Brezhnev's Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism

6. The Rails of Fraternal Cooperation: BAMers Abroad and Foreigners at Home

6 The Rails of Fraternal Cooperation BAMers Abroad and Foreigners at Home Unfortunately, Komsomol BAM headquarters has just now learned, based on an unexplained and belated receipt of information from the Bureau of International Youth Tourism Sputnik, that certain youth selected to participate in the first Druzhba [Friendship] voyage to Cuba were not the best representatives of BAMer youth. We have received no explanation from Sputnik regarding these deficient young people. Report of the Komsomol Central Committee,  A   BAM construction and its attendant propaganda campaign was the need to impress the Soviet Union’s allies and enemies, particularly the People’s Republic of China, with the USSR’s ability to undertake and complete this massive endeavor as an expression of Soviet geostrategic and military might. In culling labor from the youth of those “fraternal nations” that were within the Soviet sphere of influence, the BAM administration attempted to amass an additional workforce to supplement the poorly trained and insufficiently motivated domestic BAMers. These  fraternal nations included Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam, which belonged to Comecon, the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Chinese youth were not invited to participate in the “project of the century.” Former BAMer Nikolai V. Nikitin recalled working with the East Germans: “To tell the truth, we got along fairly well with the [East] Germans despite their poor command of Russian and their obvious displeasure at having to spend their summers in our mosquito-infested and sweltering camp. Their refusal to share their cigarettes with us really irked us, though.”¹ The administration used foreign labor throughout the BAM Zone to propagandize the railway among Soviet allies. The project’s managers felt this accomplishment would serve as a catalyst in increasing trade between the European USSR and the Pacific Rim, particularly with Japan, and thus help to reduce the Soviet economy’s dependence on trade with Western Europe and the United States.² To complete the ambitious goal of driving the nearly ,-mile railway across Eurasia within a decade, BAM officials made two fundamental decisions. First, they used the incentive of foreign travel, higher pay, and automobile vouchers in an attempt to encourage generally ineffectual domestic cadres to build the railway more quickly and efficiently. This incentive to work more diligently was for those workers considered “morally upstanding” and “pacesetting.” Second, the BAM administrators employed ideological and practical inducements to attract international laborers, most of whom were already studying in the Soviet Union, to assist in the project’s construction.³ Many BAMers traveled outside the USSR as ostensible ambassadors of Soviet achievements, to perpetuate the officially generated illusion of BAM as a showcase of international solidarity and cooperation. Based on findings in the archives, however, it is more likely that the approximately ten thousand BAMers who journeyed abroad actually damaged the reputations of the project in particular and the Soviet Union in general in the eyes of some of their hosts.⁴ Rather than promoting BAM and Soviet state socialism, many BAMers abroad deflected attention from the project through their social, not only ideological, interactions with other young people. These BAMers gained personal knowledge of the world outside the Soviet Union, and upon their return home, they would relate their experiences to their comrades. Non-Soviet BAMers labored on the project in a distinctly unequal capacity in comparison with their Soviet counterparts. Because of the unreliable The Rails of Fraternal Cooperation /  nature of some domestic BAMers, railway administrators turned to these foreigners, most of whom were recruited from a number of socialist countries . In return for Soviet economic and political assistance, BAM leadership used gentle but persistent pressure to convince the heads of socialist nations to send their youth to BAM. Non-Soviet youth who worked on the railway were frequently surprised and even disgruntled at being segregated from their Soviet counterparts while toiling on low-prestige infrastructure construction assignments, many of which were located in the hinterlands of the BAM Zone. To the state’s considerable embarrassment, however, these international BAMers witnessed firsthand the railway’s corruption, gross inefficiency, and colossal waste of resources. Later, these individuals would undoubtedly relate their experiences to those back home, as had the Soviet youth who had ventured abroad. Evidence suggests that the foreign BAMers’ generally negative impressions of their time working on the project further damaged both their and their countrymen’s...