In order to make discoveries, it is not at all necessary to go to hot countries. Let the Mexicans, Bolivians, Italians and Greeks explore their territories on their own, and do not need to disturb them. It is much more important for us to deal with our own land and with what is happening on it now and in the past. And most people no longer doubt that our own story is no less important and exciting.
Well tell me, why do we need to know the width of the roadway in some town in Malta or Thailand, if we do not suspect what is happening right under our feet! Real discoveries can be made by walking along the streets of cities familiar from childhood, or on forest paths along which we can run blindfolded.
I was lucky to make one of these discoveries literally a couple of tens of kilometers from the house in which I have been living for more than twenty years. If you drive along the Riga highway E77 from Pskov, then, before reaching the village of Dubnik, which is just before Izborsk, you can notice a small turn to the left, where there is not even a sign informing about exactly where the narrow dirt road leads, on which two cars cannot pass cars. And it leads to the village of Shakhnitsy, through Rzhevka and several other abandoned farms.
Fragment of a map of the Russian Empire in 1914.
How did this unremarkable road attract my attention? And the finds, which were made right on it and on the side of the road, "one friend of a friend of my friend," who had a good metal detector lying around in the hallway. Driving off the asphalt highway, you can be led astray, thinking that nothing interesting can be found on the muddy road, muddy from the rains. But a few minutes of patience, and you will find yourself on the site of the former village of Lebezh, where today, in addition to one well-kept house with a plot and a video camera above the gate, there are still several surviving houses, probably used as summer cottages, and one non-working pay phone.
But then it becomes much more interesting. The road leading from the village to the forest leaves no doubt that the peasants did not build it. This is an object that could only be built by builders who have not only the skills of engineers, but also sufficient resources to lay a straight, like an arrow, a road that has no elevation differences. This is a perfect creation that could not be born thanks to the peasants who carried oats on carts.
One can clearly see an industrial embankment with a hard dry bed of sand and gravel, obviously poured on a thick "pillow" of construction rubble, most likely limestone.
Promotional video:
Such a structure requires not only the work of designers, but also accurate calculations, as well as surveying work using precise instruments and measuring instruments, the labor of skilled workers and the involvement of a large number of vehicles and construction equipment. It is impossible to bring such volumes of stone and soil on carts, at least not economically in this place. And the road clearly has nothing to do with Soviet road-building organizations. Then who built it, when and, most importantly, why ?!
So. The road looks completely unnatural in this place. For the needs of the peasants, no one would definitely build such. And the quality of the building is amazing in its perfection. To some, it will seem like a dirt road overgrown with grass, but an experienced eye will immediately notice that the road was built by professionals of the highest level. The fact is that ordinary country roads are overgrown with alder almost instantly. In just ten to fifteen years, the roads that once connected villages and farmsteads turn into completely impassable thickets, where it is difficult even to guess the direction.
Here we found a beautiful straight road on which nothing grows but grass. Even after the recent rains, it continues to be dry and hard. But why spend colossal resources on arranging a road of this quality, which does not lead anywhere and does not come from anywhere! In some places on the surface slabs of limestone and flat granite slabs come across. I have come across sections of cobblestone pavement in the Pskov forests, but they are mostly primitive, made handicraft and without any backing. Here we see an embankment, which is usually arranged for the construction of a railway line.
This was what our small expedition had to find out, which included me and my friend from Pskov Alexander (joint campaigns are already becoming our good tradition).
It was this thought that drove us forward to find evidence or refutation of the version that our road is a former narrow-gauge railway. Not confirmed. And this fact did not upset us at all, and I will tell you why. The main goal of the expedition was to find a memorial sign on the side of the road, where an inscription is carved that sheds light on the history of the road. Without an accurate geotagging of the stone, we had practically no chance of finding it. And yet we found him!
