Between 1917 and 1941, the young Soviet state launched an intensive effort to defeat what it perceived to be the historical enemy of Russian modernization: bezdorozhia or roadlessness. This paper traces the evolution of the institutions, associations, mass campaigns, forced labor, and holidays created by the Soviet regime to conquer the distances that made rural resources unobtainable for urban use. Soviet roads were designed to be corridors of legitimacy and control as well as modernization. Roads were not only of the traditional asphalt, concrete, dirt and gravel varieties. Devices were invented, such as all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, and swamp boats, to turn rivers, the frozen tundra, and the desert sands into road-like transportation corridors. The development of roads in the interwar period, a phenomenon long overlooked by historians, reveals a great deal about the political, social, and economic forces behind the Soviet modernization imperative.