Russia Opens what It Calls ‘Second Trans-Siberian’ Railway to Take Pressure Off Its Namesake

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 30 – Two weeks ago, Russia opened a 531-kilometer rail link between BAM and the Pacific coast, thus completing a project Moscow has called “the second Trans-Siberian railway” and taking the pressure off its namesake with regard to trade between European Russia and the Pacific rim.
    Moscow has been talking about constructing such a link and a new port to handle its ties to the Pacific since the 1950s, but the current push to construct both began only four years ago – and the port itself remains as yet unfinished (fondsk.ru/news/2024/11/30/vtoromu-transsibu-pora-prirastat-severo-sibirskoy-magistralyu.html).
    But Russian sources are already viewing this route as ensuring expanded trade in coal and other minerals with China and other Asian countries and giving Russia new capacity and redundancy in trade with the east and thus supporting Vladimir Putin’s much-ballyhooed turn to the east (vostok.today/52048-pervyj-sostav-s-uglem-proehal-po-tihookeanskoj-zheleznoj-doroge.html).
    What they are not yet talking about at least in public are two other consequences of this new railway, one domestic and the other international, that may ultimately prove more economically and even politically significant.
    On the one hand, this railway almost certainly will lead to the expansion of extractive industry in the Sakha Republic, boosting that region’s  economy and also linking it with Asia more directly and thus reducing its almost total dependence on Moscow, something that could lead to more demands there for radical autonomy or even independence.
    And on the other, it gives Moscow a railway to the Pacific much further north from the Chinese border than the Trans-Siberian, thus ensuring that Moscow would have a fallback position in the event of some future Chinese move into Russian territory.