![Russian prisoners of Amur Railway](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Russian_prisoners_of_Amur_Railway.jpg)
The Amur Cart Road or Amur Wheel Road (russian: Аму́рская колёсная доро́га or ,
tr. ) was a
cartage road in
Amur Oblast
Amur Oblast ( rus, Аму́рская о́бласть, r=Amurskaya oblast, p=ɐˈmurskəjə ˈobləsʲtʲ) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast), located on the banks of the Amur and Zeya Rivers in the Russian Far East. The administrative ...
of
Imperial Russia
The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the List of Russian monarchs, Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended th ...
that connected
Khabarovsk with
Blagoveshchensk
Blagoveshchensk ( rus, Благове́щенск, p=bləgɐˈvʲeɕːɪnsk, meaning ''City of the Annunciation'') is a city and the administrative center of Amur Oblast, Russia. It is located at the confluence of the Amur and the Zeya Rivers, o ...
through mostly uninhabited areas of
taiga
Taiga (; rus, тайга́, p=tɐjˈɡa; relates to Mongolic and Turkic languages), generally referred to in North America as a boreal forest or snow forest, is a biome characterized by coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruce ...
and swamps.
The road was built during 1898–1909 with nearly exclusive usage of
katorga
Katorga ( rus, ка́торга, p=ˈkatərɡə; from medieval and modern Greek: ''katergon, κάτεργον'', "galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisoner ...
prison labor. It was praised as a success in its use of
penal labor, claiming that no other country had any prison labor project comparable in scale. In 1905 over 700 convicts were simultaneously at work on the road. In this respect it was unsurpassed in the
Gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
system of the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
.
See also
*
Siberian Route
The Siberian Route (russian: Сибирский тракт; ''Sibirsky trakt''), also known as the Moscow Highway (, Московский тракт) and Great Highway (, Большой тракт), was a historic route that connected European Russ ...
*
Kolyma Highway
The R504 Kolyma Highway (russian: Федеральная автомобильная дорога «Колыма», ''Federal'naya Avtomobil'naya Doroga «Kolyma»,'' "Federal Automobile Highway 'Kolyma'"), part of the M56 route, is a road throu ...
*
Amur Highway
The Russian route R297 or the Amur Highway (so named after the nearby Amur River) is a federal highway in Russia, part of the Trans-Siberian Highway. With a length of , it is the longest segment, from Chita to Khabarovsk, connecting the paved ro ...
References
*
Andrey Sobol, ''Kолесуха'' ("Kolesukha"), 1925, memoirs, in Russian.
Roads in Siberia
1900s establishments in the Russian Empire
Transport in Amur Oblast
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