Life Along the BAM

The Sands of Chara

Nothing but sand as far as the eye can see. Desert sand – or are they dunes? Dark mountains on the horizon, capped with snow. I’ve trekked out here with Sergey Logvinenko, more than an hour through woods and marshes, branches and brushwood, with pools of water everywhere. At first they resemble sand dunes, with a few pines here and there, but gradually the hills become bigger and more barren. It’s a dramatic sight, all of this sand with snow-topped peaks in the distance. A little further on, we see a small lake with a wall of sand as its backdrop. These sand drifts in the middle of Siberia, on the perpetually frozen soil, created thousands of years ago at the foot of a glacier, are unique. We trudge on through the loose sand, to the bare spots where nothing can grow.

The experience is at once breathtaking and ponderous – I’m sweating profusely and starting to ache all over. I’m a city boy, unlike Sergey, who’s on a survival trip in this wilderness with a group of twenty-five young men and women. He doesn’t falter. Just before this, they had forded the river in a rubber boat that carried their tents, provisions, and baggage – and me. There’s still plenty of ice, even though it’s June. Ice sticks around in the river well into July. Then it returns in September. The group will spend about ten days camping in various locations, but I will be returning this evening to Novaya Chara, in Zabaikalsky Krai. I have a room there, with a real bed, in an average Russian apartment. During my travels, I’m staying in the homes of ordinary people, almost all of whom have a connection with the BAM. Either they or their parents came here in the 1970s to work on the railroad, under extremely difficult conditions. They never left.

Novaya Chara is the “capital” of Kalarsky District, which is almost one and a half times the size of my native Netherlands. It is 6,079 kilometers east of Moscow, and about 4,000 people live here. It is a stop on the Baikal-Amur Mainline, which I am writing a book about. To reach the BAM, I took the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow, got off at Ulan-Ude, and then backtracked a bit to get to Tayshet. The train I took from Moscow was named Tsarskoye Zoloto (“Tsar’s Gold”), a luxury tourist train with Beijing as its final destination. The most elegant cars of this German excursion train are copies of the comfortable carriages in which party leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev traveled around the country in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of red velvet, copper, and wood paneling. And extravagant restaurant cars. Travelers are truly pampered here, and I was no exception, which was a good thing: the next leg on the BAM would be a different story. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

The BAM is the little brother of the Trans-Siberian Express, which was initially called the Great Russian Railroad. The Trans-Sib was constructed between 1891 and 1916 and is thus a legacy of the tsarist era. In 1891, Tsarevich Nikolai Romanov presided over the launch of construction work in Vladivostok.

By the end of the nineteenth century, rails had been laid all the way from St. Petersburg to the Urals. Some 7,000 kilometers remained to be added to reach the Pacific. There were plenty of people living in western Siberia, but settlement was sparse toward the east, beyond Lake Baikal. The labor pool had to come from somewhere else, and in the end more than 100,000 people (mostly prisoners and soldiers) worked on this, the world’s longest railroad, designed to connect the Russian Empire’s two Western capitals – St. Petersburg and Moscow – with the Pacific Ocean and the city of Vladivostok (“Ruler of the East”), founded in 1872.

A monument to the Komsomolki in Severobaikalsk

By 1898, the first train reached Lake Baikal, and until 1904, when the Trans-Baikal Line was completed (see Russian Life May/June 2001), specially constructed ferries shuttled trains between the western and eastern shores of the lake.

In 1901, the eastern section of the line, between Mysovaya and Vladivostok was opened, but there was a problem: it ran through Chinese-controlled Manchuria. This was not a very comforting thought, in view of the threat posed by China and, especially, by Japan. With the opening of a bridge in Khabarovsk in 1916 – one year before the Russian Revolution – the entire route was on Russian soil for the first time. This year marks the centennial of this memorable feat.

From Tayshet, I continued my journey on regular Russian trains. First I passed over the gigantic dam at Bratsk to reach Ust-Kut, on the Lena River, the BAM’s official starting point. After that, I would travel in twelve stages, crossing 3,150 kilometers, to my destination: Komsomolsk-on-Amur. I had allotted 45 days for the trip and planned to stop in places like Kuanda, Niya and Tynda, not exactly Russian-sounding names.

