The Asset (Lance Spector, #1)

by Saul Herzog

The Yaroslavsky Train Terminal in Central Moscow had the distinction of being mile zero of the longest railway line on earth. The fact was commemorated by a small, concrete marker just outside the station with moss on its north side and a barely legible ‘0’ carved into its west face. The marker was placed in 1916 by a young engineer from Petrograd named Myasnikov, who personally oversaw the placement of every single marker along the ten thousand kilometer route. Myasnikov died in 1937 in a Siberian gulag, within sight of marker 3,434. His crime had been to suggest improvements to a later route drawn on a map by Stalin himself with pencil and ruler. A passenger on the Trans-Siberian could get on a train in Moscow and pass Myasnikov’s markers at a rate of one per minute for seven days, finally disembarking at the Pacific coast in Vladivostok, or Beijing, or even Pyongyang if they had the paperwork. Marker 1816, the only one located on a bridge, marked the spot where the train left Europe for Asia. The bridge spanned the Iset River. The peaks of the Urals were visible in the distance. Across the river rose the Soviet-era buildings of the city of Yekaterinburg. It was there, in 1723, that Peter the Great ordered the construction of a massive iron-making plant that would eventually become one of the largest metallurgical facilities ever built. It was there also, in July 1918, that Tsar Nicholas II, with his wife and children, was executed by the Bolsheviks. The site of the exe...

I have to assume this is factual as several of the other tangents have been and, if so, just wow!

overlooked the field in Khodynka, where, on the 30th of May 1896, the last Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, had been crowned. On that day, half a million people gathered for the festivities. When word spread that gifts were being handed out, the crowd got out of control. The resulting stampede led to over thirteen hundred people being crushed to death. The gift that caused the stampede was one bread roll, one piece of sausage, one pretzel, and one gingerbread cookie per person. Despite the tragedy, the bodies were cleared, the festivities continued, and the Tsar and his wife appeared before a jubilant crowd at the central pavilion as planned.

Daltons, or twelfths of the mass of a carbon-12 atom.