Transport in the Soviet Union

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Transport in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was an important part of the

automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than the construction of new roads. By the mid-1970s, only 0.8 percent of the Soviet population
owned a car.

Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making by the central authorities. The demand for transport infrastructure and services was rising, but the Soviet authorities proved to be unable to meet the growing demand of the people. The underdeveloped Soviet

merchant fleet
was one of the largest in the world.

Civil aviation

The Ministry of Civil Aviation was, according to the Air Code of the USSR, responsible for all air transport enterprises and airlines established by it.[1] Soviet civil air transport was the largest by total destinations and vehicles during most of its post-war existence.[2] In the USSR, Aeroflot had a monopoly on all air transport. This ranged from civil and cargo transport to transporting political prisoners to the gulags, and more.[3]

The Soviet Union covered over one sixth of the entire earth's landmass, and in the early 1920s its government decided to invest in the aviation industry. They concluded that expanding it in the Soviet Union would not only make travel more efficient and faster, it would also help develop the sprawling, mostly agricultural nation that it was. At this time, most travel required taking trains (or, as was often the case, by off-road travel in cars, buses, or trucks).[4] Many of the northern and eastern territories in the Soviet Union were completely inaccessible during much of the year; most of these vast expanses of land lacked roads and railroads because of the huge distances between them and the nearest population centers. The extreme climate conditions also made travel and construction nearly impossible.[5] The absence of "surface transportation facilities" also meant that very little equipment was available to use for road construction—making the process even more daunting.[5] Consequently, the Soviet government concluded that building a series of airports scattered throughout the more isolated parts of the country would be far more economically efficient than to build thousands of miles of road and railways.[5] The Soviet Government decided, therefore, that air travel would be the best means of transportation for people and cargo. First, a fleet was necessary; between 1928 and 1932, the number of aircraft manufacturing facilities grew from twelve to thirty-one, while the nation's annual output of airplanes increased from a mere 608 to 2,509.[6] After combining a number of existing fleets, the Soviet government founded the national airline and air service of the Soviet Union, renaming the "USSR Civil Air Fleet" Aeroflot.[7]

Aeroflot, at its formation in March 1932, had three main purposes. They were: to operate and maintain an air transportation system, to provide different types of services (such as aerial surveying, forest-fire fighting, and agricultural spraying) and to promote educational, recreational, athletic and other such activities for the public.[8] Aeroflot, which literally translates to or air fleet, originally consisted of an amalgam of existing air transportation fleets in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.[8] By creating Aeroflot, the Soviet government was, much like many industries in the young Soviet Union at the time, expanding and centralizing fleets like the "Red Air Fleet."[8] To the general public, the aviation industry did not represent modernization; rather, it represented the means to achieve modernization and future glory.[9]

During

roubles
—maybe half of a workers' monthly salary) and service was poor.

Aeroflot, as the single state owned and governed airline, operated without any competitors and expanded according to the Soviet central government and central planning.

airlines then use these larger airports—or "hubs"—to connect passengers to their flight and onto their destination.[19]
Because the Soviet Union essentially revolved around Moscow, this networking technique proved effective.

An Aeroflot Il-86 with Soviet livery.

By the early 1980s, Aeroflot had experienced massive growth in the aviation market. They carried 116.1 million passengers and millions of pounds of cargo.[20] Still, because of travel restrictions, only 3.4 million passengers were international travelers. The airline remained an almost entirely domestic carrier, getting freight and people to far off remote cities, many of which had been built by Stalin-era Gulag prisoners.[20] Aeroflot also remained in charge of other non-delivery or transportation services such as: "ice patrol in the Arctic Ocean and escorting of ships through frozen seas, oil exploration, power line surveillance, and transportation and heavy lifting support on construction projects."[20] Further, because nearly every single non-military airplane permitted to fly in the Soviet Union was registered as an Aeroflot airframe, Aeroflot suffered from the worst safety reputation in the worldwide industry, recording between four hundred and five hundred incidents since its creation in 1932.[citation needed] Many blamed Ilyushin and their engineers for the airplanes' poorer reliability when compared to its Western counterparts[according to whom?][citation needed]—namely Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.

