 And he looked at what that did to American productive economy. He goes back to the Tsar, and they immediately start building a railroad to Siberia because Siberia is where all of the raw materials were. Western Russia was still farmland, much like the Ukraine that it bordered. But the raw materials were in the east, and the only way they could get them was through rail. Before that, it took a long time to get those raw materials to the productive plants of Western Russia.