BAIKAL-AMUR MAGISTRAL RAILWAY

Traversing eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the Baikal-Amur Magistral Railway (BAM) runs north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway. The "BAM Zone," the term used to describe the territory crossed by the railroad, includes regions within the watersheds of Lake Baikal and the Amur River, the latter of which forms a major part of the Russian border with China. An area crisscrossed by a number of formidable rivers, the BAM Zone presented seismic, climatic, and epidemiological challenges to builders from the 1930s until the early 1990s.

The Soviet government conceived of BAM as a second railway link (the Trans-Siberian Railway being the first) to the Pacific Ocean that would improve transportation and communications between the European and Asian sectors of the USSR. The initial BAM project was built from Komsomolsk on the Amur River to Sovetskaya (now known as Imperatorskaya) Gavan on the Pacific coast by labor camp and prisoner-of-war labor from 1932 to 1941 and again from 1945 to 1953, when it was abandoned in March of that year after Stalin's death.

In March 1974, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed that the construction of a new and much longer BAM project would fall to the Young Communist League, known as the Komsomol. In Brezhnev's mind, experience on what the state heralded as the "Path to the Future" would instill a sense of inclusion among the Soviet Union's younger generations. In addition, the USSR undertook the new BAM to bolster Soviet trade with the dynamic economies of East Asia and to secure an alternative route between the nation's European and Asian sectors in the event that the Trans-Siberian Railway was seized by China. At its height, BAM involved more than 500,000 Komsomol members who severely damaged the ecology of the BAM Zone while expending some 15 to 20 billion dollars in a highly wasteful and inefficient endeavor that reinforced the inadequacies of Soviet-style state socialism among BAM's young constructors.

In October 1984, a golden spike was hammered into place in a ceremony that marked the official completion of the "Project of the Century." In reality, however, only one-third of BAM's 2,305-mile-long track was fully operational by the early 1990s, although the railroad was declared complete in 1991. BAM remains one of the Russian Federation's least profitable railways.

See also: communist youth organizations; railways; trans-siberian railway

bibliography

Asia Trade Hub. (2001). "Russia Watch." <http://www.asiatradehub.com/russia/railway.asp>.

Josephson, Paul R. (1992). "Science and Technology as Panacea in Gorbachev's Russia." In Technology, Culture, and Development: The Experience of the Soviet Model, ed. James P. Scanlan. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Mote, Victor L. (1977). "The Baykal-Amur Mainline." In Gateway to Siberian Resources (The BAM), ed. Theodore Shabad and Victor L. Mote. New York: Scripta.

Christopher J. Ward