By the mid-to-late 1980s, Aeroflot's domestic flights were noted consistently as "harrowing" experiences for both Western and Soviet passengers. At the airport, passengers complained of long waits, poor and indifferent service at ticket offices, poorly designed and set up waiting areas at airport terminals, along with inadequate food and toilet facilities. On board, passengers complained of being forced to sit in "hot airplane cabins without air conditioning" and "indifferent" cabin crews.[20]

Air traffic in Russia, 1970-2015

By the time

Tu-214 airplanes, the rest of their fleet consists of only the Boeing (747, 777, 767)—modernizing and Westernizing Russian aviation.[25] S7, though originally operating more Soviet-built airplanes, currently fly only Airbus and Boeing types.[26] Aeroflot, too, followed suit. Beginning in 1994, Aeroflot began taking deliveries of Western Airplanes. Aeroflot uses its Airbus and Boeing fleet primarily on Western routes to encourage Western passenger travel. In 2006, Aeroflot joined the global airline alliance SkyTeam,[27] and in 2010, S7 joined a different global alliance, OneWorld.[28] The Soviet aviation industry has unequivocally shifted to adapt more modern and Western philosophies of air travel, although it was the inventive Soviet style of air transportation that helped build Russia, its industries, and its widespread global influence into what it is today.[citation needed
]

Airports

Dnepropetrovsk
, Ukraine, 1974.

The Soviet Union had 7,192

computerised.[30]

Pipeline network

Main article: Energy policy of the Soviet Union
Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhgorod pipeline

The Soviet Union had, at its height, a

oil fields were increasing up to an all-time high in 1990 and reached a 15 percent failure rate that year alone.[33]

Among the better known pipelines were the

Don, and Dnepr. It had 41 compressor stations and a yearly capacity of 32 billion cubic meters of natural gas.[34]

Rail network

Main article: Rail transport in the Soviet Union
A Soviet envelope celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first railways

The Soviet Union had a non-industrial

resolution, it was decided that increased investments coupled with the introduction of newer trains could solve the crisis. This resolution was never carried out, and yet again, the system continued to deteriorate.[36]

The Central Committee ordered

reality in 1941.[38]

Paveletsky Rail Terminal

Soviet rail transport became, after the

timber. Oil and oil products were one of the key reasons for building railway infrastructure in Siberia in the first place.[39]

The efficiency of the railways improved over time, and by the 1980s it had many performance indicators superior to that of the

autarkic model created by Joseph Stalin's regime. Stalin's regime had little interest in rail transport, or any other form for transport, and instead focused most of the country's investments in rapid industrialisation. Stalin's regime was not interested in establishing new railway lines, but decided to conserve, and later expand, much of the existing railways left behind by the Tsars.[41] However, as Lev Voronin, a First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union, noted in a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in 1989; the railway sector was the "main negative sector of the economy in 1989". As industrial output declined in the late-1980s so did the demand for transportation, which led to a decline in freight transport in return.[42]

Rapid transit

Avtovo station, decorated metro stations were common in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet

petrol. Because rapid transit systems usually were cheaper to operate and less energy consuming, the Soviet authorities managed to install 20 rapid transit systems in their union,[43] and had an additional nine under construction when it collapsed.[44] Twenty other stations were under construction in 1985.[45] The country's rapid transit system was the most extensively used in the world.[43]

Road network

VAZ-2102 (1971) and VAZ-2103
(1972)

The Soviet Union had a road network of 1,757,000 kilometres (1,092,000 mi), of which 1,310,600 kilometres (814,400 mi) were paved and 446,400 kilometres (277,400 mi) were dirt roads.

urban economy. The road network had problems meeting the people's demand, a problem which the Soviet leadership publicly acknowledged. A resolution by the Central Committee laid down a plan for the improvement in planning, organisation and the efficiency of local road transport enterprises.[46]

roubles
. But in 1975, road transport was 27-times more expensive than railway transport, due to long distances between starting points and destinations.[48]

