Infrastructure Projects Office, Technical Building of the Ministry of Communications. Saint Petersburg.
Graftio had spent the last five days at the Volkhov site.
He knew this because five days at the site accumulated in a particular way, frozen ground underfoot, a continuous wind off Lake Ladoga that didn't let up even during the midday hours, the sound of surveyors working on the river ice with their theodolites and core hammers, and the steady buildup of notebooks filled with figures, elevations, bore samples, flow measurements that the Volkhov produced in January at a rate of roughly 4,940 cubic feet per second, or 140 cubic meters, according to the latest estimate from the river hydrology team that had come up from Moscow on Thursday.
He had returned that morning on the six-forty train. At his desk in the Ministry he had a table, two drawers full of plans that were no longer the originals from the proposal years but updated versions incorporating data from the actual site, and a chalkboard he had filled with the general scheme for the north foundation using the granite rock values that geologist Serebriakov had obtained from Wednesday's bore samples. The underlying granite was more uniform than the original plans had assumed. That simplified the formwork for the central pier foundation by at least three weeks of work.
He was reviewing that scheme when the orderly came in to tell him the Tsarevich had arrived at the building and would see him in ten minutes.
Graftio wrote down the last figure in his notebook, closed it, and went to the meeting room down the central corridor.
. . . . . . . . . .
Alexei arrived alone. No Tatiana, no the usual ministerial retinue that accompanied visits of this rank. Just a leather briefcase, which he set on the table before sitting down, at the far end from where Graftio was already seated.
The meeting room in the Ministry of Communications' technical building was a working room, a long unvarnished oak table, unupholstered chairs, a window that looked out onto the interior courtyard where a maintenance worker was at that moment scraping ice from the cobblestones. No rugs, no decorative plasterwork on the walls.
Alexei opened the briefcase. He took out three documents and laid them on the table in an arrangement that was clearly deliberate: the first was a geological map of Novgorod Province with red pencil annotations in the northeast quadrant. The second was a typewritten sheet with a table of figures. The third was a clipping from a German publication, the Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie from 1886, with several paragraphs marked in the margin with a vertical line.
"Have you had time to eat?" Alexei asked.
Graftio indicated that he had, that he'd eaten something on the train. It wasn't entirely accurate, on the train he had drunk tea, but the detail wasn't worth mentioning.
"Good." Alexei pointed to the map. "Tikhvin?"
It was the question of someone who already knows the answer and is verifying that the other person does too.
Graftio studied the map. The red mark was over the Tikhvin district, east of Lake Ladoga and southeast of the Volkhov site, roughly 118 miles from Saint Petersburg following the courses of the Sias and Tikhvinka rivers. He knew the region in general terms because the geological surveys of 1885 and 1902 had appeared in the hydrological reports he'd consulted for the dam project, the same Lower Devonian geological formation that produced the granite bedrock of the Volkhov appeared there interbedded with sedimentary strata that geologists described as ferruginous and aluminous clays.
"The Tikhvin bauxite deposits," he said.
"Identified by the Geological Committee expedition of 1885, recatalogued in 1902, never commercially exploited." Alexei pushed the sheet with the table of figures toward him. "This is the reserve estimate from the second report. The last column is ore purity expressed as a percentage of available alumina."
Graftio read the table. The alumina column values ranged between forty-eight and fifty-three percent, for raw bauxite, a more than acceptable figure.
The Hungarian bauxite deposits that supplied the aluminum plants of Central Europe ran between forty-five and fifty-five percent purity. Tikhvin was not inferior.
"Why hasn't anyone exploited them?" he asked, not because he lacked an answer, but because he wanted to verify whether his matched the Tsarevich's.
"Two reasons." Alexei pointed to the German clipping. "The first is that until 1886, the Hall-Héroult process for obtaining metallic aluminum from alumina by electrolysis didn't exist. Before that date, producing aluminum was a craft operation and the metal was worth more than silver. Nobody had reason to extract bauxite at industrial scale."
