“Only the train can get you there,” the bartender said as we gaped at miles of forbidding, snow-covered mountains and endless miles of lonely taiga. “With the plane, you never know, and the car? Forget it. This is the way to go.” Almost stunned by the vastness of this empty, frozen zone, warmed by a comfortable bar car and our 100 grams of vodka, we had to agree. Only the BAM could reach into Siberia: the land of the gulag and ancient tribes, Soviet pioneers trying to tame the land — and the future. This was definitely the way to go.
One of the great engineering feats of the twentieth century, the 2,305-mile-long Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), is barely known outside of Russia and not much better known within. Running about 400 miles north of and parallel to its older and better-known cousin, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the BAM crosses a cold and virtually empty landscape, winding through taiga and mountains, connecting up loose threads of Russian history.
Like other Soviet remnants, the BAM is still quaking from the country’s implosion. Critics see it as money wasted in a distant, unforgiving deep-freeze, while those whose lives are tied to the line hope for its revival. After 75 years of planning and building, the colossal project, seeking its place in a brave new world, reflects the lives of average Russians, also feeling their way in uncertain times.
The BAM was originally planned as a strategically alternate route to the Trans-Siberian, which skirts the Chinese border as it courses south of Lake Baikal on its 5,772 mile route from Moscow to Russia’s Pacific port of Vladivostok. Construction of the Trans-Siberian began in 1891 and was spurred on by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. It was finished in 1905, even as the country went down to defeat.
Wary in its humiliation, Russia kept a close watch both on Japan’s expansion and on the looming Chinese threat on its southern border. After the 1917 Revolution, the new Soviet government saw Japan’s absorption of Inner Mongolia and its 1931 occupation of Manchuria as handwriting on the wall. Plans were laid for a second transcontinental rail line, one safer from foreign predation. But security was not the only factor. Planners were also interested in exploiting the colossal riches of Siberia through colonization and development.
The BAM was first proposed in the 1930s, and construction proceeded in helter-skelter leaps, with little planning and even less understanding of the obstacles lying in wait. The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 brought most work on the BAM to a halt. After the war, opponents argued that BAM construction would drain needed resources from western Russia. After Stalin’s death in 1953, work on the BAM ceased altogether.
Then, exactly two decades later, the Arab oil crisis and deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations gave BAM proponents a second wind. In 1974, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev reanimated plans for the BAM line. The reasons were the same as 40 years before: hopes of exploiting oil and gas reserves and concern for the main Trans-Siberian line’s security in the wake of Sino-Soviet skirmishes along their shared Siberian border. Completion of the BAM was ambitiously targeted for 1982.
Soviet authorities marketed the BAM project as “The Construction Project of the Century,” and it became a national passion. Irina Zhilesova, a lifelong Muscovite born in 1968, recalls the daily bulletins – in newspapers and on television – showcasing the BAM’s progress.
“It was around 1976,” Zhilesova said. “Every day, news reports would tell how many kilometers had been completed, or would show visits of performers who traveled to BAM towns to entertain the workers. To us, building the BAM was building Communism. It was very exciting.”
Though actually a system of spurs and trunks joining the main single line (see map, page 44), the eventual plan for the BAM followed the Trans-Siberian route out of Moscow and across the Urals into Siberia, where it broke away at Taishet, crossing the Angara River at Bratsk. After curving around the northern edge of Lake Baikal past Severobaikalsk, it passed Chara and Tynda, traversing the mighty Amur River at Komsomolsk-na-Amure, to reach the Pacific Ocean port of Sovietskaya Gavan. From Komsomolsk, an alternative route rejoins the Trans-Siberian at Khabarovsk to terminate at Vladivostok. In all, the BAM Zone – as the region traversed by the BAM trains is known – includes 60 or so towns. Most were built to create and maintain the railway and they have a combined population today of 300,000.