The deteriorating quality of roads was due to bad attendance, and the then ongoing growth in road transport made it even harder for the Soviet authorities to focus their resources on attendance and maintenance projects. The transport of freight by road had increased by 4,400 percent in the past thirty years, while the growth of hardcore surfaced roads had grown only by 300 percent. Growth of motor vehicles had increased by 224 percent in the 1980s, while hardcore surfaced roads only increased by 64 percent. As Soviet economists in the early to mid-1980s said, the Soviet Union had 21 percent of the world's industrial output, but only a meager 7 percent of the world's top quality roads. The

Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981–85; spanned through the rules of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko) called for the construction of an additional 80,000 km hardcore surfaced roads, but this was far from adequate in solving the serious shortage, and the planners needed to build at least twice as many roads to meet consumer demand. Another obstacle was that Five-Year Plans in the USSR's later life were rarely fulfilled due to economic malfunctions. Many roads were not paved, and because of this shortage, several dirt roads were created.[49] By 1975 only 0.8 percent of households owned a car.[50] Productions of cars, however, had increased dramatically in the late 1970s. From 1924 to 1971 the USSR produced 1 million vehicles, and the government passed another milestones five years later when it had produced 2 million vehicles.[51]

Bus transport

Only a very small proportion of the population in the USSR owned cars. Because of the widespread lack of any mode of private transport, most Soviet citizens travelled via

Ministry of Transport. Hundreds of thousands of bus stops were built during the Soviet Union, often following centralized design rules, but sometimes not. In recent years the term Soviet Bus Stops, coined by photographer Christopher Herwig, covers these examples of architecture and road design that were built between 1960s-1980s.[53]

Since rail transit systems were more

deficit for the first time in their history by the mid-to-late 1980s.[56]

Water transport

The Soviet Union had 42,777 kilometres (26,580 mi) of coastline

Ministry of the Merchant Marine Fleet of the USSR.[58]

Merchant marine

Moskva River

The Russian Empire concentrated much of its investment on constructing new shipbuilding facilities, and not enlarging their merchant marine; this policy continued in the prewar USSR. By 1913 85 percent of all merchant ships were foreign built. The merchant marine was overlooked during the regime of Joseph Stalin, because the USSR traded mostly with its neighbouring countries in the Eastern Bloc. Soviet trade later expanded to its neighbouring countries in Asia. When Stalin died in 1953, his successor started to increase trade with non-communist countries, most of which were on other continents. Due to this policy, the merchant marine increased from 2 million deadweight tonnage in the early 1950s to 12 million in 1968. By 1974 it had reached 14.1 million deadweight tons, about 3 percent of the world's total. Of the 114 million tons moved by the Soviet merchant marine in 1974, 90 million of it was export and import.[59]

While the merchant marine was technologically outdated, and slower than that of the First World, it still attracted a consistent volume of cargo.

Soviet Government advocated for the traditional freedoms of the sea.[62]

By 1990 the Soviet Union operated a large merchant fleet with more than 2400 ships of all types — the world's second largest in number of ships and seventh largest in carrying capacity.[63]

Ports

The Soviet Union had 26 major ports, eleven of them inland ports.[29] There were 70 ports in total.[64] None of the ports could be considered major by world standards.[65] By the 1980s the majority of Soviet ports were lagging behind the First World technologically. There were also a high number of surplus workers, many of whom would become redundant if the USSR would introduce new, more advanced, technology.[64] Also, in the northeast territories of the USSR most ports were closed down due to cold climate.[66]

