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Andrei Andreevich, were also distinguished
architects. Ton studied at the St. Petersburg Aca-
demy of Arts (1803-15), then moved to Italy
(1819-28), where he gained recognition from
the Rome and Florence academies. Returning to
St. Petersburg in 1831, he was associated with
the Academy of Arts for nearly 25 years, first as
professor, then as rector. In his work, Ton sought
to create a national style that would embody the
official ideals of
NICHOLAS I
's reign: autocracy,
Orthodoxy, and nationalism. Although he did
not live to see its completion, Ton's greatest work
was the Church of Christ the Savior in
MOSCOW
,
built between 1832 and 1893. Intended as a
memorial to the War of 1812, the church was a
grand project that, when completed, stood over
100 meters in height, second only to the Krem-
lin in the Moscow skyline. Ton's other major
work was the Great Kremlin Palace in Moscow
(1838-49). Inside the Kremlin, Ton also con-
structed the Armory (1844-51), where collec-
tions of artworks, historical relics, weapons, and
treasures are stored. He was not inflexible in his
commitment to a Russian style. He modeled the
two train stations he built for the first Russian
railroad line (1844-51) on western European
town halls, keeping the facades in the style of
the Italian Renaissance. This composition and
stylistic resolution can be attributed to Ton's
understanding of the train stations as public
buildings of citywide significance. His identifica-
tion with the ideology of the autocracy made
him a lightning rod for criticism by the late 19th
century, when democratic journalism became
widespread. In Soviet times, the majority of his
churches were destroyed, including the Church
of Christ the Savior, razed to make room for a
proposed monumental Palace of Soviets that was
never built. In the 1990s the church was rebuilt,
at great cost and with great fanfare, as one sym-
bol of Russia's break with its Communist past.
between 1891 and 1904. The Trans-Siberian rail-
road has since served as a symbol of the geo-
graphical expansiveness of Russia. The idea for
the railroad surfaced after the foundation of
Vladivostok in 1860. By 1880, Vladivostok had
become a major port but lacked an adequate
transportation link with European Russia. Plan-
ning for the railroad first began in the 1880s
under the direction of Sergei
WITTE
and strong
support from Czar
ALEXANDER III
. Advocates of the
railroad believed it would facilitate the eastward
movement of peasants from the overpopulated
lands of European Russia to the mineral-rich and
relatively fertile parts of Siberia. The eastward
projection of Russian power and military might
into Asia also figured in the arguments that led
to the construction of the railroad. With Alexan-
der III's approval, construction began in 1891
under the direction of the newly appointed min-
ister of ways and communications and, later,
minister of finance, Sergei Witte. The outbreak
of the
RUSSO
-
JAPANESE WAR
in 1904 pressured
the Russian government to rush the final stages
of the railroad, which was first completed in
1905. The original route was a single-track rail-
road that went eastward from Chelyabinsk in
the Urals through Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasno-
yarsk, Irkutsk, and Chita, east of Lake Baikal.
From Chita, the railroad cut through Manchuria
in China, before reentering Russian territory and
reaching Vladivostok. The
RUSSO
-
JAPANESE WAR
highlighted the vulnerability of a railroad run-
ning through foreign territory. Thus a new line
was built between 1908 and 1914 linking Chita
with Vladivostok through Russian territory. Cut-
ting through difficult, mountainous terrain, this
stretch of the railroad cost almost twice as much
per kilometer as that of any other section of the
railroad. World War I also showed that there was
too much traffic for a single-track railroad. By
1918, despite the turmoil of the Russian Revolu-
tion and civil war, most of the railroad had been
double-tracked.
Between 1950 and 1970, the railroad was
fully electrified. In 1974 another extension of
the Trans-Siberian, known as the Baikal-Amur
Trans-Siberian Railroad
A railway of 5,785 miles linking Moscow with
Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, first built
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