The original BAM scheme was to have included a connection to Sakhalin Island with a five-mile undersea tunnel, and a 300-mile railway running from Komsomolsk-na-Amure, but while part of the line was built, and a start was made on the tunnel, the scheme was abandoned after Stalin’s death.
All the problems of building the BAM would merely have been rather unfortunate and expensive, but for the fact that there was a much wider issue, the catastrophic environmental effects. The very ethos behind the building of the project mitigated against attention being paid to the environmental effects: ‘These developers [journalists and high-level administrators] maintained that any obstacle put forward by nature could be conquered by humankind through the use of technology. Showing little regard for environmental concerns, these individuals served as a mouthpiece of one perspective of official rhetoric.’16 According to this argument, the BAM zone was essentially an endless virgin territory with such vast resources that they could not be damaged by human intervention.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. As Dervla Murphy put it, ‘Because of its extreme ecological fragility all industrial developments – oil wells, dam-building, paper and pulp combines, logging, mining for coal diamonds, gold, copper – can only be cataclysmic, though the map may show them as mere flea bites on a mammoth.’17 All of these activities were, of course, encouraged by the construction of the railway.
One of the odd and unexpected consequences of the construction of the railway was the vast number of fires that swept through the taiga far beyond what might have been considered as the area affected by the BAM. Siberia, being inland and protected by mountains in the south, has a dry climate and the draining of swamps leaves an environment vulnerable to fires. According to one former BAMer scientist, there were more than 400 fires in the Irkutsk oblast (county) in 1979 alone and the number grew in the 1980s. The situation was exacerbated by a desperate lack of forest rangers to monitor and control the fires. Parts of the area were beginning to resemble a lunar landscape. Fire damage in southern Siberia takes only fifty years to recover, whereas in the northern parts it is nearer 200 years, because of slower growth in the colder climate. Deforestation was the other major issue, with satellite imagery suggesting there was a ‘40 per cent loss of trees in the BAM Zone from 1960 to 2000’.18 Trees are not only lost when they are cut down for use on the railway or associated structures, but they die, too, when the permafrost melts, creating a swamp.
The pristine Lake Baikal suffered, too, from BAM activity and in 1979 two factories associated with the railway were accused of polluting it with various metals and oil. Along the whole line, oil was a particular environmental concern, as not only did the diesel trains on the tracks leak fuel, but also, during construction, oil supplies had to be imported in drums, which were then left scattered around depots and sidings.
The final irony of the project – laughable if it were not so tragic – was that the completion of the scheme was announced three times by the Russian authorities. In order to meet the schedule ordained by Brezhnev (who died of alcoholism - and prescribed-drug-induced diseases in 1982) a golden spike – in an echo of the ceremony held to mark the completion of the First American Transcontinental line in 186919 – was hammered into the ground during a ceremony held in September 1984. No foreign journalists were invited, for the simple reason that it would have been all too obvious to them that the project was nowhere near completed and they would have asked difficult questions. Apart from the fact that just one of the major tunnels was ready for use, only a third of the 2,000 miles of track was fully operational and the condition of much of the line was lamentable, with insufficient ballast, rails that were too light and severe speed restrictions. Some other sections could be used by work trains, but the prospect of a through journey on the whole line was several years ahead. Therefore, seven years later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, announced once again that the line was complete, and he stressed that it would form a new link with Japan. The Severomuysky Tunnel, however, was nowhere near finished and there were still other sections that could only accommodate work trains. As a result, it was only under the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin that the line was completed, and a third announcement was made in 2001, although the Severomuysky Tunnel still did not open until two years later.
There are many tragedies in the history of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the BAM, while being perhaps the least well-known, is probably the greatest. It involved the deaths of thousands prisoners and Gulag inmates and the desecration of a region, including threatening the integrity of the world’s deepest lake, and largely proved to be a waste of resources. Moreover, it killed off the enthusiasm and fervour of thousands of young people who genuinely believed they were creating a new type of society based on socialism, and damaged the lives of many of those who helped build the BAM. Visitors to the BAM zone today talk of abandoned villages, ghost towns and lasting environmental damage linked by an inadequate single-track railway, where trains rarely exceed 20 mph. Dervla Murphy found she fell in love with the railway, but for reasons which will not have pleased its promoters: ‘A train that travels hundreds and hundreds of miles at an average speed of 20 mph, often slowing to 15, surely represents the acme of civilized public transport.’20 Even today towns designed for large populations remain semi-inhabited, creating desolate townscapes littered with abandoned buildings, collapsing streets and laid out areas that remain empty, rather like those out-of-town developments in the United States made bankrupt by the 2008 collapse in property values.