"And the second reason," said Graftio.
"The second reason is that the Hall-Héroult process requires between thirteen and sixteen kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of aluminum produced. That consumption makes production viable only alongside a cheap, continuous source of electricity. The European plants are in Switzerland, in Norway, in the French Alps, in each case, places with their own hydroelectric power. In Russia, in 1885 or 1902, there was no electricity source of that kind within a reasonable radius of Tikhvin. That's why the bauxite was sitting there untouched."
Graftio looked at the map. The Volkhov site was about 75 miles from Saint Petersburg.
Tikhvin was roughly 56 miles east of the Volkhov. The dam, once operational, would produce continuous power that the latest revised estimates placed between 58,000 and 72,000 kilowatts depending on seasonal flow.
The figure needed for a medium-capacity aluminum plant was on the order of 30,000 constant kilowatts.
He said nothing. He saw it all at once and didn't need to say it.
"The dam isn't just to light Saint Petersburg," said Alexei.
"No," said Graftio. "The dam is to smelt metal."
. . . . . . . . .
They spread the maps across the table. The Tikhvin geological map alongside the Volkhov hydrographic chart Graftio had brought back from the site, with the updated elevation data from the previous week's bore samples penciled in the margins. Together, the two documents formed the basis of an industrial logistics problem that Graftio began working through aloud while Alexei listened and took notes.
The first and most immediate issue was transport. Tikhvin had a rail line connecting it to Saint Petersburg, the Tikhvin Railway, built between 1874 and 1882.
The problem was the gauge. That line, like much of Russia's secondary rail network built before the 1891 standardization, ran on a three-foot-eleven-inch gauge, about 1.2 meters, while the main network operating standard rolling stock used a five-foot gauge, 1.52 meters.
A wagon loaded with bauxite ore leaving the mine at Tikhvin couldn't reach Saint Petersburg directly without a transfer at Volkhovstroy junction, where the ore would have to be unloaded from narrow-gauge cars and reloaded into standard-gauge ones.
That transfer added time, labor cost, and the risk of ore loss during handling.
"How much ore do you estimate for an initial-scale plant?" Alexei asked.
"To produce five thousand tons of aluminum per year, which would be a reasonable initial capacity for the applications you have in mind," said Graftio, "you would need between twenty and twenty-two thousand tons of bauxite annually. That's roughly sixty wagons of twenty tons each, per week, each way."
"The Volkhovstroy transfer becomes a bottleneck at that volume."
"Yes. Either the junction is resolved, which requires civil works at the station, or the Tikhvin branch gauge is converted to standard, which takes more time and more investment."
"Or?"
Graftio hadn't arrived at an 'or' yet. He was working the problem as he spoke.
"Or you avoid the railway in the initial phase and use road transport for the raw ore to Volkhovstroy station, which has standard gauge and a direct connection to the main network. The road between Tikhvin and Volkhovstroy is twenty-six miles. With Neva trucks in heavy-load configuration, a round trip is about six hours under normal conditions. With a fleet of twenty units making two runs a day, moving the necessary volume is feasible."
Alexei wrote in his notebook. He jotted down the figures and did a quick calculation in the margin. "The operating cost of truck transport versus rail transfer."
"Trucks have a higher cost per ton but lower upfront infrastructure cost. The rail solution is cheaper long-term but requires capital investment for the junction works. In an initial phase of three to five years, trucks are faster to deploy and more adaptable to growing volume."
"And the condition of the road between Tikhvin and Volkhovstroy in winter," said Alexei, not as a question.
"I don't know. It would need to be surveyed."
"Someone is looking at it this week." Alexei pointed to the map without elaborating.
Graftio nodded and moved on to the reduction plant problem. The electrolysis plant would have to be close to the electricity source, the Volkhov, not close to the mine. The ore would be transported to the plant, not the other way around. That meant the plant would be either 75 miles from Saint Petersburg, or, if built directly in the city using the dam's transmission line, on the industrial outskirts of Saint Petersburg itself, where the rest of the Putilov infrastructure already sat.
