by Frazier
Two hundred miles of railway, from Taishet to Bratsk, were finished in 1947. Surveying of the route continued in the 1950s, but not much additional track got built. Then in the ’60s, more mineral deposits were discovered in the parts of Siberia accessible to the BAM route, and hostilities between the USSR and China demonstrated the need for a second line across Siberia, one not so near the Chinese border. In the early ’70s, the Soviet government restarted the building project with full and official enthusiasm.
President Leonid Brezhnev told the country that the BAM project would be “a great labor exploit of our people,” while the deputy minister of railways said it “outranks every other project in the history of railroad building anywhere in the world.” “The track we are laying,” said the deputy minister, “passes through a wide and rich range of practically every element in Mendeleyev’s table.” BAM’s engineers studied the four-thousand-plus bridges that would have to be built along the line’s two thousand miles and the dozens of tunnels—one of them almost ten miles—that would have to be dug through mountain ranges. Other giant projects, like the Magnitogorsk Dam at Bratsk or the Dnieper Hydropower Project, were referred to for comparison and inspiration. Nor were BAM’s promoters exaggerating; the building of this railroad would turn out to be the last great construction project of Soviet times.
It also would be the last great Soviet enthusiasm among the country’s youth. After the authorities of the BAM project announced that it needed young workers, tens of thousands of them left everything and headed for Siberia by any means they could, even on foot, to be a part of BAM. Those who went by the Trans-Siberian to Taishet were greeted with brass bands and cheers at every station. BAM wanted construction workers, welders, carpenters, lumberjacks, ironworkers, chemists, teachers, machine-tool builders, geologists, electricians, truck drivers, tailors, laundresses . . . Early arrivals lived in tents or in dugouts in the ground. Uplifting slogans proliferated, such as “We are building the Baikal–Amur Railway and the Baikal–Amur Railway is building us.” Official artists were shipped in to record the glory on epic spreads of canvas. Different cities and regions of Russia sponsored different sections of track and settlements along the route. Moscow sponsored Tynda, Leningrad sponsored Severobaikalsk. For motivation, people recited this rhyme:
Let us warn you, friends,
Answering the taiga’s call,
The railway wants no
Chickening out at all.
Somehow everything built in Russia looks as if it has been made by hand. Even in the most generic industrial structures, the concrete looks hand poured, the corners as if shaped, sometimes clumsily, by individual hands. To me, BAM had the one-of-a-kind appeal of a completely handmade railroad. No book in English exists describing the construction of BAM from beginning to end, so I have no way of knowing, for example, the numbers of workers who died in the labor. Individual sacrifice and effort are evident everywhere. Work on the BAM project went on for seventeen years, and although it was supposed to be completed in 1982, the railroad didn’t officially open along all its length until 1991, the year the Soviet Union disappeared.
Government support for Siberian enterprises dried up after that, and people started leaving the remote places. By 1994, instead of the predicted flowering of cities and resource extraction and industry along the BAM route, fewer people occupied the 580,000-square-mile region served by BAM than had been there in 1991. As a result, the great achievement of building this railroad got buried in events and forgotten. Nowadays you often hear of impressive feats of construction in the world—in modern China, especially—but after BAM I can’t think of another grand construction project that was carried out with so much soul.
Take the city of Severobaikalsk. It doesn’t even qualify as a city, really; its highest population level, about thirty-five thousand, had dropped to less than half that in recent years. But the people who planned and built Severobaikalsk had cared about it, you could tell. No settlement at all existed on this site in 1973. The next year the first work crews came out and lived in tents and railroad cars and cleared the timber. On the ceiling of our room at the profilaktorii hung a light fixture of an elaborateness beyond the needs of the situation. As I lay in bed I contemplated the fixture’s embellishments of leaflike metalwork, scrolled tracery, and small cascades of faceted glass lusters. It reminded me of similar extravagances I’d seen out West in America—those almost heartbreaking domestic items (a spinnet, a chiffonier) that the pioneers brought from their former homes in the hope that fanciness would civilize the wilds.
