# The village of Bailkaskoe near Severobaikalsk.
IT is just before
dawn as train 72 crosses the Bailkalsky Mountains, and the winter wnoe falls
thickly outside the cabin window.
It is not the fluffy snow of the Christmas –time Coca-cola
adverts. It is bad-tempered, Russian snow the sort that can freeze your eyelids
together, turn your skin beetroot red and leave tiny icicles dangling inside
your nostrils. It settles silently on a winter landscape coloured pale lilac by
the pre-dawn light on endless forests of birch and pine, on mountain streams
long since frozen to a halt.
In 1868, a party of engineers set out into this landscape,
surveying for the construction of the world’s longest railway line: the
Trans-Siberian. But upon reaching the Baikalsky Mountains, things started to go
wrong. They found themselves blocked by mighty peaks; greeted as an
all-you-can-eat buffet by mosquitoes. Buggerthis, the engineers soon decided. Plans
were revised: the Trans-Siberian instead took a detour through easier territory
to the south, where it trundles alogn happily to this day.
It would take almost a century before another railway
ventured where the Trans-Siberian feared to go – a line that struck through the
Baikalsky Mountains and onward into the coldest, loneliest landscapes ever crossed
by ion rails. For train 72 has begun its journey on the Baikal Amur Mainline – the ‘BAM’ – a railway with a story of
triumph and tragedy worthy of a Tolstoy novel.
Little heard of outside Russia, BAM was described as the greatest
building project in human history when work started in 1974: a 2,700 mile line
running through frozen wildernesses north of the Trans-Siberian. The soviet
union billed BAM as the ultimate showdown between Mother Russia and Mother
Nature at their most inhospitable; a glorious-rich project to open up remote
corners of mineral-rich Siberia. It was a project as ambitious as the Soviet
space programme, covering similarly vast distance.
Few tourist visit BAM today. Those who do go for the simple,
hypnotic pleasure of watching endless landscape rolling past the window. A BAM
journey can feel more akin to a sea voyage than a train ride.
We emerge from a tunnel, and the landscapes the first BAM
builders battled against swing into view Narnia-esque forests and glaciers
glinting in the first rays of morning sunshine. The only signs of human life
are the reflections from our own warm railway carriages, skimming alongthe
snowbanks heaped by the trackside.
In the 1970s, young volunteers from across the USSR came to
Siberia to build BAM. Soviet propaganda promised a new utopian society in the
model towns along the line-if that didn’t convince them, they also promised
workers a free car. This was the dawn of a new era. When generations in the West
had Woodstock and the ‘Summer of Love’, the young communists would have BAM
instead. In between construction there were even music festivals (featuring
Soviet glam-rock bands).
One man who volunteered for BAM duty was Albert Ivanovich –
a former bulldozer driver who wears and impressive set of Soviet railway-building
medals on his jacket, jingling as he walks. I meet him after our train hauls
into Severobaikalsk – the model town to which he emigrated as a young man, set
on the northern shore of Lake Baikal.
‘When I first came to Severobaikalsk it was August,’ he
recalls. ‘The first snow had settled on the mountaintops, and the mountains
were reflected perfectly in the lake. I knew this would be my home.’
Albert shows me around the town’s small BAM museum. The exhibits
stir his memories: of days long ago clearing passes in his bulldozer, and
summer nights singing around the campfire, nameless mountains standing silent
all around.
Severobaikalsk, too, looks back fondly on its BAM past. Along
the town’s wide boulevards are signs reading ‘BAM IS THE PROJECT OF OUR YOURTH’.
Others offer advice like ‘REAL MEN BUILD TUNNELS’ to passing motorists. It is a
town typical of settlements on the BAM: Soviet-era concrete tower blocks with puffing
chimneys and tangled plumbing; homes where Virgin Mary icons hang on the walls,
boots dry by the stove and the smell of smoked fish wafts about.
In 1984, Severobaikalsk joined in the celebrations as the
Soviet Union announced the completion of BAM, in the museum there are pictures
of the occasion: people cheering, children being hoisted up into the air. Rumour
had it US spy planes were flying over, concerned by this miracle of
engineering.
There was one small problem with this, however, BAM hadn’t
been completed at all. It was all a whopping great fib.
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