Appendix E: Biographies

Kraft

Nikolai Osipovich Kraft (St. Petersburg 1798 – Warsaw 1857; see Image 248) was the son of the personal physician of Tsar Paul I (1754–1801; reigned 1796–1801; see Image 417).1 He became a student at the Institute of the Corps of Transport Engineers, Class of 1820, graduating with the rank of lieutenant. He worked in Odessa, where he was engaged in expanding the commercial port and studying the transport means of this southern area. In 1825–1831, he was in charge of explorations for making a canal with a dividing station for joining the Volga and Don rivers, and made the negative assessment that there was not enough water in the dividing station to make the canal. In 1832–1833, he participated in a project to build a canal to avoid the rapids of the Dniepr River. In 1833, he was on a mission in Prussia, where he inspected the new highway from Tilsit to Berlin and made a study of the cost estimates for its construction. In March 1835, he investigated the condition of the Linz–Budweis Railway built by F.A. Gerstner and made an unfavorable report. In 1836, he was invited to teach at the Institute of the Corps of Transport Engineers, giving a course on drawing up technological projects and supplying cost estimates for them. In 1836, he joined the staff of the Petersburg Committee for Buildings and Hydraulic Works.

On 1 June 1839, he and his Institute colleague, Pavel Petrovich Mel’nikov (1804–1880; see Image 247), sent by the Main Administration of Transport, set out for a 15-month stay in the United States to inspect railways and other transportation systems. There, they studied railroads under construction as well as already in operation, steam engine factories, and hydrotechnical installations. They met with many well-known engineers, including Brown, Latrobe, Robinson, Swift, and Major Whistler (see Images 7–8, 21), who, they ultimately recommended, should be invited to be the consulting engineer for the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway. On returning to Russia, Mel’nikov drew up their three-volume technical report “emphasizing the successes and beneficial effects of railways in the United States.” In 1841, their recommendations were considered by an interdepartmental commission established to draw up a preliminary project for this railway. Kraft and Mel’nikov were both members of this commission. Kraft drew up a detailed cost estimate. In January 1842, Nicholas I (see Images 420–423) called a special meeting to look at the railway project, which Kraft and Mel’nikov were not invited to attend. On 1 February 1842, a ukase was issued announcing the decision to build the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway, and Kraft and Mel’nikov were appointed heads, respectively, of the Southern Administration (the route of which was from the Kolomenets River in the Valdai District of Novgorod Province to Moscow) and the Northern Administration (the route of which was from St. Petersburg to the Kolomenets River in the Valdai District of Novgorod Province), both routes established as of May 1843. Kraft worked out a program for testing all the large railway bridges along the St. Petersburg–Moscow line after they were built.

In August 1851, on the completion of the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway and travel upon it by the Imperial family to Moscow on the 22nd for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Nicholas I, Major General Kraft was awarded the Order of St. Anne (1st class, with Imperial crown).

He became the second director of the line in 1852, remaining in this position for three years. In 1855, he was made director of the XIII (Warsaw) Division of Transport. He died in Warsaw in 1857. In 1859, during the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Institute of Railway Transport Engineers, the newspaper, Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok (The Russian Art Newspaper) published his biography and portrait along with those of three other outstanding graduates of the Institute. In 1891, at a special session of the Imperial Russian Technological Society, it was noted that N.O. Kraft, P.P. Mel’nikov, and D.I. Zhuravskii (see Image 249) had “established the Russian school of Engineers.”

An assessment of Kraft by his contemporaries reveals a kind and honorable man who endured extreme physical and mental suffering. The manifestations of his mental suffering caused him to be viewed by all as a great eccentric.