As a monument to communist failure, the BAM ranks alongside North Korea. The PR puff on the Russian Railways website sounds almost convincing, although its tone reminds us how much communist ways still prevail:
BAM’s construction represents an engineering triumph. Stretching nearly 2,000 miles from Lake Baikal in Siberia to Khabarovski Krai on Russia’s Pacific coast, BAM negotiates 7 mountain ranges, 11 alpine rivers and areas of high seismic activity. And for almost half of its length, it runs through the permafrost, where winter temperatures can plummet to –60°C. Building BAM through this difficult terrain required 142 bridges over 100 metres long and more than 200 railway stations and sidings, as well eight tunnels, including Severomuysky, which at 15.3 kilometres is the longest mainline railway tunnel in Russia and the fifth longest in the world. Over 60 towns and townships along the route were established.21
Interestingly, there is no mention of the cost and that is because no remotely accurate estimate has ever been made available. The official figure of $11 billion is widely discredited, and one suggestion is that the BAM used up more than one per cent of the whole of the Soviet Union’s gross domestic product during every year of the main construction period. That is little more than sophisticated guesswork, given the lack of conventional accounting in the Soviet Union. There is, though, no doubting that it was the most expensive project ever undertaken in the Soviet Union and, probably, anywhere in the world during the twentieth century. Possibly the most ironic footnote on the quality of the work carried out on the line in the Brezhnev era is that, according to the BAM guide, ‘From anecdotal evidence, it appears that the Gulag prisoners and POWs in the 1930s and 1950s built the most durable sections.’22
In the event, whatever the gloss put on the project by Russian Railways, there can be no shying away from the fact that none of the assumptions that led to the construction of the BAM have stood the test of time. The hope that it would open up new agricultural areas was misplaced. There was a good reason why indigenous settlers had not created farms in the region: the climate, with barely a three-month growing period, is unsuitable except for the hardiest vegetables like cabbage and carrots, while other crops require expensive heated greenhouses. As for relieving pressure on the Trans-Siberian, the opposite is the case. The biggest strain on the Trans-Siberian is in the Western section, west of Tayshet, where BAM traffic actually shares the same tracks and therefore exacerbates congestion. The eastern Siberian oil and gas field
s did not live up to their early promise and the BAM is a slow railway that does not really provide an alternative to sea routes between Asia and Europe. Container traffic continues to be carried mostly by sea, but while it has built up on the main Trans-Siberian, the BAM is still considered too slow to carry it, although reliability has now improved thanks to the stabilization, at great expense, of the sections built over permafrost. The BAM may even ultimately lose traffic to the sea route north of Russia if global warming means the sea eventually remains open all the year round. The author of the analysis of the BAM project is unequivocal: ‘The project made few positive tangible contributions to the economic development of the Soviet Union.’23
At least, though, it caused a few laughs: ‘Many Soviet citizens thought of the project as the butt of popular jokes rather than the “project of the century”.’ Indeed, it may well have contributed to the fall of communism: ‘By repeating ad nauseam claims of BAM’s economic, social and cultural significance, the Komsomol, the Communist Party and the Soviet government held an unwavering belief that the USSR’s youth needed this message to avoid a loss of collective faith. Ironically, however, the realities of the railway helped to intensify such a loss of faith in the Soviet political and economic system in general.’24
The widespread disillusion of the young people that the Soviets were trying to inspire was deeply damaging to the communist cause. The post-war generation needed their faith in the system reinforced but, instead, hundreds of thousands of them had experience of a gigantic failure of the system, either by working on it themselves or through socializing with those who had.
Eventually, around half a million Komsomol volunteers and older people worked on the line, and, disillusioned, many turned against the system and became supporters of the opposition to the Communists. Rather than being a ‘beacon to our communist future’, it soon became obvious that ‘there was not much behind the myth, just as the Brezhnev era as a whole was more notable for its window dressing than any substantive accomplishments’.25 Far from carrying people to the promised land of a twenty-first-century future, as the slogans promised, BAM clearly went nowhere.
Moreover, even those seeking simply individual benefits also lost out. While some BAMers stayed in the area, most returned to European Russia, only to find that the promised extra benefits did not materialize. Many of the vouchers for cars and apartments proved worthless, as the authorities found themselves unable to redeem them because of the huge numbers issued. This resulted in a scandal which stretched into the post-Soviet era, when there were public demonstrations by those affected.
The only bit of leaven in this terrible story is that there are signs that all the effort of building the BAM will not be wasted. After languishing unwanted during the Gorbachev era and the early years of the post-Communist period, there has recently been considerable investment in the BAM with the expectation that the line will fulfil a useful economic purpose. In particular, a new 2.5-mile single-track Kuznetsovsk Tunnel – to bypass an older tunnel and cut out a series of curves – opened in December 2012, greatly improving access to the port at Sovetskaya Gavan. The old tunnel had difficult gradients and the new tunnel relieved a bottleneck on the BAM, but the high cost of the new alignment – nearly $2 billion, which included just 12 miles of new track – shows how expensive it is to build infrastructure in this remote part of Siberia if there is no source of cheap or free labour.
