(Post)Socialist Infrastructures: Materiality, Identity, and Emotions

According to a popular definition, infrastructure is matter that “enables the movement of other matter.”³ The word “infrastructure” was adopted in English from nineteenth-century French civil engineering. Back then, it, in fact, referred to the organizational work required before railroad tracks could be laid. By the late twentieth century, it had turned into a generic term widely used in international development and in social theory.⁴ Social scientists, including anthropologists have been using the analytical lens of infrastructure in writing about modernity, development, and modernization. For example, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, drawing on their ethnography of road construction in Peru, argue that infrastructures like roads and railways are archetypal technology of post-Enlightenment, emancipatory modernity that “enchant” with the hopes and dreams of development.⁵ At the same time, as the authors write elsewhere, roads promised are never quite the same as those delivered, because they are, in essence, risky ventures full of uncertainty and surrounded by stories of corruption, embezzlement, and shady dealings.⁶ Railroads, typologically and functionally similar infrastructure objects, are even more potent expressions of modernity. In the world history of industrialization, colonization, and formation of nation-states, railroads figure as symbols of power,⁷ stitching together vast territories of rising empires.⁸ Soviet railroad projects with their underlying ideology and practices of high modernism⁹ symbolized and enforced state power in remote parts of the empire.¹⁰

Socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have endured in postsocialist Eastern Europe and beyond.¹¹ In Russia, despite political shifts and socio-economic transformations, the Soviet modernization project with its socialist plans, ideologies, and identity-building policies continued well into the post-Soviet period.¹² Demographic and socio-economic decline, degradation of infrastructure, and “fuzzy” (nontransparent or mixed) forms of property¹³ characterize the postsocialist development of frontier regions. While the current regional development strategies reveal path dependency on the Soviet industrial plans, massive state investments in infrastructure have been substituted by targeted private funding. Companies’ investments and benefits from resource extraction “fly over” local communities producing “modernization enclaves”¹⁴ in landscapes of uneven development.¹⁵

In her famous article on ethnography of infrastructure, Susan Leigh Star noted that infrastructures, be they optical fibers or railway lines, do not grow de novo, but are built on an installed base.¹⁶ While infrastructures have to wrestle with the inertia of that underlying base, they are, in fact, dynamic material objects going through different cycles of transformation. Ruin and retrofit are among the key paradoxical qualities of infrastructure, where ruination suggests its degenerative quality and retrofit an attempt to test its solidity.¹⁷ Ruination or a breakdown of once taken-for-granted, state-supported communal infrastructure, as was the case with the thermo-electric station in a Siberian city in 2003, help to rethink the relationship between the postsocialist state and its citizens.¹⁸

Stephen J. Collier argues that infrastructures emerge “as privileged sites where the relationship between neoliberalism and social modernity can be reexamined.”¹⁹ His research in a provincial city in post-Soviet Russia showed the vital importance and durability of Soviet material structures, bureaucratic routines, and resource flows. The material setup of such mundane infrastructure as heating systems restricted attempts to “unbundle” those systems. As a result, marketization reforms took the shape of a selective intervention to reprogram key nodes in the system while leaving much of its structure intact.²⁰ In a similar vein, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov shows how infrastructural ruins (in the form of abandoned roads, development plans and ideas) in Siberia reveal the paradoxical continuity of Soviet modernity, with its promises and failures, and serve as a foundation for new state construction projects.²¹ Following Collier and Ssorin-Chaikov, I show how temporal, geographical, and affective dimensions of BAM infrastructure are rooted in the Soviet modernization project and construction plans. In fact, the socialist-era BAM and its current reconstruction program reveal ideological continuity with Soviet development plans. At the same time, the materiality of the railroad infrastructure (e.g., the foundation laid for the second track, unfinished infrastructure objects) predetermines and constrains the ongoing reconstruction program.

