85-Year History of Baikal-Amur Mainline Provides Few Reasons for Optimism, Zhirnov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 16 – Many assume that the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway super project was a Brezhnev era effort begun in 1974, but in fact, construction of the BAM, as the railway is commonly known, began not then but in the early 1930s and was scheduled to be completed by November 7, 1936.

            Now that Moscow is again talking about expanding BAM by enlarging tunnels and making it a double-track rather than single-track road, Kommersant journalist Yevgeny Zhirnov has examined the history of this project and concludes that the main obstacles are not “severe weather conditions and the lack of a labor force” but in Moscow (kommersant.ru/doc/5038170).

            Again and again, from the 1930s on, Moscow announced grand plans and then engaged in bureaucratic infighting that precluded their achievement. As a result of these problems, Zhirnov shows, the east and west branches of BAM were connected only in 1984 and the most important tunnel, itself only single-tracked, was completed only in 2001.

            Something similar appears to be going on now, and that provides little reason for optimism. The obvious problems of climate and labor availability seem so overwhelming that few look beyond them to the bureaucratic difficulties in the Soviet and now Russian capital. But it is there that BAM has been blocked so often in the past.

            Zhirnov’s article provides compelling evidence that a similar pattern holds again now, with big talk in the capital about transformative development and far less progress actually achieved on the ground in the Trans-Baikal.