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

1. Introduction: The Project of the Century

1 Introduction The Project of the Century W   , the assessment of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) and its effects on the Soviet Union transformed radically. In , Leonid Brezhnev addressed the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress: “The Baikal-Amur Railway will transform the cities and settlements of Siberia, the North, and the Far East into high-culture centers while exploiting the rich natural resources of those regions!”¹ By , however , the Moscow News told a different story: “What is the railway like today? It is in a state of ruin and desolation. Rarely does a train whistle disturb the surrounding silence. The stations are deserted. The passenger terminals, beautiful structures built from individual designs that were chosen in competitions , are neglected. The settlements built by envoys from various republics of the former USSR have fallen into decay. Each year the number of residents dwindles—they keep scattering in all directions.”² The chasm of social and political change that these assessments bracket proved more vast than even the four thousand kilometers of harsh Siberian terrain traversed by one of the most ambitious public works projects ever conceived. The BAM was so important to the entire leadership of the Soviet  Union that it tirelessly poured massive resources into a project doomed to crumble almost immediately upon completion.³ The Soviet Union used the railway to bolster collective faith in the command-administrative system as well as to improve the economy. The personal influence of Brezhnev represented a strong force in the push to popularize the project. In its heyday, BAM represented the quintessential Soviet big engineering project, as the nation’s scientists, journalists, academics, and propagandists extolled the railway’s virtue as the USSR’s first step toward realizing a utopian society. BAM was the last example of Soviet “gigantomania”. Like its many predecessors it shared a massive allocation of human and material resources, a highly inefficient utilization of them, and a general disregard for any impact on the environment. The project represented the government’s attempt to exploit the USSR’s vast natural resources for propagandistic and economic reasons.⁴ As one in a long progression of Soviet colossal schemes that the party used to herald the accomplishments of state socialism, BAM was the final expression of postStalin Prometheanism, in which the conquest of nature through technology was seen as a panacea for various political, social, and economic problems.⁵ Although the project achieved little in terms of tangible accomplishments, the propaganda effort created by the Soviet state to cast BAM in a favorable light was one of the most significant, if not the greatest, achievement of the eighteen-year Brezhnev period.⁶ The resources employed to portray BAM as an epic victory of humankind over nature, a forum for ethnic cooperation, and a catalyst for the economic development of the USSR’s eastern reaches equaled and occasionally surpassed those used to build the railway itself. In fact, the propaganda system created to promote BAM touched the lives of more Soviet citizens than its actual construction. Interviews with BAM participants stress the propagandistic nature of BAM rather than its concrete accomplishments. Interestingly, although never publicly conceived as such by the state, the railway served as a place where Soviet youth could express themselves with relative freedom. This situation was the product of a number of factors. One was that the project’s great distance from the centers of state power in the European part of the Soviet Union and Moscow in particular allowed the BAM labor population the space to voice a number of taboo ideas. They could engage in behaviors that were antithetical to official Soviet notions of civil obedience.These behaviors included, but were not limited to, expressions of national identity from a variety of non-Russian ethnic groups that resided  / Introduction: The Project of the Century both inside and outside the Soviet Union, a voicing of environmentalist and ecological tendencies that in some cases exceeded the scope of what the state allowed, philosophies of women’s liberation and expressions of gender equality , and even widespread participation in criminal activity ranging from petty theft to rape and murder. One of the most intriguing aspects of BAM is the stark contrast between the project’s public portrayal in official media outlets and the private impressions of the railway held by those who worked it. Among other things, this disparity reveals the regime’s fundamental lack of understanding...