BAM. An abbreviation of three letters, familiar to almost every inhabitant of our country, who was born in the USSR. These three letters contain a huge time period in the history of our state, billions of spent rubles, hundreds of thousands of destinies of our compatriots, which were inextricably intertwined with the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline. The importance of this railway for the country, the profitability of the project and the need to build a highway continue to argue in the 21st century.
Regardless of the existing points of view about this construction, it is necessary to remember that BAM is a grandiose phenomenon not only in domestic but also in world history. This is objectively dictated by a variety of factors. The most obvious of which is distance. The length of the railway is huge, more than four thousand kilometers, most of the route passes through impassable and uninhabited terrain, which is hostile to humans, this is truly wild nature. Hence the second image arises - the geographic-romantic one. It is enough to imagine all these amazing landscapes from Lake Baikal to the Amur River and the ports of the Pacific Ocean over a total length of 4287 kilometers.
This construction is also grandiose in terms of the cost of work. Experts note that BAM is the most expensive construction site during the existence of the USSR. The project cost is estimated at 17 billion 700 million rubles in 1991 prices. Another factor in the grandeur of the construction is the number of people of different nationalities involved in the work. The Baikal-Amur Mainline is a truly all-Union construction project, people of 70 nationalities took part in the construction of the mainline, and in total, in different years, up to two million people worked here.
BAM. The beginning of the story
Many believe that the BAM is an exclusively Soviet project, relating mainly to the era of stagnation of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, imagining primarily Komsomol volunteers who willingly pose against the backdrop of the amazing beauty of taiga landscapes. However, the idea of building a railway in these places arose long before the appearance of construction brigades here and not even at the dawn of the birth of Soviet power in the 1920s. The first talks about the construction of a railway in these remote places date back to the end of the 19th century. The first ideas about the construction of a railway in the area of Lake Baikal date back to 1887. According to the initial plans, the Transsib was to pass through the places where the BAM was eventually built.
At that time, two construction options were considered - the northern and southern routes. The southern route was much simpler, and the option of building a railway here was the most convincing. The famous Russian engineer Orest Polienovich Vyazemsky spoke out for this option. Despite this, the northern option of building a railway to the Pacific Ocean was also considered back in the 19th century. In the places where the BAM was built today, two expeditions took place, led by prospectors Ludwig Ivanovich Prokhaski and Nikolai Afanasevich Voloshinov. The researchers faced harsh climatic conditions and rugged terrain. According to their reports, the area here was unsuitable not only for the construction of the railway, but also for the future life of people here.
In their reports, researchers who passed through the sites of the future construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline noted that the road would pass in areas "north of the line of successful arable farming"; they separately emphasized the fact that these lands cannot be considered as a reserve of land for settlement. All this will be confirmed in the future. Today, many villages and cities along the highway are emptying, people are leaving these places en masse, for more habitable areas of our vast Motherland. But at the end of the 19th century, it was extremely difficult even to carry out survey work here. In fact, a real breakthrough was achieved here only with the development of aviation and the launch of satellites, which helped to carry out all the necessary surveys (aerial photography and space survey of the terrain), this territory was so difficult for movement on the ground. Already at the end of the 19th century, the decision to build a railway here was postponed, since the project was recognized as difficult to implement in every sense and very expensive.
The construction of the Transsib moved south. At the same time, already in the 19th century, arguments were sounded that will often be encountered in the future. In particular, it was already noted then that the passage of the Trans-Siberian Railway along the current Bam route to the Amur River would be significantly shorter, by about 500 versts. Another argument for the construction of the road in difficult terrain was the strategic distance from the border with China. In the 21st century, this argument only gained weight along with the manifold growth of the military-technical potential of our main eastern neighbor.
The first Soviet projects of BAM. Prisoners' labor
In the late 1920s, the idea of construction was returned again. In 1928, the presentation of the next version of the fantastic project of the Great Northern Railway, which was supposed to pierce the country from Murmansk to the Tatar Strait through Kotlas, Surgut, Yeniseisk, took place. The author of the project was Alexander Alekseevich Borisov. The project was already recognized as impossible for implementation due to the huge labor costs and the cost of work. At the same time, an alternative was adopted as the development of the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
Over time, only BAM itself remained directly from Borisov's project. This abbreviation first appeared in 1930. The decision that the Baikal-Amur Railway is really needed was formed precisely in the early 30s of the XX century. The decision to build the BAM in the form in which it exists today was made in April 1932. This is a section of the railway from Taishet to Sovetskaya Gavan.
The construction of the road was based on two main factors. First, economic - the country felt the need for a large amount of resources. The development of new deposits of minerals, access to which could be provided by the railway infrastructure, solved this problem in the interests of the national economy. Secondly, a strategic factor - the BAM was needed as a safe option for the transfer of troops and cargo to the Far East and from the Far East. The railroad was moved a safe distance from the country's borders. The seizure by the Chinese of a section of the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929 clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of the USSR's communications. The growing power of Japan, which in the 1930s unleashed a full-scale war in the Far East, also added fuel to the fire. In addition, Tokyo's policy was openly militaristic and unfriendly to the Soviet Union.
