The idea of bridging the strait was not new; both sides in the war had wanted it. When German forces held the Crimea, they had begun stockpiling steel and materials for a road-and-rail bridge of their own, and they completed a separate aerial cable railway that kept their armies supplied for more than a year. Retreating in the autumn of 1943, the Wehrmacht destroyed both the ropeway and the unfinished bridge works rather than leave them behind. Then, in the spring of 1944, the Red Army liberated Crimea - and Soviet engineers seized the materials the retreating Germans had left behind and put them to their own use. Racing to complete a rail link, they drove piles up to thirty meters long into the strait bed and strung together more than a hundred spans, with movable sections to let ships pass. The bridge opened to traffic in November 1944, a hurried triumph stitched together from a rival's abandoned plans.

The strait had a defense the builders had underestimated. Each winter, ice forms on these shallow waters and the currents drive it southward in great drifting sheets, and that first winter the ice came for the bridge. Pier after pier gave way under the pressure. By late February 1945, dozens of pillars and spans had been destroyed, and of more than two thousand piles, over a thousand were badly damaged. The engineers fought back with everything they had - shelling the ice, blasting it from the shore - but nothing worked fast enough, and foul weather made aerial bombing impossible. Icebreakers could not even reach the spans to relieve the pressure. In the end there was no choice but to dismantle what remained. The longest bridge in the Soviet Union had survived a single season.

Failure did not kill the dream of a fixed crossing. In 1949 the Soviet government decreed a new, permanent road-and-rail bridge, but the difficult geology and geography of the strait defeated the planners, and in 1950 the effort was shelved in favor of a ferry line instead. For decades the notion drifted in and out of proposals without becoming real. The engineering problems that had beaten the 1944 bridge - the shifting seabed, the earth tremors, the punishing ice - were never trivial, and every generation that studied the strait came away with fresh respect for it. The winter of 1945 had taught a hard lesson about building across this narrow, treacherous stretch of water, and the lesson took a very long time to unlearn.