It stretches halfway across the globe. If you were to travel from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland to the shores of the Bering Strait you would have to cover 6,000 miles and change your watch ten times. If you went from the Indian border in the South to the Arctic island of Severnaya Zemlya you would cross 45 degrees of latitude. By the fastest train it would take you ten days to go from Leningrad to Vladisvostok and three and a half days from Murmansk to Odessa on the Black Sea. In time of peace and especially during the cold winters they are an extreme economic burden on the nation.
Transportation is a major problem in Russia.
River travel is slow and cumbersome. In winter all of them freeze over. Road building material is scarce and paved roads are few and far in between. Russia had only 55,000 miles of railroad. This has improved since than but even today Russia has only one mile of railroad per 100 square miles of land compared to the US 7.1 miles and Britain's 20.6 miles.