Amur Cart Road or Amur Wheel Road (Russian: Аму́рская колёсная доро́га or "Аму́рская колесу́ха", tr.: Amurskaya kolesukha) was a 2,000 km cartage road in Amur Oblast of Imperial Russia that connected Khabarovsk with Blagoveshchensk through mostly uninhabited areas of taiga and swamps.
The project was accomplished during 1898–1909 with nearly exclusive usage of the katorga labor. It was praised as a success in organization of penal labor, rightfully claiming that no other country had anything comparable in scale in the practice of prison labor. In 1905 over 700 convicts were simultaneously at work on the road. This feat was surpassed beyond comparison by the Gulag system of the Soviet Union.
Reference
- Andrey Sobol , Kолесуха ("Kolesukha"), 1925, memoirs, in Russian.