The transmission line from the dam to central Saint Petersburg was an additional piece of work the project's electrical engineers had already budgeted. Adding a branch to a future aluminum industrial complex didn't substantially change that budget.
"The problem of refractory material for the electrolysis furnaces," said Graftio. "The components of Hall-Héroult electrolysis cells use graphite carbon that is consumed during the process and must be continuously replenished. In Europe it's imported from the graphite deposits of Bohemia and Moravia. Russia has known deposits in Siberia, in the Yenisei region, but they've never been exploited at industrial scale."
"Which means in the initial phase the graphite would be imported."
"From Austria-Hungary, mainly, or from Germany. There's an open market for it, no monopoly like there is with bearings."
"For now." Alexei wrote something in his notebook and turned the page. The implication was clear to Graftio even without being spelled out: if the Siberian deposits existed and the logistics to exploit them were workable, graphite could be another potential independence. A problem for five years from now, not today.
What was for today was the calculation of time.
. . . . . . . . .
The fastest aluminum electrolysis plant built in Europe up to that point had taken sixteen months from project approval to first metal pour. That was the Aluminium-Industrie AG plant at Chippis, later Alusuisse, in Switzerland, inaugurated in 1908 with a connection to the Navizence River hydroelectric station. The Swiss had the entire supply chain resolved domestically, accumulated experience building similar facilities, and a climate that didn't produce five months of sub-zero temperatures complicating formwork and foundation pouring.
In Russia, the conservative estimate was twenty-four months from project approval to first pour. The optimistic estimate, if the site civil works started in parallel with dam construction without waiting for it to be operational, was twenty months.
The Volkhov dam, with the resources now allocated, needed between forty-eight and sixty months to reach electrical production.
Graftio laid those numbers on the table without comment, because they didn't need comment. An aluminum plant that required the dam's power to function couldn't produce aluminum until the dam was operational. The minimum waiting period was four years.
Alexei looked at the numbers from across the table for a moment.
"Is there any way to get provisional electricity before the dam is ready?"
It was the question Graftio had already been turning over on the return train, though without an urgency that forced him to resolve it.
"The coal thermal plants operating in Saint Petersburg have surplus capacity on certain shifts," he said. "If that surplus is redirected to a small-scale electrolysis installation, you can start with a trial run that isn't commercially significant but allows you to validate the process and train technical personnel. A hundred, a hundred and fifty tons of aluminum per year, not the five thousand of the full plant."
"What does that require?"
"An agreement with the thermal plants for access to the surplus, which under current conditions is negotiable, since that surplus is being wasted. A set of small-format electrolysis cells, which can be manufactured at Putilov using Swiss plant designs as a reference. And chemically processed alumina to feed the cells, which would need to be imported from Hungarian plants until Russia has its own Bayer refinery."
Graftio mentioned that he had the alumina consumption figures per ton of aluminum produced in the notebook he had been reading at the Volkhov site during the stretches when the temperature made it impossible to continue the core sampling. He went to the desk drawer, retrieved that notebook, opened it to the relevant page, and left it on top of the map for Alexei to see.
Alexei read it at the speed of someone who knows exactly what they're looking for in a data table.
"Does alumina imported from Hungary carry any export restrictions?"
"Not currently. The alumina market is open. There are three main producers in Europe, Austria-Hungary, France, and Greece. None have exclusive agreements that would prevent sales to Russia."
Alexei noted all three countries in the margin of the map.
Graftio's notebook contained something beyond the consumption table, it also held a summary of an article from the Journal of Industrial Chemistry from 1910, on the mechanical properties of extruded aluminum profiles compared to structural carbon steel. Aluminum weighed one-third as much as steel per equivalent volume, and its tensile strength, in the right alloys, reached between forty and sixty percent of structural steel's. For structures where weight was a determining variable, that was significant.