For political reasons, the BAM line was declared completed more than once. When the “Golden Spike” connecting the eastern and western sections of the railway was driven in on September 1984 at Balbukhta, near Kuanda, only one third of the BAM’s track was fully operational. The BAM was truly finished only with the commissioning of the 10-mile Severomuysk Tunnel in 2003.
About six to eight trains travel the BAM system each day, traversing the route in seven days. I opted for the private train – aptly named “The Trans-Siberian Express” – operated by GW Travel, Ltd., of London, which covers the route in 14 days. Traveling at a slower pace allowed the 60 passengers aboard to tour remote BAM towns and the surrounding countryside before continuing on.
After leaving Moscow’s Kazan station, we passed through Yekaterinburg in the Urals and Novosibirsk, the capital of Western Siberia, moving on to Abakan, the capital of Khakassia in Eastern Siberia. As part of our introduction to Siberia, a four-member troupe, Ailanys Khakass Folklor, joined the train to demonstrate traditional Khakass music (see story on Khakassia, page 52), including throat singing.
Usually associated with Central Asia, traditional throat singing requires the singer to manipulate the harmonic resonances of his voice to mimic natural sounds, such as animals, wind or waterfalls. Our singer demonstrated several pitches based on a steady drone, then began to sing. The impression, as one passenger said, is “like sounds from outer space.”
Beyond Abakan, the Siberian landscape seemed idyllic: fishermen in mini-camps sat huddled around wood fires; cattle and horses browsed the broad, flat fields. Almost out of nowhere, however, we lurched back into the industrialized world, crossing over the huge Bratsk hydroelectric dam on the Angara River.
A city of 250,000 today, Bratsk began as a Cossack fortress in 1631, when a unit of 40 soldiers was sent there to impose a tax on the indigenous Buryats. In fact, the town derives its name from a misunderstanding: Russian settlers took the name of the native Buryats to be “brat” – Russian for “brother” – and the name “bratskiye lyudi,” or “brother people,” morphed into today’s Bratsk. A wooden watchtower still guards the Angara River, as part of the Angara River Village Open-Air Museum of Wooden Houses, which also includes the Church of St. Michael.
Begun in 1954, the Bratsk dam was part of a vast plan to tame and exploit the Siberian rivers, with labor – chiefly idealistic young Komsomol members – and material transported over the Trans-Siberian. Construction was completed in seven years.
In fact, during the dam’s construction, the average age in the town was 26. Working through short summers and long winters, the young Communists also constructed the city, industrial complexes for processing aluminum, fertilizer, and paper pulp, and the BAM link to the Trans-Siberian. The dam became a symbol for the Soviet plan to taming the wilderness through selfless dedication (i.e. free labor).
At 410 feet high and 14,488 feet wide at its crest, the dam creates the Bratsk Sea, which has an area of 5,426 km2 – the world’s sixth largest reservoir. Its electric power capacity – 4,500 megawatts – is vividly expressed by the mesh of overhead wires that crisscross the sky.
Yet the dam’s construction wreaked an economic and emotional toll. Insufficient planning meant that 200 villages had to be quickly moved as the reservoir filled. Valuable forest and agricultural resources were simply drowned. Problems continue, as emissions from the town’s industrial enterprises poison the air and water, and the population, living in dreary, Soviet-style buildings, has declined from 302,000 in 1995 to 250,000 – equivalent with the 1989 population. Yet the city’s average age remains low: just 36.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its supersized industry, Bratsk draws few visitors. Like the rest of the BAM Zone, the city lacks a tourist infrastructure. The largest hotel in Bratsk, for example, is barely adequate, according to Tatyana Kolesnikova, GWT’s on-train manager. A sort of “red” mindset persists, Kolesnikova said: local agents still do not understand freedom of movement. Kolesnikova found it impossible to buy air tickets in Bratsk for a couple that had to leave the trip: “The agent at the office was terrified to do anything. Finally, the office insisted on a credit card linked to an account in rubles, which we didn’t have.”