It was incredibly difficult. The grass at this time of the year stands more than one and a half meters high. The dense foliage of bushes and trees hides everything from sight two or three meters deep into the forest from the roadside. Difficult terrain: numerous reclamation ditches, small swamps, dense reeds taller than a person - all this significantly complicated the search.
Here and there there were traces of hostilities: trenches, parapet, dugouts, craters (one of which is about 25 meters in diameter and 5 meters deep), which also made the search very difficult. Subsequently, it turned out that several times we passed a few steps from the sought stone and did not see it. In the end, already starting to lose hope, we discovered him.
Despite its impressive size (with a "humpbacked Zaporozhets"), it safely hid in the thickets of alder.
The inscription on the granite boulder: "By order of the Emperor Nicholas II, the highway was built by engineer GF Stankevich in 3 months during the Patriotic War of 1914-1915."
Do you understand what exactly is written on it? "Highway"! How could it happen that it was the highway that was being built, because how does this type of road construction differ from a regular road?
Who in the woods needs a highway? It's for cars, not hay carts. Second: "The Patriotic War …". Which one? They talk to us about the "imperialist", and more often about the "First World". And the war was patriotic, which in translation from the pre-revolutionary Russian language into the modern one meant - civil. Exactly. Patriotic means within the same country. And it's true. After all, Emperor Nicholas II was also a prince of many European principalities: "… the heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarnsky, Dietmarsen and Oldenburg, and so on, and so forth, and so on." By "other" it is meant that Nicholas was the monarch of Monaco, Liechtenstein and, possibly, some other countries. Let me remind you that, as a colonel in the Russian Guard, he simultaneously held the ranks of field marshal of the British army and admiral of the British fleet. Of course, the war began as a civil war.
A fragment of a map of postal messages of the Russian Empire in 1917.
And then … There is a great war in the yard, and Russia is building a road, which, according to modern historians, is completely useless. What is it like? Or are they still holding back something to us? Maybe you still needed a road? For what?!
The answer may turn out to be straightforward if you look at its direction and dream up, assuming its probable beginning and end. To begin with, local Pskov ethnographers declared the highway a rocky road. But what is rocada?
Any sane person, without hesitation, will reject the version of the Pskov historians. Rokada is a temporary frontal road, which is deliberately built with as many bends as possible so that the enemy does not have the opportunity to zero in and not keep the frontline communications under constant artillery fire. In this case, this is out of the question. Rockades are not made capital and straight, without a single turn for whole miles.
Suppose, if we are dealing with fortifications, then in this case the absence of a road on all known maps is easily explained: rokadas are secret structures.
A fragment of a map of postal messages of the Russian Empire in 1917.
Then why was it built by a civil engineer? For reference:
Stankevich Gerard-Klemens Fortunatovich - civil engineer. Graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers. For more than 25 years he worked in various positions in the construction department of the Pskov provincial government.
According to his projects in Pskov, the following were built: the Shpakovskaya apartment building, 1897 (Lenin St., 8), the building of the bank of the Mutual Credit Society of the Pskov District Zemstvo, 1902 (Oktyabrsky Ave., 8), Safyanshchikov I. A., 1912 (Oktyabrsky prospect, 18) and other buildings.
One of the best architects who worked in Pskov in the late 19th - early 20th centuries.
Second question: who came up with the idea of building a rokada in the absence of a front line? It turns out that Stankevich foresaw for three years that Pskov would have to be defended from the advance of the German army? Indeed, even in 1916 there was not a single foreign soldier on the territory of the Pskov province. The main hostilities in 1914-1915 were fought in East Prussia, while Pskov and the Ostrovsky region, together with Izborsky, were deep in the rear. What kind of rockade could we talk about then ?!
Map of military operations in which the Russian army participated in 1915 - 1916.
Again, it does not add up. And now about the finds of "an acquaintance of an acquaintance of my acquaintance." The whole road and its shoulders were literally dug by "black diggers". Their main catch is coins of the late nineteenth century, as well as trade seals.