Collective emotions, elicited by state actors and institutions, are crucial in structuring political fields, subjects and objects, and come to be invested in particular sites, such as material infrastructure and projects.²² In the countries undergoing rapid postsocialist transformation, public images and emotions from the socialist era still shape social life and provide a moral framework in which power relations between actors are being discussed and played out. For example, nostalgia, mistrust, fear, and anger juxtaposed with joy, pride, enthusiasm, and hope have been leitmotifs of postsocialist memory narratives and the politics of emotions in Eastern Europe.²³

The term postsocialist affect has been used to describe how the collective emotions of the builders of apartment blocks in postwar Vietnam were “harnessed by the state to produce new, feeling subjects committed to the work of socialist nation-building.”²⁴ In her study of urban infrastructure redevelopment, Christina Schwenkel focuses on the materiality of buildings as conduits of socialist ideologies and emotions. She illustrates how the bricks of old apartment blocks, “harnessed political passions … that over time came to signify unfulfilled promises of the socialist state and dystopic ruins that today stand in the way of capitalist redevelopment.”²⁵

Similar to the socialist generation of construction workers and urban residents in Vietnam, builders of the socialist BAM fill the old rails and surrounding landscapes with nostalgic memories of their lives inscribed in the country's landmark construction project. The collapse of Soviet socialism, which coincided with the official end of BAM construction, engendered a public disenchantment and pessimism that was projected onto the railroad as the landmark of the socialist epoch. The renewed public attention on the BAM and investments in its technological modernization, fueled by resource extraction interests, evoke new hopes and expectations anchored in Soviet modernity as an open-ended process.²⁶

Thus, the infrastructure of BAM assembles rails, people, machinery, construction plans, ideologies, and emotions extending beyond a single historical epoch or political regime. This article demonstrates how Soviet ideologies, memories, identities, and emotions are embedded in the material structures of railway tracks, stations, and towns.²⁷ Furthermore, it seeks to explore the materiality of the railroad and unpack the Soviet modernization myth and ideology in the context of post-Soviet transformations by focusing on ethnography of reconstruction works.

BAM-1: The Soviet Construction Project

The history of the BAM starts with early plans dating back to the nineteenth century and continues with the first railroad sections built under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s. While the major part of the mainline was built between 1974 and 1984, some sections and infrastructure objects, such as tunnels and bridges, were put into operation as late as 2003. Built within the industrial program of “mastering the North” with the primary goal of resource extraction and regional development,²⁸ it represented a grandiose and final Soviet “project of the century.”²⁹ The late socialist BAM was glorified in public discourse, media and popular literature as a symbol of human achievement in the “conquering of wild nature,” “bringing civilization to remote corners” of the country, and constructing the “Soviet man.”³⁰

BAM construction yielded not only the tracks and railway stations but also a series of settlements, ranging from villages and towns with populations of 4,000 to 70,000 residents, such as Severobaikal'sk, Novaia Chara, and Tynda, to big cities such as Komsomol'sk-na-Amure with its population currently exceeding 260,000. The labor mobilization campaign attracted multicultural populations from different parts of the Soviet Union to the construction site. Soviet nation-building policy officially aimed at supporting cultural diversity in its ultimate pursuit of forging the “Soviet people.”³³ The architectural design of railway stations and urban infrastructure, containing ethnic ornaments and symbols, with signs in the local languages of the peoples of the USSR, officially aimed to represent the ethnic and territorial diversity of the country. At the same time, the fact that the main stations and cities along the BAM were “assigned” preferentially to construction organizations from Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia revealed the hidden hierarchies of Soviet nationalities policy.³⁴ Thus, for example, the key cities of Tynda and Severobaikal'sk, informally known as “the capitals of the BAM,” were built by engineers and construction workers from Moscow and St. Petersburg respectively (see Figure 2).

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The railway station in Severobaikal'sk, symbolizing a ship's sail and designed by engineers from St. Petersburg. Photo by author.

