The Borki train disaster occurred on near Borki station in

Kharkov Governorate Kharkov Governorate was an administrative-territorial unit (''guberniya'') of the Russian Empire founded in 1835. It embraced the historical region of Sloboda Ukraine. From 1765 to 1780 and from 1796 to 1835 the governorate was called Sloboda Uk ...

of the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

(present-day Birky, Ukraine), south of

Kursk Kursk (, ) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Kursk Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Kur (Kursk Oblast), Kur, Tuskar, and Seym (river), Seym rivers. It has a population of Kursk ...

, when the imperial train carrying Emperor Alexander III of Russia and his family from

Crimea Crimea ( ) is a peninsula in Eastern Europe, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, almost entirely surrounded by the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov. The Isthmus of Perekop connects the peninsula to Kherson Oblast in mainland Ukrain ...

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

derailed at high speed. Twenty-one people died at the scene and two later, and many others were injured. According to the official version of events, Alexander held the collapsed roof of the royal car on his shoulders while his family escaped the crash site uninjured. The story of the miraculous escape became part of contemporary lore and government propaganda. The investigation into the crash, led by Anatoly Koni, resulted in the appointment of railway manager and the future Russian prime minister, Sergei Witte, as the director of State Railways.

The accident

The imperial family was en route from

. Contrary to railway rules of the period that limited commercial passenger trains to 42 axles, the imperial train of fifteen carriages had 64 axles. Its weight was within the limits set for freight trains, but the train actually travelled at express speeds. It was hauled by two

steam engine A steam engine is a heat engine that performs Work (physics), mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a Cylinder (locomotive), cyl ...

s, a combination that caused dangerous vibrations that, according to Witte, directly caused the derailment. Technical flaws of the royal train were known in advance, yet it had operated for nearly a decade without incidents. Twenty-one people were killed instantly. According to official reports, corroborated by Witte's memoirs, at the moment of the crash the royal family was in the dining car. Its roof collapsed in the crash, and Alexander reportedly held the remains of the roof on his shoulders as the children fled outdoors. None of the royal family initially appeared to be hurt, but the onset of Alexander's

kidney failure Kidney failure, also known as renal failure or end-stage renal disease (ESRD), is a medical condition in which the kidneys can no longer adequately filter waste products from the blood, functioning at less than 15% of normal levels. Kidney fa ...

was later linked to the blunt trauma suffered in Borki.

Publicity

The survival of the Romanovs was celebrated. When Alexander returned to Saint Petersburg and went to the Kazan Cathedral, university students wanted to unharness his carriage and pull it by hand. In the view of the established religion, the salvation of the imperial family was hailed as

divine Divinity (from Latin ) refers to the quality, presence, or nature of that which is divine—a term that, before the rise of monotheism, evoked a broad and dynamic field of sacred power. In the ancient world, divinity was not limited to a singl ...

intervention by the Sovereign. Pamphlets by clergymen linked the miraculous escape to the miracles of 17th-century icons at the end of the great plague of 1654–1655;Wortman, p. 311 the laity believed that prayers in front of these icons enabled the survival of the emperor. A special icon of the ''God's Grace on the 17th of October'', made for the occasion, widely circulated in photographic copies.

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

, the old shrine of Orthodoxy, was perceived as the source of the miracle; a contemporary pamphlet declared that the "power that Moscow had professed and that had exalted her revoked these laws f Nature.

Investigation

Immediately after the crash, the Chief Inspector of Railways, Baron Sherval, who had been travelling on the royal train and had broken his leg in the crash, summoned railway manager Witte and director of the Kharkov Technical Institute, Victor Kirpichev, to lead the investigation on site. Anatoly Koni, an influential public lawyer, was dispatched from Saint Petersburg later. In the preceding years, Witte had been regularly involved in managing imperial train journeys across his railroad and was well known to the emperor. Two months before the crash, Alexander, upset about Witte's insistence on reducing train speed limits, had publicly chastised him and his railway, referring to its owners' ethnicity: "Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one because it is a

Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

road".Witte, p. 93 According to Witte, he had warned the government earlier of the deficiencies in train setup, notably using paired steam engines and faulty saloon cars.Witte, p. 95 The three investigators disagreed on the direct cause of the crash. Witte insisted that it was caused by speeding, exonerating railroad management; Kirpichev blamed rotten wooden ties, whilst Koni shifted the blame onto the railroad, exonerating state officials. Witte, in particular, maneuvered between blaming state officials and exonerating Minister of Communications Konstantin Posyet.Harcave, p. 32 In the end, Alexander preferred to close the case quietly, allowed Sherval and Posyet to retire, and appointed Witte as the director of Imperial Railways. Despite Witte's efforts, railroad management did not escape public attention. The contractor who built the Kursk-Kharkov line, Samuel Polyakov, who died two months before the crash, was posthumously linked to inferior construction quality of the railroad. The public particularly "credited" him with substandard gravel ballast pads that failed to cushion track vibrations as they were supposed to.Owen, p. 173

References

Sources

* * * *

External links