The tone is overwhelmingly elegiac: back then, comrades came together to build a new world. In Tatiana’s words, the BAM was “a labor of love and heroic sacrifice built by the dedicated workers, for the sake of their children and grandchildren.” Like the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, the horrors fade, but the flame never dies.
Yet the horrors were plentiful. Tatiana insisted that BAM construction was started in 1974, the politically correct date, after which “clean labor” was used. But the railway’s first section – initiated by Stalin to offer an eastern route that ran farther away from the Chinese border – was built by forced labor, including Russian inmates and German and Japanese prisoners of war, herded together in so-called BAMlags, now ghost towns.
Even when volunteers were used, they were not nearly as enthusiastic as official accounts claim. Lacking adequate housing and electricity, few re-enlisted, and many deserted before completing their term.
Nonetheless, the Brezhnev-era BAM construction showed what that dying Soviet system was still capable of achieving. Indeed, the railway’s completion amounts to an asterisk on the conventional assessment of how decrepit the late Soviet Union really was.
The truth is that Siberian Russia – still home to 20-30 million Russians – benefited significantly more from the Soviet system than the European population centers did. The heart of Russia, we were often told by those we met during our BAM journey, is rural, not urban. In fact, the Soviet state sustained the Tsarist policy of subsidizing Russians to move east. Only now are they returning to Europe, replaced partly by an influx of Chinese and Uzbeks.
Our journey on the BAM furnished poignant reminders of the region’s previous prosperity. One that stuck in my memory was a deserted kolkhoz (collective farm) on Lake Baikal, which once thrived on fishing and fur. The village, still inhabited and well maintained, consists of a few people growing vegetables, keeping chickens and the odd cow, and selling trinkets to visitors like me. At the same time, rusting fishing boats line the shore like beached whales.
In the village, as we enjoyed a homemade lunch of soup and pancakes, our hostess praised Putin, whom she credited with restoring Russia to health after the Soviet Union’s disintegration. “Why is the West so down on Russia?” one of our fellow travelers asked. “Don’t they understand that a chaotic Russia is a much greater threat to the world than a united one?” It is hard to get a hearing on international law in BAM land.
Robert Skidelsky, professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, is a member of the British House of Lords. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.