Economy, Transportation

Russia’s transportation network has been shaped by the country’s vast size and its Soviet history. Soviet planners were preoccupied with expanding heavy industry, so the Soviet government considered transportation a necessary but less productive economic activity. It therefore designed transportation facilities to move large amounts of goods and people at low cost and generally sacrificed consumer convenience. The transportation system is densest in European Russia, where industry and population are concentrated. Overall, however, Russia’s transportation system is much less dense than those of most advanced industrial states.

Railroads dominate the transportation system. In the mid-1990s Russia ranked second internationally in terms of the length of its public rail network, which totaled 86,000 km (53,400 mi). After 1990 shock therapy cut the volume of railroad freight by nearly half, but at mid-decade the railroads still carried more than three-quarters of the country’s total freight. The heaviest traffic on a single rail line occurs on the western Siberian section of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, where trains occasionally run as frequently as once every three minutes. To relieve some of this pressure, parallel lines were built during the Soviet era in western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In the late 1970s and the 1980s the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a major line located north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railroad, was built across eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast. Unlike some other means of transportation, Russia’s railroad system has not been privatized.

Railroads also account for nearly half of all passenger travel, although buses have begun carrying an increased share of commuter passengers and airplanes have absorbed a large proportion of long-distance travel. The Soviet government neglected automotive transportation because of the high cost of constructing and maintaining roads and because of the high operating cost of transporting goods by truck. With about 532,000 km (330,814 mi) of public and private roads, Russia ranked sixth internationally in terms of the size of its road system, even though it is by far the largest country in the world. Although automobile ownership has increased since 1990, by 1997 there were still only 120 vehicles for every 1,000 inhabitants, and many members of the middle class who want cars cannot afford them because bank credit is unavailable. There are no Western-style freeways; only 67 percent of the roads are paved, and only about 60 percent of rural villages can be reached by a paved road. Not surprisingly, trucking accounts for less than 5 percent of total freight shipped.

In some regions of Russia, inland waterways are a major means of transportation. The most important waterway is the Volga River, which carries more than half of Russia’s river traffic. Moscow is connected to the Volga system through the Moscow Canal, which runs north to the Volga River. In remote areas of Siberia rivers are often the only means of transportation available. However, most Siberian rivers, such as the Ob’, the Yenisey, and the Lena, flow north to the Arctic Ocean, thus limiting their utility in a region where east-west links are required. The eastward-flowing Amur River is the chief navigable river of the far eastern region.

In the Soviet era, Aeroflot, the state airline, was the exclusive provider of domestic civilian air transportation. Aeroflot continues to operate, but it no longer has a monopoly on domestic air transportation. It now faces serious competition from two other large airline companies: the semiprivate Vnukovo Airlines and the private Transaero company. Russia has about 300 registered airlines, many of them extremely small. In the 1980s the national volume of airline passenger travel expanded by a remarkable 1,500 percent. From 1990 to 1994 steep increases in ticket prices and the discontinuation of flights to less populous areas reduced total air passenger miles by more than one-half, but the airlines still accounted for about one-eighth of the total of all types of passenger travel.

The merchant navy is an important transportation link with many foreign countries. The principal civilian seaports in Russia include Novorossiysk on the Black Sea; Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea; Nakhodka, Vostochnyy, Vladivostok, and Vanino on the Pacific coast; and Murmansk and Arkhangel’sk on the Arctic coast. In 2001 the fleet, which included 4,727 Russian-owned vessels of 100 gross tons or more, ranked among the world’s 15 largest merchant navies.

Russia's extensive network of natural gas and oil pipelines is another important part of its transportation system. The network includes about 200,000 km (about 124,000 mi) of pipe, with approximately one-third devoted to oil products and two-thirds to natural gas. As a whole, the system was operating at only about 60 percent of capacity in the mid-1990s, but most outlets to export markets were operating at maximum capacity. Most of the system’s lines run from east to west. Oil pipelines connect producing fields in western Siberia and the Volga-Urals region with consuming areas in European Russia and countries to the west. Pipelines pump natural gas from western Siberia, northern European Russia, and the North Caucasus to the large European market. Several pipelines also connect Russia to gas and oil fields, as well as consumers, in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states. Domestic pipelines run south and east from western Siberia as far as Irkutsk.