Russia's Far East - maps and roads

Until not so very long ago, Russia's Far East had no year-round, asphalted road connection to the rest of the country. In 2010, Vladimir Putin officially opened a new road that finally allowed motorists to make the entire journey from Moscow to Vladivostok without having to cover a thousand kilometres off-road.

In my 1989 Atlas Avtomobil'skich Dorog SSSR, the gap is glaring. The Soviet motorist - unless an intrepid explorer with a rugged and reliable four-wheel drive vehicle - could not drive from one end of the country to the other. Below: the key map shows where the gaps are. Between the eastern edge of page 83 and the western edge of page 84 - nothing. To the south of the Amur river - China.

Let's zoom in a little bit - the Soviet highway network had a huge hole in it between Chita and Khabarovsk - over 2,100km of gap. However, if you go east from Chita and west from Khabarovsk by minor roads not of highway standard but were asphalted,the gap shrank to just over 1,000km.

Below: the eastern edge of page 83 of Atlas Avtomobil'skich Dorog SSSR: Note the dotted line heading north-east out of Sretensk - the dotted line means no asphalt - in Russian as in Polish, 'gruntowa'. Beyond Gorbicha, there is no road. At all. Whatsoever. The black lines are the railways - the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur. As you can see, Russia's east and west were held together by just these two slender threads. Now a third is in place (since 2010), the connection of Chita and Khabarovsk by a main road - certainly not motorway standard - but something entirely acceptable in the Western world, given the volume of traffic using it.

Below: the western edge of page 84 of Atlas Avtomobil'skich Dorog SSSR: Two roads leading north-south, but nothing east-west. This was 1989, remember...

Below: Google Maps shows us the 1,004km of 21st-century asphalt that today joins together the road networks of Siberia and Russia's Far East. It might be long, but it's just seven metres wide. The only road connecting east and west.

Three years after the asphalting of the road was complete, Google sent a car with a camera mast to drive the length of it, taking photos for Google Maps Street View and for Google Earth. The result is fascinating. Unlike in Soviet times, when unauthorised possession of military maps was a criminal offence and the few maps available to the public were riddled with deliberate errors and small in scale, Google offers top-quality images and maps to one and all. Based on satellite imagery and backed up by cameras on the ground, we can now see into the lives of Russians living in distant provincial towns and villages like never before.

Much of it is ramshackle, rusty, potholed, improvised, crumbling; here and there some new buildings appear but this is not China. Rather this is slow decline.

Here is a small selection: Below: this is the point, north of Never (pron. 'N'yev'yer), where the road to Magadan, over 3,100km away, begins. Note - when the photo was taken, the roads were numbered M58 (Chita- Khabarovsk) and M56 (Never-Magadan); they were re-numbered P297 and P504 respectively in 2011, though the old nomenclature remain on photos taken in 2013.

It's a mighty long way down the dusty trail to Magadan, once gateway to the hell that was Kołyma. Double the distance between London and Warsaw. At least today it's accessible by road from 'mainland' Russia - in Soviet times, it was only accessible by sea during the ice-free months, and by air. No land routes.

Below: Magadan is well covered by Google Earth Street View. A desperate, hellish place even in high summer.

"Minus 40 is no frost. Forty kilometres is no distance. Forty percent is no alcohol" (Siberian saying).

The imagery is from 2013. After the rupture with the West following the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, it is unlikely that Russia will allow Google to update its Street View maps or to extend the coverage. So see what's available to see today, dragging the orange man symbol onto roads highlighted in blue on Google Maps (on picking up the icon).

Google Street View offers an excellent sense of 'being there'. A few weeks ago, I was riding through Góra Kalwaria, not far from Warsaw, and thought to myself - "I was here recently with Eddie. We were looking for the location of the pizza restaurant we used to stop at when he and his sister were small... but I couldn't recall driving here with Eddie... and then it occurred to me that we did this scouting online, on Google Earth Street View, and my recollection of that moment shared by the computer screen felt just as though we'd actually been driving through Góra Kalwaria!

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