Graftio didn't know exactly what applications the future Tsar had in mind for aluminum. He had a general sense of it, because the conversations over the past two months about engines and aeronautics left patterns readable to anyone paying attention, but he hadn't asked directly because it wasn't his area, and because if the Tsarevich wanted him to know, he would tell him.
What had become clear to him since the Ministry meeting in December, when the Volkhov project had been approved, was that each piece of what was being built connected to the others in a way that went beyond the logic of ordinary industrial planning. A hydroelectric dam made sense as an energy infrastructure project. A hydroelectric dam designed specifically to power an aluminum plant that in turn produced a metal which in 1912 Germany and Great Britain had to import from neutral countries was a different kind of project entirely.
What exactly that other kind was, Graftio was coming to understand in fragments.
. . . . . . . . . .
Alexei closed his notebook. He spread his fingers on the map and left them resting there without pressure for a moment, looking at the red marks over Tikhvin, the line of the Volkhov, the dotted line he himself had penciled in representing the electrical transmission branch from the dam to Saint Petersburg.
"What's needed to start the reconnaissance phase at Tikhvin?"
Graftio knew, because he had thought it through on the train. "A geologist who knows the Lower Devonian formation in the region, not the same one from the Volkhov bore samples, since that man comes from the fluvial geology school and Tikhvin is sedimentary rock geology. A drilling crew, eight people minimum with light percussion drilling equipment, for this kind of reconnaissance you don't need the heavy civil works apparatus, just the manual percussion borers. And an administrative manager to handle housing and logistics in a place that in January has temperatures comparable to the Volkhov site."
"Time to put that together?"
"One week to have the team assembled and on the way. Two weeks in the field to get the basic data on the depth and extent of the bauxite strata. With that I can produce a reserve estimate reliable enough for the project's budget planning."
"Then start tomorrow."
It wasn't exactly an order.
"I need a geologist," he repeated.
"There's one at the Geological Committee who wrote the 1902 report on the Tikhvin deposits. Valentin Andreyevich Karpov. He's still active." Alexei opened the briefcase and pulled out a one-page typewritten file. "This is his record. He's spent three years without the Committee assigning him any field projects because the Committee's budget hasn't covered prospecting expeditions in three years. He'll be available."
Graftio took the file and read it. Karpov was fifty-one years old, a specialist in northwest Russian sedimentary geology, with four technical papers published in the Geological Committee's Trudy between 1895 and 1907. The 1902 Tikhvin report was his.
"Do I contact him directly?"
"Through the technical secretary of the Ministry of Industry," said Alexei. "There's a temporary secondment procedure for Geological Committee personnel to Ministry projects. That way it doesn't require a State Council resolution, just the signature of the Deputy Minister of Industry." He paused. "The signature will be ready this afternoon."
Graftio didn't ask how it would be ready on that timeline. He had learned, in the months since the first meeting in the ministerial office back in November, that when the Tsarevich said something would be ready by a given time, it was because the process to make it ready had already begun before he knew it.
There was a working silence. Graftio folded the Tikhvin map carefully and stored it alongside the Volkhov one. He closed the notebook with the alumina consumption figures. He lined up the three documents Alexei had brought in his briefcase at the edge of the table, in case he wanted to take them or leave them for the project folder.
Alexei collected them. Then he looked toward the window. The maintenance worker had finished with the courtyard cobblestones and was walking away with the scraper over his shoulder.
"If the dam produces enough electricity in forty-eight months," said Alexei, without looking away from the courtyard, "...and the provisional aluminum plant in Saint Petersburg has been running for twenty-four months by then, how many people will we have trained in the process?"
Graftio thought it through. A small-format electrolysis plant with four to six operating cells required an operations team of between twenty and thirty people with specific training. Plus the cell maintenance technicians, the low-voltage circuit electricians, the metal quality analysis staff. In total, between forty and fifty people who, at the end of those two years of trial operation, would know the Hall-Héroult process in practical detail, not just in theory.