A memorial to the Romanovs in Yekaterinburg

Everywhere I went, people knew I was coming; I had organized it all through homestays, and so at every station I found a Gennady or Svetlana waiting for me. In Ust-Kut, it was Tanya who picked me up in the middle of the night and took me to her home, about 10 kilometers outside the town. I was worried about how I was supposed to get into town the next day, but it all worked out, as is so often the case in Russia. Tanya didn’t leave me for a moment: she took me everywhere, arranged meetings with BAM veterans, showed me the BAM monuments, and even cooked for me. She was also a congenial person. Pavel, her husband, had a chain of garden center shops called Everything for the House.

BAMovtsi who came to work in Zvyozdny and stayed

By the look of things, he was doing well: their house in the temporary village (“temporary” for 40 years – a common situation on the BAM) was not beautiful, but had been nicely renovated – unlike most of the other houses – and was very comfortable, with Jacuzzis and the like, and two big four-wheel-drive vehicles parked outside. On a lark, Pasha (a diminutive of Pavel) had created a ski run on a nearby mountain enjoyed by large numbers of Ust-Kut residents during the winter. This was all semi-legal: making it an official facility would have required years of bureaucratic frustration and bribes, but since everyone in town benefited from it and Pasha wasn’t making a ton of money on it – indeed, it cost him money for upkeep – local officials just looked the other way. Pasha and Tanya shared their house with their twelve-year-old son, an adopted daughter, age ten, Pasha’s brother Sergei, and their binge-drinking cousin Roma.

Tanya’s parents had been true Bamovtsy, having come here specifically to build the railroad. As a young girl, she attended the opening of the new car bridge over the Lena, in 1989, a grand spectacle with fanfare and speeches and red banners. She can still remember her high hopes and then her disappointment: to her, the bridge was now just an ugly object.

The Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway

The BAM was constructed between 1974 and 1984, with spurs added as recently as 2003. But its history extends as far back as the 1933 Five Year Plan. The Soviets began building it at that time, starting with a branch from the Trans-Sib, running northward from the small village of Bamovskaya to the junction with the planned main route at Tynda. That segment was completed in 1937. In the meantime, the Gulag had settled into the BAM region, with work camps that gained notoriety under the name “BAMlag.” The first BAM engineers were arrested and executed, falling victim to the Great Terror engulfing the country. Thus, it was mainly prisoners who began work on the main route.

This spurt of construction was short-lived: when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it came to a halt. Later, entire sections of track were dismantled, so that the rails could be relaid near Stalingrad. Construction continued only in the Far East, between Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Sovetskaya Gavan, where the first trains went into service in 1945.

BAM Worker Larisa Norina, then and now

After victory in the Great Patriotic War that same year, work resumed in other locations. Japanese POWs worked on construction of the BAM between Komsomolsk and Tynda, and five years later the Tayshet-Bratsk segment was opened in the west.

With Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, everything ground to a halt again. It was not until 1974 that General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev gave an impassioned speech that put the BAM center stage. From that point on, things proceeded rapidly. The previously interrupted line from the Trans-Sib to Tynda was reopened in 1975, and in 1984 a team of shock workers, amid fanfare, drove the golden spike into the rails connecting the eastern and western BAM sections. Under Mikhail Gorbachev (from 1985 on), the BAM lost its status as a “priority project,” and almost all funding was cut. Nevertheless, 1989 was an important year: the BAM became fully operational across its entire length.

The objectives of the BAM were basically the same as those of the Trans-Sib: to lessen the military vulnerability of the Far East and make Siberia’s resources more accessible. But it was also – unofficially – a source of prestige for the party leader. Brezhnev, whose predecessor had launched the first human into space, needed to immortalize his own name as well. The BAM could help him outshine Khrushchev. He called the BAM the biggest civil engineering project in history. The Trans-Sib was three times longer (9,200 compared to 3,150 kilometers), but by taking the southern route it had avoided many geological problems. The BAM’s route runs through vast swathes of swampland and is vulnerable to earthquakes and landslides; almost all of it is built on permafrost – permanently frozen soil. There were three thousand points at which water in various forms had to be surmounted, as well as seven mountain ridges. Construction involved displacing far more earth than did the Trans-Sib.