Mel’nikov believed him to be a sensible and honorable man with an unparalleld mistrust of others and stressed the difficulties existing between them. When Mel’nikov proposed to Kraft that the latter accompany him to the United States in 1839–1840, Kraft had misgivings about leaving his family so suddenly and for so long, but his inquiring nature and curiosity won out over that concern. Then a disgruntled subordinate of Mel’nikov’s filled Kraft’s ears with such a negative assessment of Mel’nikov that, although they embarked on their trip to America, their personal relations ceased to be cordial, and in America they spent very little time together. No effort to reconcile them was successful, and they spent the entire period of the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway avoiding all contact with one another. It was as a result of this impasse that both Mel’nikov and Kraft proposed in 1842 that Major Whistler be invited to be the consulting engineer and intermediary between them, because both of them trusted him. In 1857, Mel’nikov was passing through Warsaw, where his brother was commandant and Kraft was working. He was informed that Kraft was very ill, and, while he was preparing to visit Kraft, news came of the latter’s death marked by great suffering and all alone except for his orderly.

A.I. Shtukenberg (see Image 250), Class of 1836 at the Institute of Transport Engineers, knew Kraft as a friend of his father and father-in-law. Kraft personally chose him to work in the Southern Administration. Shtukenberg said that Kraft, along with Major Whistler, had the most influence on him and on his situation. He saw them as his good geniuses.2 He described how Kraft came to see him in 1842, at the start of their explorations for the railway bed, stayed with him, and was simple and straightforward. However, given his ultra-sensitive character, as soon as they turned to business, Kraft accused Shtukenberg of paying too much to the workers the latter had hired. This dichotomy of attitudes in matters personal and professional persisted, but sometimes the line was crossed. When the explorations were completed in 1842, Kraft gave Shtukenberg assignments that would keep him in Vyshnii Volochek, knowing that Shtukenberg’s wife and family were there. When Kraft disrupted Shtukenberg’s private life on Easter Sunday of 1843 by requiring him to transfer to Tver’ that day, he invited Shtukenberg to live in his home and all of Shtukenberg’s staff to take dinners there. Shtukenberg said Kraft’s face, which almost always wore a gloomy expression, resembled that of Napoleon I and that Kraft was very aware of it. From Shtukenberg we also know that Kraft spoke English, French, and German fluently.

In staying with Kraft, Shtukenberg found him very well-mannered, kind, and intelligent, as well as a good example of an eccentric, suffering sometimes from spleen or hypochondria. All the windows in Kraft’s study were covered over with green wallpaper, so that from the street one could think no one lived there. In the study itself there was a feeble green light, like light passing through sea water at a considerable depth. Shtukenberg could not understand how Kraft could see to work in this light. Perhaps the reason for the shaded light was that Kraft frequently suffered from sometimes-excruciating headaches. They resulted in his either sitting motionless for hours or becoming so antagonistic that he would beat his servants, then immediately try to make up for it by rewarding them. Faced with the necessity of addressing a large gathering of his officers, he usually became flustered, even at times commenting on his personality flaw. This characteristic was construed by people – such as the local governor, who tried to make his acquaintance – not as eccentricity but as overweening pride, which Kraft became noted for. He even lived apart from his wife and family in order to have complete isolation from the wider social contact their presence would have brought. His family eventually stopped visiting him on their journeys from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and he almost never went to visit them. It is interesting, therefore, that when Major Whistler was on his deathbed, Kraft visited him. Anna Whistler’s diaries inform us, in addition, in the entry for Monday July 27 [1846], that on 23 July 1846 Kraft sent officers to Major Whistler to persuade him to accept going to Elagin Island in “a government barge with its many oars,” where Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna’s name day was being celebrated.

When Kraft died, Shtukenberg begged the latter’s sister to give him her brother’s papers. He found out four years later (in 1861) that she had sold three baskets of them to a wrapping-paper pedlar.

There were among his contemporaries and posterity those who saw him as less prominent and less capable than Mel’nikov. This has been construed by Haywood as due to Mel’nikov’s “ability to project a favourable image of himself in his prolific writings and an unfavourable one of Kraft.” But Mel’nikov was writing his memoirs some thirty years after the events and swore that because they were only for himself he was telling the honest truth. Haywood also points out that while Kraft “may have been slightly inferior to Mel’nikov in capability, breadth of outlook, experience and training, at least in matters pertaining to railways,” in which he did not have “a pioneering interest,” during the actual building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway, progress on Kraft’s Southern Administration was more rapid than on Mel’nikov’s Northern Administration.

Notes