Railway trade seal from Yaroslavl.
The economic ties of all cities at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries can be traced by such unusual attributes of trade equipment as … lead seals. According to the rules of that time, the goods leaving for the journey were necessarily sealed. This measure ensured the safety of the cargo. Literally everything was sealed, starting with bales with manufactory and sacks of flour and ending with cans of milk! There is nothing to say about boxes of tea or barrels of oil.
Each manufacturer or merchant had his own unique type of seal. The recipient of the product, having made sure of its safety, threw away the lead round, not caring about its further fate. The Russian land has carefully preserved these silent testimonies of the era. They are often found on the sites of former transshipment points, customs terminals, berths and warehouses.
And the whole highway is literally stuffed with just such seals. The inscriptions on them are very different, but most often you come across "Yaroslavl", "Pskov", "Izborsk", "St. Petersburg", "Rybinsk", "Tver", "Kazan" and "Nizhny Novgorod". It turns out that thousands of tons were transported along the road, no, tens and hundreds of thousands of tons of ordinary civilian cargo. That is why there are so many coins here. From this it follows that there can be no question of any military role. It was a commercial route connecting two junction railway stations in Novy Izborsk and Ostrov. And they were the key points of the imperial railway on the tracks from St. Petersburg to Königsberg and on the St. Petersburg - Riga route.
Let us assume that this issue has become somewhat clearer for us. But there remains the problem of a high concentration of lead bullets per square meter of road.
A bullet from a rifle of the Berdan system.
This is a bullet from a Berdan rifle, which was removed from the armament of the Russian army long before the onset of the sad events of 1917.
I managed to find out that it was made for the 4.2-linear (10.67 mm) Berdan rifle No. 2. More precisely, on the contrary, the rifle was created under the existing cartridge. The story of Berdanka is curious:
Two Russian officers sent to America in the early 1860s, Alexander Pavlovich Gorlov and Karl Ivanovich Gunius, made 25 different improvements to the design of the Belgian rifle in service with the Russian army (not much of the original model remained) and redesigned it to a caliber 4.2 lines; developed a cartridge for it with a seamless sleeve. In the United States, it was called nothing less than "Russian musket".
The production of rifles in the United States was carried out by the Colt company at a factory in Hartford, Connecticut (because in America it is known as the Colt Berdan rifle). The rifle was adopted by the Russian army in 1868 as a "rifle model 1868" - without mentioning its original creator and subsequent innovators (subsequently, the documentation almost always used the expression "Berdan rifle", in common parlance just "Berdanka").
Taking into account its rather high, at the end of the 1860s - beginning of the 1870s, ballistic qualities, it was first of all armed with rifle units (organizationally separate from the line infantry, light infantry, mainly operating in loose formation with firearms and avoiding close combat) … The Berdan rifles No. 2 began to enter the troops in 1871, and as their production expanded at domestic factories, they gradually replaced the older systems. As of January 1, 1877, the army had: Berdan rifles No. 2 of 1870 (infantry, dragoon, Cossack and carbines) armed with 253,152 pieces. and 103 616 pcs. in reserve.
After this weapon was removed from service, a huge number of "Berdan" guns were in civilian circulation, mainly among hunters for small and medium-sized animals. This circumstance allows us to make the assumption that the abnormally high number of Berdan bullets on the Stankevich road indicates a successful hunt for the Pskovites in this place. But not a fact. Too many are stuck in the embankment. And this is a sign of a phenomenon, the essence of which is difficult for us today to understand.
This issue, of course, still needs to be resolved. But most importantly, we were still able to understand: on the territory of the Pskov province of the Russian Empire, there was a currently unknown highway. Lively, loaded and … for some reason secret (not displayed on maps). This testifies to a completely different level of technology development in pre-revolutionary Russia than we are used to imagining. And here the main question arises: what else do we not know about our such recent past?
Author: kadykchanskiy