The Line That Outlived Its Argument
The Baikal–Amur Mainline was begun with prison labour in the 1930s, abandoned, restarted in 1974 as the Soviet Union's last great construction campaign, and finished so late that the state it was built for had stopped existing. For thirty years it was the standard example of an infrastructure project that made no economic sense — and then Europe stopped buying Russian coal, and the only way out was east.
Severobaikalsk station has a swept concrete roof that was meant to read as a sail, and it stands at the end of a grid of panel blocks laid out on a shelf of land between the mountains and the top of Lake Baikal. Nobody lived here before 1974. The town exists because a railway needed a town at this point on it, and the railway is the Baikal–Amur Mainline: about 4,300 kilometres from Tayshet in Irkutsk oblast to Sovetskaya Gavan on the Pacific, running a few hundred kilometres north of the Trans-Siberian for most of that distance, across seven mountain ranges, several thousand watercourses and a great deal of permafrost.
For most of its life the BAM has been an argument rather than a railway. It was the most expensive civil project the Soviet Union ever undertook, it was declared finished before trains could run the length of it, and within a decade of that declaration the country that ordered it had dissolved and the freight it was built to carry had not appeared. Through the 1990s and 2000s it was cited, inside Russia as much as outside, as the definitive case of a state building something because it wanted to rather than because anyone needed it. That case looked settled. It is not settled now, and what unsettled it had nothing to do with any of the arguments made at the time.
Built twice
The line was surveyed in the 1930s and construction began with a camp administration set up for it in 1932, which became one of the largest in the Gulag system. Work went on intermittently for a decade and produced a western section and some earthworks. Then in 1942 the rails already laid on the eastern section were lifted, loaded and sent to the Volga, where they were used to build a relief railway feeding Stalingrad. A finished piece of the BAM was taken apart and driven west to be used in the fighting, which is the single most compact statement anyone has made about the line's priority.
The Komsomol line
It restarted in 1974, when the Komsomol congress declared the BAM an all-Union shock construction project and the recruitment machine of a superpower was turned on a railway. Tens of thousands of young people went east on organised drafts, and the propaganda around it was enormous — songs, films, a special postal cancellation, the promise of an apartment and a car for those who stayed. The construction was divided among the republics and the major cities, each of which took a section and a station and built it in something recognisably its own idiom. Leningrad built Severobaikalsk. Moscow built Tynda. Ukrainian brigades built Novy Urgal, Estonians built Kichera, and so on down the line, which is why a traveller passing through in one day sees half a dozen unrelated architectural sensibilities inside four hundred kilometres of taiga. The rails met at Balbukhta on 29 September 1984 and a golden spike was driven at Kuanda two days later. The line was not accepted into permanent operation until 1989.
The BAM was built twice and finished three times, and each finish was announced some years before a train could actually run the length of it.
The tunnel that took twenty-six years
The gap between the ceremony and the operation was mostly one hole in one mountain. The Severomuysky tunnel, 15,343 metres and the longest railway tunnel in Russia, was begun in 1977 and did not carry traffic until December 2003. The rock it went through was faulted, saturated and hot: the workings hit water under pressure and sand that behaved like liquid, and men were killed. In the meantime the trains got over the ridge on temporary bypasses — the second of them, built in 1989, includes the trestle viaduct that everyone calls the Devil's Bridge, on gradients steep enough that trains crawled over it at twenty kilometres an hour, split into short sections, with the locomotives working harder than a mainline railway is supposed to require. Twenty-six years is a long time to run a railway around the thing that was meant to be under it.
The towns
The towns were the other half of the project and they are where the argument was lost first. They were built at once, to a design, for populations calculated from a plan — and when the plan stopped, so did the reason to be there. Tynda, which calls itself the capital of the BAM, had something over sixty thousand people at the end of the 1980s and has around thirty thousand now. Smaller settlements lost proportionally more, and several were abandoned outright. The buildings themselves were a problem in their own right: put up quickly, on permafrost, on piles that assume the ground stays frozen, and the ground has not stayed frozen. Warming across eastern Siberia has damaged foundations along the route and continues to, which turns a maintenance question into a structural one.
The argument settles itself
From 2013 the Russian state began putting serious money into what it calls the Eastern Polygon — the BAM and the Trans-Siberian treated as a single capacity problem, with double track, new sidings, electrification and, in July 2021, a second bore through the Baikal ridge above Severobaikalsk. The stated targets have been revised repeatedly and the reported figures are disputed, but the direction is not: the two lines were to carry on the order of 180 million tonnes a year by the middle of the decade and appreciably more by 2030, and almost all of the growth was coal moving to Pacific ports. Then the reason arrived. The European Union banned imports of Russian coal from August 2022 and the rest of the western market followed. An export economy that had shipped its bulk commodities out through Baltic and Black Sea terminals had to send them somewhere else, and the somewhere else was the Pacific: Vanino and Sovetskaya Gavan, which are the ports the BAM was specifically built to reach, and Vostochny at the far end of the Trans-Siberian. A line whose critics had spent thirty years asking what it was for got its answer in the form of a queue. Producers now bid for slots on it, the allocation of capacity between regions is a political fight conducted in the open, and the limit on how much Russia can sell east is not the buyers and not the mines but the number of trains that fit through a mountain in Buryatia.
The expansion is being carried out in a manner that rhymes uncomfortably with the line's own history: military railway troops were assigned to sections of it from 2021, and in the same year the federal prison service publicly proposed supplying convict labour to the project, a proposal that was defended rather than denied. A second Severomuysky tunnel has been announced, costed and postponed more than once. None of which means the planners were vindicated. They built the BAM for a resource-extraction programme in the northern interior that never happened, and the deposits along the route are still mostly unworked. What happened instead is that a railway built for one wrong reason turned out to be the only asset available when the geography of Russian trade was reversed by decisions taken in Brussels and Washington. That is not foresight. It is the particular kind of luck that comes of having built too much, and it is worth holding in mind on the platform at Severobaikalsk — a town of some twenty-three thousand, designed for considerably more — while a coal train goes through without stopping.