Local companies seize any opportunity to pick up the pieces of Intourist, the former state-run tourism monopoly. At age 40, Kolesnikova came of age on the cusp of perestroika. Trained by Intourist, she now enjoys the freedom to pick and choose her jobs. “Intourist was a state within a state. They controlled every part of the tourist infrastructure. But all that is gone,” Kolesnikova said. In larger cities, new travel companies were cobbled together from the Intourist wreckage, but in rarely-visited Siberian cities and towns, small, private enterprises are trying to fill the vacuum with limited facilities.
As we headed east from Bratsk on a section of the rail line built between 1974 and 1989, we left industrialization behind and began to see the small settlements that had sprung up to build and support the BAM, like Severobaikalsk, founded in 1974. Perched at the northern end of Lake Baikal, Severobaikalsk is little-needed for the maintenance of the BAM, and it has so far been unable to reinvent itself as a tourist destination like towns at the southern end of the lake, such as Irkutsk.
In fact, Lake Baikal’s 1996 designation as a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site has inhibited the development of Severobaikalsk, since no construction is allowed on the reserved land at the Lake’s northern tip. Further, no roads join the northern and southern sections of the lake, and the ten-hour boat ride operates only in summer. The population of Severobaikalsk today numbers 27,300, down slightly from 28,300 in 1989, but residents still proudly promote their BAM connection in their local museum and gallery.
The museum contains exhibits relating to the planning and construction of the BAM, making it clear that this most beautiful region was also the most dangerous and difficult for BAM builders. A railway model shows the four Mysoviye tunnels between Severobaikalsk and Nizhneangarsk, which were started in 1978 and finally finished in 1989. Workers had to cut through mountains subject to seismic activity that repeatedly triggered avalanches and landslides.
Though geologists had warned of the dangers, ham-fisted planners determined the route, and builders were left to face permafrost, fault lines, and underground lakes and rivers prone to flooding. Construction required special locomotives, rolling stock, snowplows, snow-melting machines, and switch heaters, along with rails made of special steel that does not become brittle at Siberian winter temperatures, which can drop to -50° C. Such conditions also make the line expensive to maintain.
Amazingly, exploration, surveys, design and building the tunnels all pushed forward at once. Workers for their part had inadequate clothing, shoes, and instruments. And their maps – notoriously inaccurate to foil spies – were often counterproductive. Building the four tunnels sucked up one-third of the line’s total construction budget.
Adjacent to the museum is an art gallery with over 2,000 works donated by artists from all over the country, including dramatic oil portraits of the men who built the BAM – most likely free workers or Komsomol members. None of the paintings memorialize any of the estimated 400,000 prisoners held in the BAM Corrective Labor Camps, or BAMlag; none shows any of the thousands of Japanese and German POWs who lived and died on the line; none remembers the “railway troops” of the military Railway Forces for the Construction and Maintenance of Railways, who were little better than prisoners. Memory is selective, and in Soviet times, inconvenient truths were usually suppressed.
Outside Severobaikalsk, the spectacular, 7,500 foot Severomuysk Mountains loomed, snowcapped and shrouded in wet clouds. Then our train suddenly entered the 10-mile-long Severomuysk tunnel, from which it emerged only 20 minutes later. The tunnel was the last to open in 2003 and even today passenger traffic generally follows a 22-mile bypass.
Safe in a warm, comfortable restaurant car, it is difficult to imagine the hardships and dangers the builders confronted when they began work on Severomuysk tunnel in 1978. In 1979, a deluge of thermal water from a 420-foot-deep underground lake burst through a sheer granite face, sweeping away men and equipment. Several miners died, and work stopped for 18 months, but there is no memorial to the victims.
Andrei Nikolayevich, 38, from Ukraine, is the married father of two children, 13 and 3. He once worked as an assistant engineer on the BAM but said he prefers his current duties as steward in a deluxe carriage, trading 12-hour shifts with Yelena Yurevna, 24, originally from Yakutsk.