This city, or town, was as charming as any Soviet-era relic could be. Its street grid had been laid out satisfyingly and comprehensibly. The lakefront and the hills around the town had prevented the characteristic Soviet-era gigantism from spreading too far. There was the usual wide central avenue, the public square, and the drab bureaucratic buildings, but all within a small-town radius and scale. In the telephone building, the room of phone booths of hand-carved wood had a pleasantly overheated stuffiness after the cold, and a woolly, intimate, school-coatroom smell. In the post office, an ingenious system had been devised where people waited sitting down, sliding along benches one after the next in sequence as they moved up to the front. When I went in to mail some postcards, almost everyone waiting was an old or middle-aged woman.
At the head of the wide central street, the Severobaikalsk train station dominated the town. The station was another work of wilderness-defying whimsy. A guidebook said that the station’s design was supposed to suggest a sail, in tribute to the great port city of Leningrad/St. Petersburg, sponsor city for Severobaikalsk. Once I’d read that, I could see the station as a sail, or sails, but what it had first reminded me of was a dramatic wide-brimmed hat like the Three Musketeers wore. A narrow middle part corresponded to the high crown, and the sweeping, upward-tending parts on either side were like the flaring of the brim. The brim, or sails, made the station’s roof, and glass panels that came all the way from the brim down to the ground were the sides. The spirit and strangeness of the structure drew your eye wherever in town you happened to be; it cried a bold modernist yawp into the land’s wide silence. Of all the pieces of Soviet architecture I’ve ever seen, this was the only one I’d describe as fun.
On our first day in Severobaikalsk, Sergei took a bus to some slopes outside town and spent the afternoon skiing. The return bus broke down, so he didn’t get back until evening. Meanwhile, I geared up for the cold, put on my snow-tire boots, and explored the town. The day was sunny, clear, and calm. By taking occasional breaks inside warm public places, I had no difficulty staying outside for long strolls. Beyond the central administrative area, the town looked ramshackle, like a Western mining town. On some of the houses, sections of railroad cars had been used to add a room, or repairs had been improvised with sheets of corrugated iron. Most of the buildings in town were blocks of apartments, usually four stories high. I sat in front of one for a while and sketched the many kinds of antennae on its roof. In ninety minutes of sketching, I froze so I could no longer draw and had to start walking again. On a hill above town, I came upon the ruins of an amusement park with carnival-type rides lying around in pieces, and benches and walkways deep in snow. In a sort of cove of benches near one dismantled ride, a group of teenage girls and boys were smoking cigarettes and drinking from plastic liter-bottles of beer. The gust of alcohol breath and cigarette smoke and pheromones that came from them was more pungent for being concentrated by the cold.
One of the guidebooks had mentioned a museum in the middle of Severobaikalsk devoted to the construction of BAM. I hunted all over for this museum. Finally a lady at the coat check in an unidentified public building told me the BAM museum was closed for remont (repair), but the place I was now in contained another interesting attraction—Severobaikalsk’s winter garden. I checked my coat and she showed me to it. The reason I hadn’t noticed it from outside was that its floor-to-ceiling windows were obscured by condensation. I stopped short a
t the hot, moist air suddenly engulfing me. From the name “winter garden” I hadn’t pictured what this would be. Here in the frozen-solid center of Siberia, Russian romanticism or BAM pride or both had created a tropical oasis, with burgeoning greenery and a waterfall and a small tiled pond and birds flitting about in the upper stories.
