The Crisis of Railway Transportation and its Impact on the Economic Situation of the Grodno Province at the Beginning of the First World War

Abstract

The article notes that the crisis phenomena in the work of Russian railways appeared already at the very beginning of the first world war. At the same time, the attempt of the central authorities to solve the emerging transport problems, as well as their desire to ensure an uninterrupted supply of the urban population and industry with everything necessary on the basis of the primary planning of freight rail transportation, was not crowned with success. It follows from the reports of the Bialystok, Grodno and other city councils that the Warsaw and Kharkiv district committees practically did not interact with the local self-government bodies of cities and therefore poorly oriented in the real needs of the inhabitants in fuel and food.At the same time, the provincial commissions did not always have comprehensive information about the provision of the population with basic necessities. The commissions also had been caused significant difficulties determining the number of petitions satisfied by the district committees for the extraordinary delivery of railway goods and the number of goods that actually arrived in the cities under these permits. By the spring of 1915, it turned out that almost none of the commissions organized in the cities of the Grodno province could give accurate and complete answers to the governor's requests. The question of correlation between basic necessities and fuel that reached the local population from the total volume of goods that arrived in the province and then were exported from it to neighboring regions turned out to be the most problematic for most commissions.