Another problem was that even fewer people lived along the BAM’s route – just a handful of Evenks, nomadic reindeer herders native to the region. The taiga here is desolate and impenetrable. But the Communist Party’s Politburo demanded that the BAM be built in ten years. The tried-and-true solution of forced labor was considered but rejected: the prestige of the project would suffer too much, and Stalinism was a thing of the past.

Novy Urgal

Ultimately, the Politburo decided to entrust construction to its youth division, the Komsomol. Young people from across the empire came to the BAM, drawn by adventure, privileges, and idealism. Komsomol organizations from various Soviet republics adopted segments of the route. Kazakhs, Latvians and Georgians all laid kilometers of track and constructed stations and villages. And they left their national marks behind. For example, the most important street in the town of Niya, about 6,000 kilometers from Tbilisi, is named Rustaveli Street, after the central street in the Georgian capital. Elsewhere, stations are adorned with Uzbek motifs or Azerbaijani domes.

At least, this was how the western part was done; the rest, eastward from Tynda – the “capital of the BAM” – was entrusted to the army. The USSR had special railroad troops that were primarily responsible for guarding this important infrastructure, but little by little they came to be used for construction. Thousands of conscripts were put to work laying rails, guided and assisted by civil engineers and other specialists.

A retired colonel told me that the Komsomol was important here as well: nearly all of the conscripts were also Komsomol members. But the propaganda campaign to recruit Komsomol members was focused almost entirely on construction west of Tynda. That’s where the press appeared if some golden spike was to be driven in, that’s where the agitprop trains were active, and that’s where the celebrities made appearances. It was not a state secret that the army built half of the BAM, but no one talked about it. To this day, you see fewer BAM monuments in the east.

Apart from this, the circumstances on both sides were largely the same. First, geologists had to scout the terrain and map out the route, then the “paratroopers” arrived to build camps with basic amenities, and finally Komsomol brigades came to lay track and build facilities and temporary settlements.

BAM veterans Yuri and Galina Burko, of Kuanda

Conditions were difficult; in the initial months, the Bamovtsy lived in tents and cars, even though winter lasts about eight months here and temperatures can drop to -50°C. Work had to stop at -45º. In the summer, the air seethes with mosquitoes. I started whining after spending an hour in the taiga, and these people had to build a railroad literally out of nothing. Getting supplies was often a problem, building materials were defective or unavailable, and improvisation was required on a grand scale. Given these circumstances, it is quite a feat that 3,097 kilometers of railroad were constructed, including five tunnels, 2,230 bridges, three cities, and 60 villages.

Of course, vital expertise came from older experts, but the lion’s share of BAM workers were inexperienced 18-to-27-year-olds. Almost all of the workers from that era with whom I spoke talked passionately about their time on the BAM. The spirit was one of harmony and fraternity, with an almost internationalist atmosphere. Guitars were played around the campfire, and there was plenty of partying and lovemaking. No one locked their doors, since there was no theft. Dozens of couples married and hundreds of BAM children were born.

Most of the stories I heard put me in mind of Soviet hippies, and photographs also show many longhaired people in tight pants or full skirts with ribbons in their hair. “Let the sun shine always,” I read in one caption.

Of course, these are the stories of the people who stayed, who regarded themselves as the crème de la crème of Soviet youth. People might be inclined to embroider the past, weary as they are of the criticism that has been directed at the BAM since perestroika.

Sarcastic labels such as “the longest monument to stagnation” or “the railroad from here to nowhere” are hurtful and leave the impression that they toiled for nothing. In fact, amid all that enthusiasm, I also heard plenty of tales about people who got out when they could – something basically equivalent to military desertion.

Whatever the case, almost all of the present-day Bamovtsy sing nature’s praises and go in for hunting, fishing, and foraging for berries and mushrooms. Remigius, a Lithuanian, told me that he visits his brother in Kaunas once every two years. It’s a nice place, but to live there? No, thanks. He likes the open spaces, the vast expanse, whereas in Europe everything is so constrained, and you need permits for everything. Here you’re often self-reliant and you control your own destiny. People here can also do anything – build a house, slaughter animals, put up preserves, fix cars, you name it. It’s a necessity on the BAM.