There were ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of heat. The gardener, a woman of late middle age named Marina Tabakova, met me at the entrance and took me around. She had a broad face, blue eyes, and brown-and-gray hair. She wore a blue blouse with white stitching and carried a pair of yellow gardening gloves. Marina Tabakova told me that she used to teach elementary school but had recently retired. She and her husband had come out to work on BAM in the 1970s and had raised their children here, and now their children were grown and she had two grandchildren—a girl, seventeen, and a boy, twenty. Her husband, who still worked part-time for BAM, was the handyman for the garden. She said she loved showing people the garden. The last writer who had visited it, she said, was an Irishwoman named Dervla Murphy who had arrived in Severobaikalsk two summers ago riding a bicycle.
We had been talking only a short while when Marina Tabakova’s husband arrived to take her to the pharmacy. She said she had more to tell me and I must come back later in the afternoon. I said I would, and then I walked around town some more, browsed in a bookstore, and returned to the profilaktorii to pick up my tape recorder. When I came back to the winter garden at four o’clock, Marina Tabakova was there. I turned on the recorder, and this (translated and somewhat edited) is what she said:
“The winter garden was organized fifteen years ago. It moved here from Novosibirsk. All the plants were small then. They were planted in the ground, and over these years became so big.” [Me: “Were you the gardener then?”] “No, I was always a teacher. I’m not a gardener. But nobody wanted this job, they paid little. But I love it, and I took it. I have been working here for three years. I considered I was just obliged. This garden that people have made, I want to support in the way that it was when I got it, not to let the plants perish. Plants are like people, they love when somebody talks with them and communicates. Each has its own name. This is a rubber plant, this is yucca, this is monstera (aronia), these are small lemon and orange trees. What else? Well, a fig, a spiderwort . . . well, in general, every one has its own name . . .
“Here is the story I want to tell you. You know, there was a very unusual situation, two years ago, in 2003. The city of Ust-Kut, west of here, on the Lena River, have you heard of it? So, if you go down the Lena River to the north of Ust-Kut there is a small village called Verkhnemarkovo. On November tenth of that year it was very cold there, minus twenty-five degrees centigrade, ice already stays on the river. Some boys went fishing along the river. And suddenly from the sky this bird fell on them—a flamingo! A flamingo falls on them from above! It’s snowing, ice all around, and this bird is falling. The boys picked up this bird and brought it home, started to treat its frostbitten toes, even some of its small feathers have fallen off.
“So they took care of it, and cured it, and in January of 2004 they brought it here to us in the winter garden, and the flamingo lived here in our garden. Crowds of people, everybody came here to look at this miracle. Here the flamingo became so beautiful and haughty. Our flamingo was shown on TV, they spoke about it on the radio, it was in newspapers and magazines. It is a real celebrity, a superstar, our flamingo. We fed him minced fish made in a meat grinder, carrots, all vegetables, whatever you have. But he was not pink, but gray. Flamingos are pink because of the pink in the hermit crabs and shrimps they eat, but Baikal has no shrimps, so he didn’t have those, and that’s why he was so grayish. But so beautiful, haughty, independent he was.
“The flamingo stayed with us for seven months and then we forwarded it to the Krasnoyarsk zoo. And now the flamingo is in the zoo, it lives there, and everything is okay. But you know, nobody can explain the reason for this bird’s appearance in Siberia, in the north—a bird that lives in the south and does not fly so far, they are not migratory birds. Geese and ducks do arrive in our area, we admit, but this bird lives only in the south.
“But this is not all yet.
“Last year, also in November, on the Yenisei River in the north near the city of Yeniseisk, in the same way boys also find a second bird—another flamingo! This second flamingo was also frostbitten. It also was rescued and sent to us, and this other flamingo we also warmed up and caressed, and it too was then taken away to Krasnoyarsk. Now there are two of them there. Our first is called Phila, and the second Phima. Only, I do not know what they are, girls or boys, because they still are baby birds, little ones. Such a wonderful story. You are a writer—isn’t it a most unusual story? How would one explain this occurrence? How come that the flamingos appeared here? I’ll show you a few photos, just look.”