Andrei and Yelena are not even a generation apart, but they fall or either side of the upheavals of the 1990s. While Andrei said he feels that “everything is better now, everything,” Yelena has no recollection of the Soviet period and has grown up entirely in the post-Soviet world. But for both, the train is an opportunity for a future. Yelena says her parents are very proud of her job, “and my friends are very envious. They’d love to do what I do – travel, see the world.”
Little could be farther from the original intent of this northern route – exploiting the wealth of Siberia and the Far East – than tourism. And yet, so far the BAM has brought out little of the vast mineral wealth of this region. The Molodyozhnaya asbestos deposit near our next stop, Taksimo, for example, once seemed loaded with opportunity. Yet as the health hazards of asbestos became better known, plans to exploit the deposit were shelved. A proposed 30-mile rail link from the mine was never begun.
Now a town of just over 10,000, Taksimo’s hopes are pinned on nearby gold deposits, discovered in 1959 at the Irokinda mine 40 miles south. In 2005 alone, the area produced over 83,000 ounces of gold. But the mine has yet to warrant a rail spur – only a gravel road connects Irokinda to the Taksimo BAM station.
It is also at Taksimo that the electrified BAM line ends and the diesel section begins. As they were changing the locomotives, I walked to the nearby BAM monument, a 1930s seaplane mounted on a plinth. The small plane had crashed into nearby Barachinsk Lake in 1940, while conducting aerial surveys for the train route. It was finally recovered and restored in the 1970s.
Even in such a remote location, the BAM is constantly well-supplied. Our train’s chief cook, Ilkhamutdin Komolov, 52, came from Dushanbe, Tajikistan. He has worked for the railroad since 1978, and he clearly appreciated the Soviet period. “Before, things were stable,” Komolov said. “You knew where you were. But now… There’s a feeling of instability in people’s minds, not just their daily lives. No one knows what’s going to happen.” Komolov said he enjoys his work, but says retirement is not really an option: “Pensions are so ridiculously low – about 2500 rubles per month [$100] that I can’t afford to.” For him, the railway is security.
Uncertainty shrouds the future of the BAM as well. Several miles farther on, we passed Kuanda, site of the Golden Spike ceremony, and arrived at Novaya Chara. Like other towns along the line, Novaya Chara was constructed to build and support the railway, and its unusual aluminum train station still sends the message that the BAM was something new and daring in the wilderness. Like other BAM towns, however, Chara’s population is shrinking, down from 4,700 to 4,400 since 2002.
The town takes its name from the Chara river, from which is also derived the name for the unique lilac-colored gemstone, charoit, exhibited in the local museum along with BAM artifacts, including the Golden Spike. Most interesting are the displays related to the BAM workers – including BAMlag prisoners – and photos from the nearby Marble Canyon Gulag.
Chara’s hope for the future is linked to the Udokan copper mine 30 miles away. Discovered in 1949, these massive deposits, estimated at more than a billion tons, were a major argument in favor of constructing the BAM. But there have been problems financing the ore’s extraction.
The Chara region is the area of deepest permafrost on the BAM route. The ground is frozen to a depth of 1,800 feet in some places. Always a construction nightmare, permafrost is a condition in which the in-ground temperature stays at or below 0° C for two or more years, and is covered by a layer that thaws in summer. Placing heated buildings on such a foundation can cause them to slowly sink into the permafrost. Over 1,000 miles of the BAM route sits atop permafrost. Protecting rail sections and houses with proper insulation techniques more than doubled construction costs; yet many sections went unprotected and are foundering.
Our next station, Tynda, the self-proclaimed BAM capital, has become a synonym for poor engineering and construction, its power lines and buildings slowly sinking into the permafrost. Tynda sits at the juncture of four BAM sections: the Little BAM, running from Bamovskaya on the Trans-Siberian north to Tynda and thence to Berkakit to serve the coal mining and industrial area of Neryungri; the AYaM or Amur-Yakutsk Magistral; and the eastern and western BAMs. Its modern railway station and a huge 1984 stainless steel sculpture, “The Worker with the Sledge Hammer,” both demonstrate the city’s proud link to the railroad.
