There are many stories about the whims of Czar Nicholas I. One of them concerns the railway line between St Petersburg and Moscow, which was opened in 1851, towards the end of his reign, and is still in use today. The line was remarkably straight except for a pronounced kink about 160km from St Petersburg known as the Czar’s Finger. In recent years high-speed trains have had trouble negotiating this curve, and in October the line was finally straightened.
On the day before the opening of the new line, Kevin O’Flynn published a piece about the severing of the Czar’s Finger in The Guardian: “In 1850, according to the legend, Nicholas was shown the plans for a rail link between the czarist northern capital and Moscow. Taking an instant dislike to the convoluted route being proposed, he grabbed a ruler and drew a straight line between the cities. One third of the way down, the czar’s royal finger inadvertently got in the way and the railway line developed an unplanned bump. “Too scared to question the czar, the railway planners duly incorporated a 17,6km curve into the line, known ever since as the Czar’s Finger. “Sadly, the truth is more prosaic. The curve, also called the Verebinsky bypass, was actually built in 1877, 26 years after the line came into being, to circumvent a steep gradient … “Railway buffs suspect a little-known Russian writer, Nikolai Grech, of starting the finger story, although the long history of Russian leaders playing havoc with the plans of architects aided its credibility. According to one tale, Ivan the Terrible blinded the creators of St Basil’s cathedral so that they would never create anything as beautiful again.” I first heard the story of the march to Kamchatka when I was a child. A few years ago, I came across it again in a book by the Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen, and decided to write down my own version. But I would not be surprised if Grech was behind it all.