Everything that is unusual for us inevitably attracts attention. Even if it is quite a common thing. For example, if today we notice a manual meat grinder in the kitchen, then all the surrounding objects fade, and we see only one manual meat grinder. It looks like a foreign object in the modern kitchen, but this object is well known to us and in the older generation evokes fond memories of a happy past.
There is no doubt that most Americans, Japanese or British people will also consider the grinder with interest. Only the reasons for their interest will be completely different. In most cases, they will not even be able to guess the purpose of this mechanism. But for us now it is not so important. The main thing is to understand the psychological side of the described phenomenon:
Another striking example of this phenomenon can be safely considered the Yundum airfield in Gambia.
The runway of Yundum International Airport is near the capital of Gambia, Banjul.
For more than a dozen years, scientists have been struggling to solve the mystery of the birth of this airfield. The fact is that no one built it. Modern builders only put asphalt on a part of the runway built of stone slabs, but who and when laid these slabs remains a mystery.
Few people know, but there is a similar facility on the territory of Russia. The runway of the Keperveyem airport in Chukotka also did not have to be built from scratch. It was simply adapted for an airfield, but it existed in the tundra long before the appearance of modern man there. And initially there were two, strictly parallel to each other. One of them is now completely overgrown, and the second is used for takeoff and landing of airplanes and helicopters.
The runway of the Keperveem regional airport in the Bilibino region of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
These are the objects that do not fit into the series that are familiar to our gaze, and therefore they are spoken about. But there are plenty of those that we see every day, and it does not occur to us how unusual they are. But the amazing is near. Riddles are right in front of us, but we do not notice them.
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My father once told me about how in the late 1940s he had to travel from Pechora to Pskov in a lorry with a gas generator.
Gaz-AA 1939 with a gas generator. Photo from the site "Kolesa. Ru"
An explanation is needed here, because few people know what a gas generator is, and even more so about its widespread use in road transport in the recent past.
So: even then the A212 highway (E77 Pskov - Riga) existed practically in its present form. Only its surface was not asphalt concrete, as it is now, but … of paving stones. It's incredible, but true. Even as a teenager, I was shocked by this circumstance. It didn’t fit my head how it was possible to lay out the pavement 266 versts (284 km) by hand!
But that's not all. After all, the roads adjacent to the highway were also paved. There were two of them from Pechora at once. One to Izborsk (19 versts), the second to Panikovskiye Kresty (17 versts). The road to Izborsk is now completely asphalted, and to Kresty is unpaved, but in some areas the road is no-no, and it is still found today. The picture does not add up. In pre-revolutionary photographs we see peasants, shod in bast shoes, and carts, up to the hubs bogged down in the mud. What filth! What carts! Before the revolution, there was already a whole network of paved roads. And now there is no doubt that this was not a unique, isolated example. Just look at the map of postal messages of the Russian Empire.
Fragment of the map of the Russian Empire in 1887 Letts Son & Co (London).
I highlighted the E77 highway in red. But look how many similar highways already existed in the late nineteenth century in northwestern Russia. The question arises, where at that time there were so many resources in "bastard, backward, unwashed" Russia to carry out such a grandiose construction in a short time ?! Indeed, even today, possessing our modern technologies, we do not even have time to repair what we have, let alone build new roads.
While studying this problem, I looked at hundreds of maps of the Russian Empire in the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. And I came to stunning conclusions. It turns out that we still use what was created in a short period of time between the Crimean War and the revolution of 1917. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the fact that at the same time there was also the construction of railways. Not so long ago, researcher Mikhail Kamushkin discovered maps of the railways of the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century.
I was skeptical about this discovery, but, apparently, in vain. And that's why. My argument was the assumption that the Americans in 1864 put railways on old maps. However, then I agreed that Mikhail was somewhat right. Indeed, even if we discard the dating of the maps in 1772 and assume that the railways were plotted on them in 1864 (the year the maps were published in New York), then the fact of the presence on them of those sections of the track that, according to the official version of the Russians historians, were built much later.
In addition, now we have at our disposal other information that is rather difficult to rationally explain. So, during excavations at the construction site of a bridge across the Yenisei, Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk archaeologists discovered a section of the railway, laid in the 1890s.
No one can explain how the canvas was not only thrown, but also under a thick layer of soil. It is now impossible to imagine that a person could fall asleep on his own, of his own free will. Both rails and sleepers have always had and are of great value. Long-unused sections of the track are dismantled instantly in order to find a second life in private farms or to be melted down. Therefore, we can talk about some kind of natural disaster: a flood, a village, etc. But how can we explain what is captured in the next photo?
Photo of the late nineteenth century. The location and author have not been established.
