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

2. Prometheanism versus Conservationism on the Railway

2 Prometheanism versus Conservationism on the Railway The Baikal-Amur Railway crosses all of Eastern Siberia and the Far East. The construction of this railroad will cut through the expanse of Siberia and open that region’s inestimable natural wealth to industrial development—towns and cities will emerge alongside factories and mines on the face of this new land. Leonid Brezhnev to the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress,  A , officially generated propaganda apparatus heralded the construction of the BAM Railway as the vanguard of Soviet Prometheanism . This ideology promoted the notion that humankind would conquer nature by using technology to push BAM through Siberia and the Soviet Far East. But within the railway’s large construction force (known collectively in Russian as bamovtsy, best rendered in English as “BAMers”), some workers espoused a conservationist consciousness in the struggle to determine the fate of the BAM Zone’s ecology. These BAMers’ experiences mirrored a larger trend felt throughout the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev years. By the early s, some Soviet citizens had begun to publicly express concern over  the widespread damage that centrally planned industry was causing in their country.¹ Soon after the massive project’s inception, a small but influential group of administrators—based primarily within the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League (the Komsomol) and the USSR Ministry of Transport Construction—voiced their concerns. With the central bureaucracy urging completion of the railway on schedule, these administrators questioned the impact of the railway’s construction on the ecology of Eastern Siberia and the Soviet Far East. BAMers themselves engaged in a debate over whether to actively protect the local environment. This debate originated within a framework that was both created and administered by the twin pillars of official Soviet society—the government and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Although the discussion was at times dynamic and even divisive , those BAM bureaucrats who attempted to inculcate a sense of environmental consciousness to their subordinates never directly challenged the Party’s authority to dictate environmental policy. Nevertheless, the disagreement among BAMers and others outside the BAM Zone over what degree of attention should be given to the fate of flora and fauna along the railway’s route did not cease after BAM’s announced completion in . Instead, the discussion expanded in scope and boiled over during the Gorbachev years, eventually contributing to the demise of the entire Soviet experiment in . On one side of this environmental debate were journalists and high-level administrators based outside the region (mainly in Moscow) who promoted the BAM project’s Promethean qualities. These developers maintained that any obstacle put forward by nature could be conquered by humankind through the use of technology. Showing little regard for environmental concerns , these individuals served as the mouthpiece of one perspective of the official rhetoric. They characterized the BAM Zone as a “virgin territory” with abundant resources ripe for immediate and complete exploitation. Representing another view were the BAM “environmentalists”—namely, a group of locally based scientists and higher CPSU, Komsomol, and government officials in Moscow who rejected Prometheanism as a problematic philosophy . If left unchallenged, they felt, the project would ravage the delicate ecological balance of the BAM Zone’s permafrost and forests. These individuals struggled to instill environmental awareness in the larger public, but their message was only moderately successful because of their small numbers and near total lack of support from the center. Prometheanism versus Conservationism on the Railway /  In addition, this effort to bolster environmental consciousness was likely ignored by many of the half-million bamovtsy who actually built the railway. The majority, many of whom were under twenty-five, lacked adequate knowledge of railway construction and sought merely to complete the project on schedule to receive lucrative bonuses (some of which equaled a worker’s entire annual salary) from such agencies as the Ministry of Transport Construction and the Ministry of Railways. In a quest for financial remuneration and career advancement that rewarded meeting deadlines and building quotas on time or ahead of schedule, many young BAMers ultimately ignored the conservationist message espoused by those in the scientific and governmental communities. Nevertheless, the self-styled BAM conservationists used the local press to heighten BAMer awareness about the environmental damage caused by railway construction. Local editors and journalists were more sympathetic to the cause than most national publications because of their firsthand knowledge of...