See also

References

  1. ^ The Soviet Legal System and Arms Inspection. Ardent Media. 1984. p. 147.
  2. ISBN 978-0-415-00980-5
    .
  3. ISBN 978-1-57607-345-2
    .
  4. ^ Matthew Sagers and Thomas Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," Geographical Review 80 (1990): 266-267
  5. ^ a b c d e Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 267
  6. ^ Scott Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air - Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 197.
  7. ^ Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 266; "Chronicle of Events: 1930-1939" http://www.aeroflot.ru/cms/en/about/history_30-39
  8. ^ a b c "Early Soviet Civil Aviation," Century of Flight: Airlines and Airliners, http://www.century-of-flight.net/new%20site/commercial/Soviet%20civil%20aviation.htm
  9. ^ Scott Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, 101.
  10. ^ Scott Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, 224-8
  11. ^ Boyne, Walter J. (2002). Air warfare: an international encyclopedia 1.ABC-CLIO. p. 8.
  12. ^ Palmer Dictatorship of the Air, 199.
  13. ^ Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, 199-200
  14. ^ a b c d "Early Soviet Civil Aviation," http://www.century-of-flight.net/new%20site/commercial/Soviet%20civil%20aviation.htm
  15. ^ a b c Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 271
  16. ^ Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 267-8
  17. ^ Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 268
  18. ^ "Aeroflot History" http://www.aeroflot.ru/cms/en/about/history; Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 267
  19. ^ Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 273
  20. ^ a b c d "Soviet Union: Aeroflot Operations," Library of Congress Country Studies, May 1989. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+su0388%29
  21. ^ Sagers and Maraffa, "Soviet Air-Passenger Transportation Network," 266
  22. ^ "Aeroflot History" http://www.aeroflot.ru/cms/en/about/history
  23. ^ "Transaero Airlines" http://www.transaero.com/ ; "S7 Airlines" http://www.s7.ru/en/
  24. ^ "Transaero History" http://transaero.ru/en/company/history
  25. ^ "Our Fleet" "Transaero". Archived from the original on 2013-05-18. Retrieved 2013-05-12.
  26. ^ "Our Fleet" http://www.s7.ru/home/about/ourfleet.dot#.UYbkjyvwLC4
  27. ^ "Chronicle of Events: 2006" http://www.aeroflot.ru/cms/en/about/history_2006
  28. ^ "S7 Airlines" http://www.oneworld.com/member-airlines/s7-airlines/
  29. ^ a b c d e f Central Intelligence Agency (1991). "Soviet Union – Communications". The World Factbook. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
  30. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 93.
  31. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 58.
  32. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 188.
  33. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 207.
  34. ^ "Pipelines". Library of Congress Country Studies. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
  35. ^ Davies, Harrison and Wheatcroft 1994, p. 159–60.
  36. ^ Davies, Harrison and Wheatcroft 1994, p. 160.
  37. ^ Davies, Harrison and Wheatcroft 1994, p. 160–61.
  38. ^ Davies, Harrison and Wheatcroft 1994, p. 162–63.
  39. ^ Wilson 1983, p. 201.
  40. ^ Шаферин pp.17+: Сравнительные Данные о Развитии Транспорта СССР и США (in Russian)(Comparative Data about the Development of Transportation in the USSR and USA)
  41. ISBN 0-85664-571-0
    .
  42. ISBN 0-7656-0263-6
    .
  43. ^ a b Wilson 1983, p. 205.
  44. ^ Wilson 1983, p. 205–6.
  45. ^ Wilson 1983, p. 206.
  46. ^ a b Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 165.
  47. ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 166.
  48. ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 166–67.
  49. ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 167.
  50. ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 168.
  51. ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 169.
  52. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 56.
  53. ^ "Soviet superpower: why Russia has the world's most beautiful bus stops". the Guardian. 2015-09-02. Retrieved 2022-09-04.
  54. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 87.
  55. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 87–8.
  56. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 88.
  57. ^ Central Intelligence Agency (1991). "Soviet Union – Geography". The World Factbook. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
  58. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 97.
  59. ^ Grzybowski 1987, p. 3.
  60. ^ Wilson 1983, p. 4.
  61. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 96.
  62. ^ Grzybowski 1987, p. 6.
  63. ^ The Naval Institute Guide to the Soviet Navy. 1991, p. 431.
  64. ^ a b International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 98.
  65. ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 131.
  66. ^ International Monetary Fund and OECD 1991, p. 95.

Bibliography

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