The first construction work began already in 1932, but by the fall it became obvious that the main thing was that there were not enough workers at the construction site. The very first surveys, carried out at the end of the 19th century, also spoke about this. The area was not only rugged, but also completely uninhabited, almost completely deserted. Workers and specialists had to be brought here from other regions of the country. An attempt to recruit 25 thousand workers for the construction failed, only 10 percent of the planned volume of volunteers was gathered. Then it was decided to use the labor of prisoners in the construction. Already in October 1932, the issue of building the BAM was transferred to the OGPU. BAMLAG was formed in the same year.
At the same time, the actual construction of the BAM began only by 1938. The first work began on the approaches to the future road from the Transsib. They were needed for the delivery of the necessary goods to ensure the progress of the construction itself, we are talking about the Bam-Tynda (here Bam is the name of the station on the Transsib) and Izvestkovaya-Urgal. These works were imprinted by the Great Patriotic War. The rails from the already constructed sections had to be transported to the European part of Russia for the construction of the Volga road near Stalingrad. The railway from Ilovlya (near Stalingrad) to Sviyazhsk station (near Kazan) was vital for the fighting country. The importance of this railway increased even more after the Germans reached the Volga.
The last "construction of the century" of the USSR
From the late 1930s to the late 1950s, construction on the BAM began and then stopped again, the work was temporary. This was dictated both by completely explainable factors, the construction was seriously hampered by the war and the subsequent restoration of the national economy, and by the fact that the slave labor of prisoners is always not the most productive solution.
Seriously and at a new level, the issue of building the BAM was approached in the 1970s, and in 12 years the main work on the highway was completed. The new approach of the Soviet government was based primarily on encouraging builders as material benefits: high wages (the average salary of some workers reached 700-750 rubles), certificates for obtaining cars (it was necessary to work continuously for at least 2.5 years), so and better material and household provision of citizens: better supply of scarce goods, fruits / vegetables, access to foreign-made goods (clothing, household appliances and electronics).
Together, these measures helped to attract hundreds of thousands of volunteer builders from all over the country to the construction and seriously reinforced the romantic component, which is best described by the line from the popular Soviet song: "And I am going for fog, dreams and the smell of taiga." But even in those conditions, it was not possible to do with just the help of volunteers from numerous construction brigades. The most difficult sections of the route, located east of Tynda, located in the most remote, deserted and inaccessible places, were built by railway troops. Without help from the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it would not have been possible to build the BAM by 1984 with the help of "romantic Komsomol members" alone.
What was considered completely unrealizable at the end of the 19th century, seemed possible, but very labor-intensive in the 1930s, was carried out from 1972 to 1984. It was in 1984 that the so-called "golden link" was laid, connecting the track along the entire route. At the same time, the road was commissioned to the Ministry of Railways only in 1989, and it was from this period that the track started working on a regular basis. It was only in 2003 that the issue of the construction of the "Brezhnev" BAM was finally put to rest. The builders have completed the longest tunnel in Russia - a 15-kilometer underground section known as the Severomuisky tunnel. The construction of this section took 26 years intermittently.
It was only possible to materially stimulate the work of people itself to implement a project, which is very difficult in all respects, for the construction of a railway, more than half of which runs in the permafrost zone, crosses 11 large rivers, as well as a large number of mountain ranges. Along the entire length of the BAM there are more than two thousand large and very small bridges, so the joke has become widespread that the BAM is bridges connected by roads. This joke also clearly demonstrates all the difficulties of construction and the inaccessibility of the terrain on which a large-scale construction was carried out.
BAM today and road prospects
Today BAM handles approximately 12 to 14 million tons of cargo annually. For comparison: Transsib - about 180 million tons every year. However, the road has potential. Compared to the avalanche indicators of the late 1990s, when the road practically died, the freight turnover increased by 3-4 times again, and there are prospects for its increase. The development of mineral resources, to which the railway approaches, is still relevant. Before the construction of the BAM, it was simply impossible. The strategic importance of the highway for the country has not disappeared anywhere either. The road is at a serious distance from the Chinese border.
Further development of the road presupposes, first of all, the construction of second tracks, in those sections where possible, and further electrification of the road, which is mostly served by diesel transport. All these works are aimed at increasing the traffic flow, on which the profitability and self-sufficiency of the highway directly depends. According to the prospects announced by the Russian government, the transportation of goods along the BAM is planned to increase to 30-50 million tons per year, with the main emphasis on the passage of freight trains.
At the same time, in recent years, one more has been added to the national economic and strategic functions of the BAM. The road is becoming an actual transit route and not only for special-purpose cargo or military transport. It is also important to understand that the BAM turns out to be shorter than the Trans-Siberian from Taishet to the seaports: Vladivostok - by 200 km, Vanino - almost 500 km, for sending goods to Sakhalin, Kamchatka and Magadan - by 1000 km. In recent years, BAM has been increasingly used to transport coal, which Russia quite actively sells to various countries on the world market.
