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

Christopher Ward's excellent history of the Soviet Union's second transcontinental rail line, the Baikal-Amur Mainline, or BAM, charts the rise and fall of a vast and impractical construction project. Through this lens he imparts both meaning and insight to everyday life in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, an era that until recently has been dismissed by Western scholars as one of stagnant decline. Brezhnev's Folly makes fair headway toward reversing this sort of wrongheaded thinking.

Ward's focus is on the most active years of the BAM project, roughly 1974–84.Work on the first and more famous transcontinental train line, the Trans-Siberian Railway, had been finished in 1905. The BAM diverged from the Trans-Sib in central Siberia, and cut north rather than south, ending in Sovetskaia Gavan, a full 600 miles north of Vladivostok, the terminus of the Trans-Sib. This northerly diversion multiplied the project's engineering problems and meant that most construction took place on geologically unstable frozen taiga, greatly compromising BAM's safety and functionality.

Although the title of his book is Brezhnev's Folly, Ward also explains some of the more prudent economic forces driving the project. Fundamentally, Soviet planners sought a better and more expedient trade corridor as they anticipated the rise of the East Asian economy; the BAM was meant to double the amount of rail traffic that could reach Pacific ports. While he addresses economic considerations early on, Ward focuses more on the symbolic effects of the project, which included reigniting socialist patriotism, deflecting criticism resulting from the Prague Spring repressions, and civilizing a remote swath of northeastern Siberia. Much as Stalin's later years were defined by his commitment to building the hydrogen bomb and Khrushchev is remembered for his mission to turn the steppes of Kazakhstan into fertile farmland, Ward makes the case that BAM began as Brezhnev's pet project and rapidly devolved into his personal bête noire. Ward probably overemphasizes the sexier, symbolic side of BAM's rationale and foregoes a more detailed analysis of how socialist planners became convinced that urbanization and industrialization in northern Siberia would be cost-effective.

Ward is a social and cultural historian, and scholars looking for a detailed economic analysis or a discussion of steel tensile strength, rail gauges, and the like should consult the work of other scholars. What Ward excels at is peopling BAM's construction sites with a fascinating cast of belligerent, disorganized workers who drink, steal, worry about the environment, ignore rules, and dream of amassing capital rather than building socialism. The youth of Brezhnev's generation was savvy and cynical enough to disdain the hyperbolic nationalist rhetoric that surrounded the BAM project, and Ward's skill in drawing out the disaffected voices of young people is this book's greatest strength. Chapters on female BAMers and national minorities are excellent studies of the interplay of labor, discrimination, and identity politics in the late Soviet Union.

Two quibbles: first, Ward rightly sees BAM as a sort of state-sponsored catchment program for Soviet youth. He depicts this as a negative development, pointing to the isolation of the far north, boredom, disorganization, and the lack of work skills as a few of the miseries that young workers had to endure as BAMers. This is all true, yet there is a historical precedent in both the United States and the USSR of sponsoring massive construction projects in order to direct and streamline the energies of idle young people in times when social unrest threatens. Ward does not analyze or acknowledge this potential ulterior motive; he simply notes the disparity between triumphal BAM propaganda and the squalid lived experience of BAM job-sites, and stops there.

Second, Ward hardly considers the question of just who and where the state might be in his story. While he has the field roughly divided into incompetent faceless bureaucrats back in Moscow and...