She took a few snapshots from an album on a garden bench. The pictures of the flamingo—the first or second one, I’m not sure which—had the radiant, revelatory quality of icon paintings. They showed the flamingo standing in the winter garden’s tiled pond and regarding the photographer with an expression that was, indeed, haughty. He (or she) looked as if he had just planted the flamingo flag and claimed this place for Flamingo. Though kind of gray, he was definitely a flamingo. He seemed to have become comfortable with his singularity, and to accept as a matter of course the attention focused on him. Naturally he would find a tropical forest in the middle of Siberia, and naturally it would need a flamingo.
When I left the winter garden, darkness had fallen and the lights had come on in the town. The temperature had dropped a lot; the snow underfoot was so cold it creaked.
Sergei returned to the profilaktorii in a great mood after his day of skiing. Aside from the bus breaking down, all had gone excellently. He had been able to rent a good pair of skis, and he had deep, fresh powder snow and the slopes almost to himself. The only other person skiing at the resort that day was the mayor of Severobaikalsk, he said. In between runs, Sergei and the mayor had talked. Sergei said the mayor was rather discouraged with life. The mayor had told him that Severobaikalsk now had very few jobs, and the railroad, the only employer of consequence, had begun to cut back and lay people off, and many people were trying to move away. (I could believe that, having seen signs advertising apartments for sale all over town.) The reason nobody else was skiing was that almost everybody in Severobaikalsk is old, the mayor said. He told Sergei that Severobaikalsk was dying.
Chapter 26
From Severobaikalsk we traveled east and then north to the city of Yakutsk—by train for about fifty-three hours, then by hired car for another eight. I became punch-drunk from travel well before we got there. First we rode on the BAM in a comfortable sleeping compartment with a big window and two berths. We boarded it at the Severobaikalsk station, whose mad modernism and vaulting windows gave the departure a sense of real moment, as if we were stepping from the mother ship into empty space. How to describe this train’s slowness, its endlessness? The compartment window slowly fed the snow and forest into the past. Where the trees stood far apart, each had its own perfectly rendered shadow on the snow beside it, but where they grew thickly, their shadows lay jumbled together. I had never seen a more Christmassy landscape, except there were no little lit-up village churches, no Budweiser sleighs, no red ribbons, and, for great stretches, no sign of human or animal life of any kind.
A village we went through not long after Severobaikalsk appeared to be leaning uniformly to the right—fences, buildings, light poles and all—with the wind and the weight of the snow. I noted a sign with the village’s name: KHOLODNAYA (Cold). We crossed the upper Angara River, a lake-wide plain of ice, where sharp-tipped icy mountains ranged like fence palings to the north. We disappeared into long, dark tunnels, including the ten-mile one. Occasionally the bigger BAM towns had a railroad station even wackier than Severobaikalsk’s. These st
ations sported turrets, semicircular windows, conning towers, and giant clocks, among other flights of sub-Arctic surrealism. At several stations I got off and walked around. The way the arrival and departure announcements echoed in the boundless emptiness gave a new dimension to train yard solitude. Temperatures were holding at about −10°F; perhaps a frozen silence is a more profound kind. Occasionally, children’s voices would rise from someplace in the vicinity, or a distinct and singular clink of metal would ring out. Sounds of hissing would burst suddenly from the train, followed by more deep-taiga silence.
Cylindrical, squat coal stoves at each end of the train-car corridors provided the cars’ heat. Sometimes at a station a tractor-drawn wagon would pull up next to the car and a guy in the back of the wagon would shovel coal into big buckets the car attendants brought to him. If the attendant was a woman, the guy in the wagon would hop out and help her lift the coal buckets into the door of the train car. Then the wagon would pull ahead to the next car. The long-handled dustpan our attendants used to scoop the coal dust and tracked-in snow from the car’s entryway had the cartoon characters Snoopy, Woodstock, and Linus on the pan’s flat part; Snoopy was holding a banner that said “Rah.” The attendant used a broom made of broom sedge wrapped with black electrical tape for a handle.