This investment, the first of several proposed improvements to the BAM, was stimulated by the fact that mineral deposits along the line are now being exploited, thanks to high world prices, bringing traffic to the line. Moreover, Russian Railways is promoting the line strongly, as witnessed by its PR puff, and there is even talk of reviving the idea of connecting Sakhalin Island with a tunnel, though the cost would appear to be prohibitive, even if the undersea tunnel proves technically possible. Therefore the two extremities of the BAM may well eventually carry enough traffic to have made their construction worthwhile, if the environmental damage and the high cost are disregarded, but the main middle section, which remains single-track and not electrified, is unlikely ever to justify the vast resources spent on it.
There is also progress on the environmental front. Considerable work has been carried out to reduce the damage caused by the BAM. The water in Lake Baikal, for example, is now once again improving after many nearby plants were either shut down or turned into closed systems and more attention is being paid to the fire risk in areas that have been affected by the railway.
There is, however, another major scheme in the offing, one that would dwarf the BAM. Russia may no longer be communist, but big projects are in its rulers’ DNA, whether they are tsars, commissars or presidents. The most outlandish recent idea – first dreamt up by Tsar Nicholas II a century ago and recently revived – is to continue the branch line up to Yakutsk more than 2,000 miles north-east and build a tunnel or a bridge across the Bering Strait to Alaska, which, of course, the Russians sold to the United States in 1867. This grand scheme was notionally given Russian government support in 2011 with a cost estimate of £60 billion, although that is very much a back-of-the-envelope calculation. There were suggestions it would carry three per cent of the world’s freight, but the project appears unrealistic (to put it mildly) as well as being a huge environmental threat to the whole region. The heightened interest in environmental concerns would, therefore, arouse great opposition to such an enormous scheme and make it unlikely that it could be built. Finance, too, is likely to be an insuperable barrier.
While the BAM struggled to justify its existence after its completion, the Trans-Siberian was enjoying a boom, as part of a worldwide renaissance of the railways. The focus on freight remained, but the need for hard currency meant that the Communists began opening up the Trans-Siberian to tourists once again, although their travels were strictly controlled.
TWELVE
THE GREATEST RAILWAY
Travelling on the Trans-Siberian during the communist era was not much fun. Not only was so much priority allocated to freight trains that delays were common, but the facilities on board were parsimonious; and for Westerners there was the constant presence of the secret police watching every step, as well as bans on getting off the train at many stations in towns which were closed to foreigners. One traveller in the 1980s reported going along the whole route on a train without water, unable to get off because of not having the right visa.
In the immediate post-war period there was a continual process of improvement to the line. By 1956 the Soviet Union had stopped producing steam locomotives (four years earlier than Britain) and five years later the electrification of the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Irkutsk (3,400 miles) was completed with the help of army labour (the whole line was electrified by 2002 – seventy-three years after the first wires had been installed). Diesels gradually replaced steam engines on the remainder of the line. The diesel and electric trains were faster and cleaner, reducing the time of the Moscow–Vladivostok journey to just under eight days (it is now slightly more than six and a half on the fastest train).
Eager for hard currency from tourism, despite the intensification of the Cold War, the Soviets improved the trains substantially in the post-war period. Harmon Tupper, who travelled in the early 1960s, found them relatively pleasant. The train was huge and offered several ‘soft’ class coaches with compartments for four people; a diner; a deluxe ‘International Class’ sleeper; and several third-class, open-plan carriages. The deluxe carriage had a ‘distinct Victorian elegance about the compartments that would have surely been familiar to Annette Meakin and her mother, who travelled on the State train de luxe in 1900: the glistening mahogany-finished panelling; the massive, highly polished brass door lock and other fittings; the white, semi-transparent window curtains and side drapes of thick blue plush; the weighted table lamp with its fringed silk shade; the upholstered easy chair by the window; the multicolored Oriental carpet’,1 and so on.
It was not quite like Stali
n’s personal carriage, however: the toilets had rather scruffy roller towels; there was a pungent aroma of burning charcoal when the attendant fired up the samovar; both taps in the washroom ran cold; and there was no air conditioning, only electric fans in every carriage, while the windows were permanently shut. Worst of all, the loudspeakers in every compartment blasted out propaganda and martial music, and the volume control, which did not always work, was tucked away under the compartment table.
The dining car was all white tablecloths and partitions; there was a lounge section with armchairs, but the piano and the library of tsarist times had disappeared. So had the menus in French and the male waiters, replaced by white-bloused aproned women, wearing white paper lace tiaras. Their supervisor warned Tupper ‘that the sale of vodka, much less expensive than champagne and brandy, might lead to “uncultured” behaviour on their part’.2 As for the food, only the soups were edible (which actually I discovered, too, travelling in 2012).
To the Edge of the World Page 26