The museum here contains a large collection of artifacts, including the wall-sized official BAM planning map, once a document so secret that it was protected through distribution of inaccurate maps. “You still can’t get accurate maps today,” Tatyana Kolesnikova says.
The exhibits include photos and memorabilia, including a number of ceremonial keys that recall the heyday of railroad construction. Outside, metal tanks that once housed BAM crews give further insight into early construction efforts. Today, about 90% of Tynda’s population of 40,000 still works for the railroad in some way or other. Yet five years ago the town had a population of 70,000. The incentives that originally drew workers here have evaporated, leaving families to nurture what shallow roots remain.
Until recently, students at the elite private Tynda Grammar School had an exchange program with students in Tynda’s sister city, Wenatchee, Washington. According to Yelena Vysotskaya, head of language study at Tynda Grammar School, “the exchange has stopped.” But, she said, “we still send some graduates to the United States each year.”
After the final leg of the BAM, we rejoined the Trans-Siberian in Komsomolsk-na-Amure. In 1932, Komsomolsk was hewed from the wilderness to become an industrial center for aircraft, ship, and steel production. Near the Amur river, the larger-than-life First Builders’ Monument (photo, page 48) celebrates the young planners, surveyors and workers – one with a guitar – who battled harsh conditions to build this remote outpost.
Most of the Far Eastern section of the BAM was built between 1944 and 1946 by gulag prisoners, including German and Japanese POWs. Vast prisoner cemeteries lie beneath construction sites in Komsomolsk. Since 1990, Japanese families have been permitted to visit the city to pay their respects to sons who died here.
Although the BAM’s thirtieth anniversary in 2004 was marked with official speeches and the unveiling of a memorial in Tynda, the railroad’s future is uncertain: critics see it as a white elephant, while advocates conjure hopes of backfilling its sunk costs with profitable uses. After all, the BAM was the largest construction project ever undertaken by the Soviet Union, possibly the largest in the world, serving an area of approximately 464,000 square miles.
Even so, the total cost of the BAM’s construction is almost impossible to tally. Estimates range from $14 billion to $30 billion in 1984 dollars (or about twice that amount today). Even more significant, the human cost of construction is simply incalculable: the deaths, the hijacked lives of prisoners, the “volunteer” labor, the ruined indigenous cultures and environment – all put the BAM beyond the reach of any mere number. The thought of it slowly rusting into the ground would be to many a sign of national defeat.
Whatever its construction costs, the BAM line’s current revenues cover less than half of its outlays for maintenance and operations. Russian Railways annually loses 2 billion rubles, or $80 million, on the BAM’s operation. Just because of the terrain it crosses – permafrost, marsh, mountain, and river – the cost of shipping freight on the BAM is about 2.4 times higher than via the Trans-Siberian. As a result, the BAM carries just eight to ten million tons of cargo annually, about half its capacity.
The fate of the BAM is far from settled. Both the BAM’s problems and promise are real. The railroad is Siberia’s future, and it may be the future of all the Russias when wise minds, now heady with the flow of oil and gas money, eventually turn their thoughts eastward. “The fortunes out there are huge,” one of our English passengers asserted. “No way can the Russians just let it die.” Our bartender was right: in Siberia, only the train can get you there. RL
ADDITIONAL READING
The standard introduction to the BAM is Siberian BAM Guide: Rail, Rivers & Road, by Athol Yates and Nicholas Zvegintzov (Second Edition, 2002), Trailblazer Publications, $23.95 (₤13.99). See www.trailblazer-guides.com. The guide includes train schedules, route maps, and historical information, but it is best to check current information online, since the latest edition is several years old.
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