Construction of defenses on the Chinese Eastern Railway on the eve of and during the First World War: problems of financing

The article, based on previously unknown archival documents, examines the problem of financing the permanent defensive construction on the Chinese Eastern Railway on the eve of and during the First World War. For the first time in Russian historiography, an analysis of the process of financing Russian permanent defensive construction on the territory of China, the friendly neighboring state, was carried out. Based on materials of the implementation of a specific military engineering project, the issue of financial document flow in the apparatus of the War Ministry of the Russian Empire in 1913-1916 was studied. Particular attention is paid to such a factor of slowing down the process of reviewing and approving estimates for defensive construction as the constant change of military-administrative personnel: newly appointed officers had to spend time familiarizing themselves with the progress of construction and expenditure of budget funds. This purely personnel issue greatly impeded the process of financing construction work on the only existing strategic railway, which provided communication between the European and Asian parts of the Empire and along which military cargo flowed to the Russian-German front, delivered to Vladivostok by Russia’s Entente allies. Such slowness in financing the construction of structures to protect the Chinese Eastern Railway had the most detrimental effect on ensuring the security of supplies for the Russian army at the front, but the bureaucratic machine of the military administration of the Russian Empire was no longer capable of working faster.