| Beginning in 1974, the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) dominated public life in the Soviet Union. Declared completed in 1984, BAM was arguably the greatest and most costly construction feat in postwar Soviet history. Crossing some 2,500 miles from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, BAM was to open a vast sector of the USSR to economic development.; As conceived by Soviet officialdom, the mainline would serve as the “path toward communism” that would unite all Soviet citizens, regardless of their profession, ethnicity, or gender. Government and party proponents of the project, along with prominent journalists, boasted that the mainline would allow the USSR to exploit the riches of Siberia and forge a new industrial base by the twenty-first century.; This dissertation explores the campaign to promote the so-called “Project of the Century” through the creation of the BAM “myth,” an official legitimizing perspective on the railway whose core message evidenced little change over time. I hold that while this myth was tailored to appeal to a number of potentially disaffected groups in Soviet society in the hope that their combined support for the project would bolster collective faith in the Soviet brand of state socialism, the regime's transmission of the BAM message ultimately fell on deaf ears because these groups had already some of their faith in the Soviet experiment.; While the mythical world of the BAM as the “Path to the Future” grew, the construction of the mainline itself led to no concrete accomplishments in either the industrial or social development of the USSR. By the mid-1980s, the nation's leaders were unable to contend with the wide array of unforeseen circumstances that resulted from such a massive undertaking, including a nascent conservation movement, unruly BAMers traveling abroad, dissatisfied foreign workers toiling on the railroad, a restive native population, marginalized ethnic minorities, and disenfranchised women. Each of these intractable tensions produced fault lines in the geology of BAM society that reflected the problems at play in the country at large. These pressures rent apart the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state less than a decade after BAM's announced completion. |
