 BAM: The Way to the Future or the Road to Nowhere? By Oleksandr ZAHORNY |
Our politicians like to cite aphorism "the art of possible". Stressed is the word "possible" in order to avoid the excessive expectations and reproaches of the population. It is as if the limits of "possible" are known beforehand. In fact, they are experienced through mistakes and experiments.
The construction of BAM (the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway in Eastern Siberia and Far East) is a brilliant example in proof of the above. So far this enormous project has not brought the country anything except great losses. According to the experts, the railway has expected load capacity of less than 10-15 percent. This is not surprising.
I have been eager to see BAM since 1996. As a child I saw my grandfathers watching the popular TV program "Vremya" (Time) where the hosts solemnly informed Soviet citizens of the news about the construction of the railway. BAM. This short and somewhat strange word has been engraved in my memory forever: one of almost desert places, young builders, members of the Komsomol Union, severe climate, new multi-storied buildings and the first trains to the "big land".
Indeed, the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway dominated public life in the Soviet Union. BAM was arguably the greatest and most costly construction feat in postwar Soviet history. Crossing some 2,500 miles from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, BAM was to open a vast eastern sector of the USSR to economic development.
As conceived by Soviet officialdom, the mainline would serve as the "path toward communism" that would unite all Soviet citizens, regardless of their profession, ethnicity, or gender. The proponents of the project, along with a number of prominent journalists and scientists boasted that the mainline would allow the USSR to exploit the riches of Siberia and forge a new industrial base by the twenty-first century.
Times changed very quickly. During the so-called perestroika (reformation) all slogans were rewritten visa versa. The mass media painted the railway "from Baikal to Amur" into black colors and called it "the road to nowhere". So what's the truth?
The prehistory of BAM construction goes back to the 19th century. Russia's longstanding desire for a Pacific port was realized with the foundation of the city of Vladivostok (Far East of Russia) in 1860. The city was founded as a military outpost, but its outstanding natural harbour soon brought it prosperity as a trading port. The city's nomination as the headquarters of the Russian Pacific fleet in the 1870s brought further growth, and by the twentieth century it had become a major center of international trade. By 1880, Vladivostok had grown into a center of international trade and the lack of adequate transportation links between European Russia and its Far Eastern provinces soon became an obvious problem. In 1891, Czar Alexander III drew up plans for the Trans-Siberian Railway and initiated its construction. Upon his death three years later, the work was continued by his son Nicholas. Despite the enormity of the project, a continuous route was completed in 1905 having been rushed to completion by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War the year before. The Trans-Siberian railway connected European Russia with Russian Far East provinces. It was 9,289 kilometers long, spanned 7 time zones and ran from Moscow to Vladivostok.
But this is a prehistory. The construction of BAM began in March 1974. There was a necessity to build a strategic alternative route to the Trans-Siberian Railway especially to the vulnerable sections which are close to the border with China. The government of the Soviet Union finally made a decision to build the Baikal-Amur Railroad. Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated that a new BAM project would become a huge Komsomol undertaking. The youth of the Soviet Union were called to the task, specifically the Komsomol. The Komsomol was the youth organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and consisted of approximately 40 million members ranging from ages fourteen to twenty-eight.
Soviet leaders planned for BAM to be built in a decade (1974-1984), a goal which was set taking into account this "youth coefficient". The 17th Komsomol Congress declared the Baikal-Amur railroad to be the number one mammoth all-Union Komsomol undertaking. Much preliminary work lay ahead for geodesists, geologists, builders, aviators, taiga pathfinders, and engineers. It was necessary to anticipate the countless difficulties the builders might encounter while "in the field", and ruggedly reliable equipment was developed for work in permafrost (ground permanently frozen except for the surface soils that thaw when temperatures rise above freezing) and arctic cold. Newly discovered deposits were added to the maps, and energy supply centers were built.
On April 27, 1974 the first contingent of young volunteers left Moscow for the Siberian taiga (the extensive, sub-Arctic evergreen forest of the Soviet Union). The Young Communists: Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and representatives of other ethnical groups of the Soviet Union weren't the only workers who worked on building the BAM. Countless political prisoners and criminals who were jailed in the extensive Gulag system were also put to the task. The forced laborers were often transported along the BAM in secret cars which were attached to passenger trains, the passengers unknowing of the human cargo that was being transported along with them.
The BAM builders overcame all difficulties. They developed more than 400 million cubic meters of land, dug about 30 kilometers of tunnels and built 4,000 bridges. The railroad was also intended to be a supply route along which the population could settle and inhabit. This the most hostile and primitive depths of Siberia. Over 200 railroad stations were eventually built along the line. Workers advancing into the forest had makeshift living and working conditions. Tents or pre-fabricated structures were originally setup; then once construction began, proper housing, medical stations, schools, and sporting grounds followed.
The total route is 3,200 kilometers. This averages to 20.5 km per month of finished railroad track that was built. This timetable included cutting through seven mountain ranges, and digging tunnels through four of them, one of which is 15 km long. The roadbed for the BAM required moving 100,000 cubic meters of earth-either cutting or filling-for each kilometer of track. Bridges also needed to be constructed over 3,000 rivers and streams, and because of the permafrost, new bridge construction techniques had to be devised. Driving a tractor across an area of taiga and stripping off a layer of moss or turf with the tractor treads would cause the temperature of the soil to change and turn the once hard-as-stone soil into a swamp. Insulation techniques were developed which would surround a selected area to prevent the soil from thawing. The intense cold also meant rails had to be made of special steel that would not become brittle at the very low temperatures of the Siberian winter.
Taking into consideration the goals set by the Soviet government, no Western media were invited to attend the historic event of BAM opening in 1984 as Soviet officials did not want any questions asked about the line's operational status. In reality, only one third of the BAM's track was fully operational at the time. The final piece of track was laid in 1986. BAM was finally declared complete in 1991.
The medal "For the Construction of the Baikul-Amur Mainline" was instituted by a Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on October 8, 1976. The medal was awarded for distinguished labor at the construction sites, qualified project research execution, and for logistical support provided to the workers and the overall project who worked with construction or construction services for a period of not less than 3 years. It was awarded approximately 170,000 times. There are 3 small letters on the suspension ring, "LMD", for "Leningradskii Monetny Dvor" (the Leningrad Mint). It is made of Brass, measures 32mm in diameter, and is 2.6mm thick. The suspension ring is part of the medal. There are no known variations.
While the mythical world of the "Project of the Century" grew, the "Path to the Future" itself led to no concrete accomplishments in either the industrial or social development of the USSR. By the mid-1980s, the nation's leaders were unable to contend with the wide array of unforeseen circumstances that resulted from such a massive undertaking, including a nascent conservation movement, unruly BAMers traveling abroad, dissatisfied foreign workers toiling on the railroad, a restive worker population, marginalized ethnic minorities, and disenfranchised and frustrated female laborers. Each of these intractable tensions produced fault lines in the geology of the project's populace that, mirrored in the country at large, rendered apart the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state less than a decade after BAM's announced completion.
There is a museum of history of BAM construction in Severobaikalsk (Buriyatia, Russia) where one can find a collection of documents, photos, personal things of design and exploration work on BAM.
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More in the section:
The Building of Verkhovna Rada. History of the sitting place of Ukrainian Parliament
Read also previous issue' articles:
A heat wave in Ukraine
"The Spirit of Hollybush" Comes to Donetsk
The new wave of Labor Migration
Home Discoveries
Asserting dignity
New Public Health for the New Ukraine
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