It is obvious, after all, that the workers are digging up a railway track, which was in a flat area under a layer of sand and clay about ten meters thick! And to blame it on the fact that someone has buried something that has become unnecessary for him, again it will not work. Not only because it is absurd, but also because it is impossible without construction equipment. And then a reasonable conclusion suggests itself:
But then who built them, when, and why were they buried under a layer of sedimentary rocks? And this is not the only question. Doubts immediately arise as to the veracity of the official version of industrialization in general, as well as a question about the history of railway transport in particular. As researcher Alexei Kungurov from the city of Chebarkul rightly noted, it is impossible to make a steam boiler for a steam locomotive in a forge. The boiler of a steam locomotive is a complex apparatus consisting of a large number of tubes that form a so-called heat exchanger. In principle, the development of railway transport is impossible without the widespread use of pipe mills and the use of welding.
But, in general, everything is more or less clear here. The time of the beginning of industrial production of steam engines coincides with the appearance of rolling mills in the forties of the nineteenth century. If only these mills were re-created, and not dug up, as were the cities and railways. However, okay. Let's go back to the E77 highway.
Why do I consider her and others like her unusual? Yes, because it cannot be so that a backward agrarian country could afford the massive construction of a highway on a huge territory, without having for this:
- In cash.
- A sufficient number of trained designers, surveyors, engineers, surveyors and surveyors. That is, engineers and technicians who had a higher technical education.
- A sufficient number of skilled workers.
- The necessary measuring tool.
- Many quarries for the extraction of stone, sand and sand and gravel mixture.
- Developed transport infrastructure.
Just try to imagine how many workers will be required in order to get, load, deliver the necessary materials to the construction site, and there all of this can be packed, tamped and paved.
A schematic sectional view of a cobbled pavement.
Agree, this is a complex engineering structure. It is possible to calculate how many carts would be needed to build such a road 284 kilometers long and four meters wide. This is not for you to run into a rut on carts. Highways, built in the late nineteenth century, have straight sections like an arrow. That is, the builders were not frightened by the prospect of meeting the uneven terrain. The E77 highway starts from the intersection of st. Kiselyov and Rizhsky prospect in the center of Pskov and to Izborsk itself does not have a single turn, and this is almost thirty kilometers.
This is followed by a section of eleven kilometers to a place popularly called Crooked Verst. There, at the memorial cemetery, where more than eight hundred soldiers who died in the first half of August 1944, the liberators of the Pechora region from the German invaders, were buried, the highway turns again to extend to the village of Shumilkino on the border with Estonia without a single bend.
A thirty-kilometer section of the E77 highway (A212).
It turns out that we have a unique, gigantic, high-tech structure, but we do not have any information about who, when and how built it. I admit that if you make a request to the archive, you will find documentation, thanks to which it will be possible to establish in what period the construction was carried out, and, perhaps, even the technical documentation and the name of the engineer were preserved. There is no such information in the public domain. But the most important question still remains unanswered:
In addition, I do not understand the very meaning of such a large-scale construction. Why, for example, was it necessary to build a highway from St. Petersburg to Pskov and further to Riga, if at that time a railway had already existed for a long time? Have we already developed road transport? After all, if the backward impoverished Russia, which does not have excavators, bulldozers, loaders and dump trucks, was able to build a road network, then it was in demand? Couldn't they do all this for future generations who will live in a world with many cars?
But that's not all. We are now talking about these roads only because we still use them. And how many of those that remained abandoned? I wrote about one of these in the article "Highway to the Unknown Past" But the unknown roads on the Kola Peninsula, which Igor Mochalov has been exploring for a long time, may also turn out to be the legacy of the Russian Empire.
Fragment of the road "From Nowhere to Nowhere". Kola Peninsula. Photo from the Internet.
It seems to me that there is no point in looking for a "Hyperborean trace" in the history of the origin of these roads. Everything can be completely different, at the same time more complicated and simpler. By analogy with the well-known roads, the construction of which we know nothing about (one of which is E77), the Kola roads could also have been built before the 1917 revolution. True, this does not remove the questions, but, on the contrary, adds. It turns out that we do not understand and do not know about the Russian Empire of something super important. The title of S. Govorukhin's film "Russia We Lost" takes on a deeper meaning.
It seems that we did not lose it, but it was taken from us. In the nineteenth century, our ancestors did not cost anything to build St. Isaac's Cathedral, a network of highways and railways, and in the twentieth century, their children were already kneading cement mortar with bare heels and driving carts along the axis in the mud. Is it illogical? It is illogical. Such a severe level of decline and degradation is impossible on its own, without outside interference. Someone destroyed a highly developed civilization and threw away the technological level of development of Europe and Russia for centuries. While perfect weapons, cars, steam locomotives, steamers and submarines with airplanes and airships remained. Probably in order for the remaining savages to destroy themselves faster?
Author: kadykchanskiy