In the dining car

It’s clear to me that I am not that into nature. I didn’t go rafting on the Vitim, nor did I climb the 3,000-meter “Mount BAM” or slog through mountain passes. But even I enjoy Lake Baikal. So majestic, so unimaginably big. Six hundred kilometers long, up to 1,600 meters deep. Hundreds of rivers, brooks, and streams feed the lake, whereas only one river flows out: the Angara. The surrounding mountain ranges rise as high as 1,800 meters and are snow-capped until June. The mountains feature lush alpine meadows and glacial lakes. The waters are home to nerpas, or Baikal seals, the world’s only freshwater seals; the omul, a salmon-like whitefish; and the golomyanka, or Baikal oilfish, a translucent fish without scales or swim bladder that gives live birth to its young. The Baikal is also a juncture of three religions: shamanism, Buddhism, and Russian Orthodoxy. All of the creeds consider the lake sacred.

I lucked out on this trip and was able to view Baikal from two sides.

While on the Tsar’s Gold, I got to take the Circum-Baikal Railway, covering eighty-nine kilometers and thirty-nine tunnels along the southern shore. This beltway faded in significance after a new section of the Trans-Sib opened at Irkutsk in 1956. Since then, this track – possibly the finest part of the Trans-Siberian railroad, a candidate for the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites – has been used by only one local train and the occasional charter run.

Then, along the BAM, I was in Severobaikalsk, on the north side, where I experienced a gorgeous sunrise and went out on the water with fishermen. Purified, I departed from there for my destination of Komsomolsk.

And everywhere along the way I was awed by people’s hospitality. It was like a comfort blanket to stay in the homes of all these people. Of course, I avoided political discussions, and people actually had little need for them. People in Siberia don’t want much to do with Moscow, or even anything west of the Urals. I am told that the Russians there – especially the Muscovites – are arrogant and always in a hurry; they’ve sold their souls to materialism.

Homestay wasn’t available everywhere; in Zeysk I slept in the high school, in Novy Urgal in the train station. Both buildings were locked at night, and fortunately the night watchman and the woman on night duty (dezhurnaya), respectively, were locked in with me. Russians have a great capacity for improvisation and approach laws creatively – which can be calamitous at the national level, but it can sometimes be quite liberating when it comes to life’s details. For example, I smoke while traveling, but smoking in the train station is prohibited, and, since I was locked in, I couldn’t step outside.

“Oh,” the dezhurnaya said, “just go stand by the curtain in the hall. It’s such a big space that no one will smell it tomorrow.” Of course, I didn’t do that at the school, but in that case I was simply given the key.

The BAM’s future is uncertain. The recently departed director of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, threatened to completely shut down passenger service between Tynda and Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Even the one train that travels the route each day is unprofitable. That would be a nightmare for the people here, since no alternative exists.

But it appears that Yakunin was putting out feelers in a political ploy, in order to lay claim to money from other political coffers. This, after all, is the same Yakunin who proposed that the BAM be extended northward, across the Bering Strait to America. That would actually open up prospects for the Bamovtsy: at present, many young people are moving away because there’s little work on the railroad. The people living there are just enough to keep the BAM functioning. But such a huge undertaking would have to be a project that the whole country got behind –the only way the Russians could undertake such a megalomaniacal project. And that’s just not possible in this case. President Vladimir Putin may be pushing hard in the direction of authoritarianism and nationalism, but the days of the Gulag and Soviet pathos are gone for good.

Still, there is a ray of hope for the BAM community: Work is progressing on the second, parallel track, to be completed in 2021. It is an important development for the coal industry in Yakutia, and to relieve the overloaded Trans-Sib.

For now, the virgin pine forests dominate; nature will likely remain unspoiled here for several centuries. If the forests surrounding Lake Baikal are left alone, then maybe the BAM slogan will prove true and together we will take “the road to the shining future.” RL

How to ride the BAM: Mir Corporation is offering a luxury Trans-Siberian + BAM train tour this June (bit.ly/mir-bam). Transsiberianexpress.net also offers many Trans-Sib options, and can arrange BAM travel.

BAM Facts: The BAM is 3500 km long and includes 5 tunnels and 2230 bridges. It spans seven mountain ridges and 3000 water objects.