scale construction on the Turkestan-Siberian mainline was taken in 1926, with actual work commencing toward the end of 1927. Operations proceeded from both ends of the 1,445-kilometre route simultaneously: from Semey in the north and Lugovaya in the south.
The northern and southern construction crews met in 1930 at the station of Ogyz-Korgan (literally, “Oghuz barrow”). To mark the historic joining of the rails, it was renamed Aynabulaq (“mirror spring”). A multitude of journalists flocked to the grand opening. Among them were the brilliant Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, whose sharp dispatches captured the frenetic, surreal energy of Soviet modernization.
The atmosphere of the region in those exact years was memorably captured by the intrepid Swiss travel writer Ella Maillart, who journeyed through the transforming expanses of Kazakhstan. She observed firsthand how the ancient rhythm of the steppe was violently—and often bewilderingly—accelerated by steel tracks, telegraph wires, and the relentless march of industrial planning.
The famous satirists also visited Almaty itself. Owing to the fast-paced nature of their journey, however, the city initially received but a fleeting glance in their writing:
On the morning of the fourth day of the journey, the train turned east. Past mountain chains—the Himalayan spurs—rumbling across artificial structures (small bridges, culverts for spring torrents, and the like), and casting a trembling shadow upon mountain streams, the special train flashed past a small town beneath the poplars and for a long time skirted the flank of a great snow-capped mountain.
Yes, “the small town beneath the poplars” is none other than Almaty. Fortunately, in their travel sketch Caution! Steeped in Centuries!, written in the wake of the line’s opening, the authors devoted several vibrant paragraphs to the city:
Meanwhile, Almaty was precisely the sort of place where missing your train was by no means a tragedy. It is a light, expansive town, the majority of whose inhabitants saw a train for the very first time only last year, when the Turk-Sib reached Almaty. Here, one has no difficulty in finding someone who has read Saltykov-Shchedrin and Fadeyev, a subscriber to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and the magazine Art Life, yet someone who has not yet grown accustomed to the railway landscape—water towers, semaphores, and switchmen’s booths.
Almaty has largely preserved its old-regime appearance as a garrison town of colonels. It is entirely populated by single-storey, single-family cottages with outward-opening wooden shutters, carved cornices, and shady country-style porches.
All of this was erected in a thoroughly Russian style, complete with little roosters, combs, birds, and embroidered towels. One can instantly picture officers strolling about in white tunics, golden epaulets flashing amidst the greenery of public gardens, brass bands playing, and the waltz On the Hills of Manchuria drifting up to the very summits of the Trans-Ili Alatau. One can tell people intended to live here for a long time, comfortably and serenely.
Yet Almaty is not destined to remain a colonel’s town, even in appearance. The Turk-Sib will transform the capital of Kazakhstan.
Building materials are already being hauled along the urban branch line. The city is growing cramped. There is so much work to be done that it is hard to know what to tackle first. Should they lay improved pavement, install water mains and sewage systems, or embark on creating a grand resort in Medeu—an alpine spot just fourteen kilometres from the city, where the landscape lacks only a St. Bernard dog with a bar of Gala-Peter chocolate tied to its collar to look precisely like a world-famous Swiss Alps postcard?
And it is no longer On the Hills of Manchuria drifting toward the peaks of the Alatau, but the droning hum of a Junkers aircraft taking off on its regular passenger run.
How astonished the old colonels would be to see, in Almaty—the former Verny—a Kazakh university rising in place of a dreary grammar school!
(Ilf and Petrov, “Caution! Steeped in Centuries!: Travel Sketches,” ’30 Days’ magazine, no. 6, 1930)
(Note: While observers like Ilf and Petrov captured the intoxicating, forward-looking rush of the era, the immense human cost behind these sweeping Soviet modernization projects remains a sobering reality of the period.)
Yet looking at modern Almaty, one senses that both the old “colonels,” pioneer engineer Zenkov, and sharp-eyed chroniclers like Ilf and Petrov might feel a strange, paradoxical sense of pride. The city has managed the impossible feat of retaining its quaint wooden “roosters and carved cornices” while building the alpine wonderland of Medeu. Trains still run, planes fly, orchards bloom, poplars rustle, and universities brim with fresh ideas.
Not a bad finale for such a story, wouldn’t you agree?
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