"Fifty people with real hands-on experience in the process," he said. "Enough to staff the production line teams at the full-scale plant."
Alexei nodded. "That's what matters. The metal is the product. The people who know how to produce it are the asset."
Graftio understood that this explained the logic of the provisional phase, it wasn't primarily about producing aluminum before the dam was ready. It was about having fifty people who knew how to produce it when the dam was ready. The waiting time became training time.
"Is there anything else for this afternoon?" Alexei asked.
"The Volkhov site report from the week," said Graftio. "If you need it."
"Send it to the technical office. I'll look at it tonight."
Alexei closed the briefcase. He put on his coat, which he had hung on the back of the chair when he came in. Quick process, no delay. Graftio stood up.
"Engineer Graftio." Alexei stopped before reaching the door. "Geologist Karpov. When you contact him, don't explain the connection between the Tikhvin project and the Volkhov project, or the aluminum plant. Just the bauxite reserve reconnaissance as a first step. The rest when he's been brought into the project."
Graftio didn't ask why, because the reason was obvious enough: the fewer people who knew the complete connection between the projects, the fewer people who could report that connection to anyone who shouldn't know it. Tikhvin and the Volkhov separately were two prospecting and infrastructure projects. Together, they were something that warranted discretion.
"I'll do it that way," he said.
Alexei left. His footsteps on the tiled floor of the technical building's corridor faded toward the main staircase.
. . . . . . . . .
Graftio stayed in the meeting room for another ten minutes. Not because he had anything to do there, but because it was easier to think with the maps still spread on the table than with them put away.
He had spent three months working with a clarity of purpose he hadn't had in the previous ten years. In those previous ten years, when he presented the Volkhov project before ministerial committees, he had come to know the exact moment in each meeting when the committee stopped listening, it was when someone mentioned the cost of winter formwork and the figure in rubles produced a particular silence that meant the proposal had died, even if no one said so explicitly.
That silence had not occurred once since November.
He rolled up the Tikhvin map together with the Volkhov one, tied them with the leather cord he used for that kind of transport, and went out into the corridor. At his desk he needed to find the contact information for the Ministry of Industry's technical secretary and draft the formal secondment request for Karpov before the Ministry closed at five.
As he walked down the corridor, he passed the window looking out onto the outer courtyard. The maintenance worker who had scraped the cobblestones was now at the far end of the yard, clearing the snow that had built up on the steps of the side entrance.
Graftio kept walking.
. . . . . . . . . .
At four forty-five, the Ministry of Industry's technical secretary received the secondment request for Valentin Karpov via the building's internal mail. He read it, pulled Karpov's file from the Geological Committee records, confirmed that the Deputy Minister's signature was on the attached document exactly as promised, and stamped the request as approved.
Fifteen minutes later, the secretary sent a messenger to Karpov's address in the Vasilievsky district with the appointment notification and instructions to present himself at the Ministry's technical office the following morning at nine.
Graftio received the stamped confirmation at five-oh-two, two minutes past the Ministry's official closing time, because the technical secretary was the kind of civil servant who didn't close a file until it was complete.
The following week, Karpov would be in Tikhvin with a drilling crew of eight and the light percussion boring equipment.
At that moment, neither Karpov nor the eight crew members knew what bauxite was actually for.
Years later, when the first aluminum pour flowed out of the electrolysis cells powered by the Volkhov's electricity, some of them still wouldn't fully know.
[Nemryz: This chapter is somewhat technical and draws on real knowledge, in fact, the entire novel does. If any articles or figures appear in the text, you can look them up online and find that what the story describes is accurate. That's something I take responsibility for, and it's also part of why updates take time. I want this novel to have historical accuracy, even though I know that's a difficult goal.
I hope you enjoy reading this. I'm happy to answer your questions at any time, I always like to do that. Take care.
If you've enjoyed this story and want to read ahead, I have more chapters available on my patreon.com/Nemryz. Your support helps me continue writing this novel and AU. Thank you for reading! ]