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While ethnicity played a certain role in residence patterns and social relations along the BAM, it was mostly an emerging sense of belonging to local communities and communal labor during the construction of the railroad that shaped the identity of bamovtsy and consolidated them as a group. Bamovtsy made the built and social environment of the newly emerged communities in the BAM region, similarly to Russian settlers in Chukotka or Soviet migrants in industrial frontier regions.³⁵

The majority of BAM builders, especially, those recruited to the construction site by Komsomol, were men in their twenties and thirties who often started their families in the region. Similarities in age and in educational and professional background, as well as overlapping residential patterns, collegial relations, and marriages with other BAM builders or indigenous residents helped them to build strong social networks and integrate into local communities. Currently, bamovtsy remember the construction period as the golden days of the BAM and their own lives filled with joy and enthusiasm.

There was enthusiasm. We had a musical band here. I was also part of it. We were dancing and singing. It was very interesting. There was an idea. There was construction. Only youth gathered here. Teams came here from Ukraine and Belorussia. That was so interesting! In the first year, a lot of people got married … (NK, BAM builder, retired, Tynda, 2016)

BAM-2: From Decline to Reconstruction

The political and socio-economic crisis following the dissolution of the USSR has resulted in a sharp decline in living standards, population flight from the North, and public disenchantment. The late Soviet BAM project was criticized in the media as “the road to nowhere” due to the fact that, during the bust period of the 1990s, the railroad was heavily underexploited. High maintenance costs no longer covered by the state resulted in infrastructural decline. While some fragments of the BAM declined without proper repair and renovation, sidings leading to mineral deposits were completely abandoned to decay. Many ambitious urban construction and development projects announced in the BAM's heyday were not implemented because of the economic crisis.

Since the early 2000s, the country and the BAM region have experienced economic recovery. Cargo turnover along the BAM increased by 51 percent in the period 2006 to 2015.³⁷ Accordingly, in 2014, the Russian government launched BAM-2, a state program of technological modernization aimed at boosting the cargo capacity of the railroad. The ultimate goal of the project is to bifurcate the functions of the BAM and the Trans-Siberian Railroad (Transsib): the former is to specialize in the transportation of cargo while the latter will focus on passengers and, additionally, on agricultural and fish products.³⁸ The project, supported by the National Welfare Fund, the federal budget and RZhD, is prioritized in national and regional development plans. According to RZhD, which is mainly responsible for administering the program, 462 kilometers of main track, 45 switching tracks, and 51 railway stations are to be built by 2020, with a total investment of 304.1 billion rubles shared between RZhD (135.3 billion), the National Welfare Fund (119.3 billion), and the federal budget (49.5 billion).³⁹ While the reconstruction program does not foresee the construction of a second track along the BAM's full length, it includes full electrification of the railroad and completion of old and new infrastructure objects (tunnels, bridges, etc.) with the purpose of increasing carrying capacity. The goal is to have the BAM transport natural resources (coal, timber, and rare metals), extracted in the vast region it traverses, toward the sea ports and border-crossing points in the Far East, and from there to supply the Asian markets (see Figure 3).

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At a railway crossing, Kuvykta, 2017. Photo by author.

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The official launch of the program BAM-2 in 2014 coincided with the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of BAM construction. Both events were accompanied by media campaigns, including the pro- duction of dedicated popular literature, coffee table books and encyclopedias of the BAM project. They obviously aimed at reconstructing the glorified image of the BAM as an embodiment of state power. Relying on propaganda slogans of the late socialist-era BAM, media discourse seemed to be aimed at reawakening patriotic feelings, enthusiasm and pride suppressed during the 1990s wave of public criticism towards the railroad. References to the BAM as “a great construction site,” “a railroad built with love” ⁴⁰ and “a path to the future,” biographies of BAM construction workers and organizations, as well as archival photos depicting milestones of the construction process and everyday life during BAM-1 filled the pages of the regional press.⁴¹

The popular term “BAM-2,” associated with the rhetoric of the “second life” or the “second wind”⁴² of the railroad and the region, literally refers to the construction of the second track. Indeed, BAM-2 reveals striking continuities with BAM-1 not only on a discursive, but also on bureaucratic and material levels. It is, in fact, a continuation of the Soviet regional development program of “mastering of the North” that tied the construction of the BAM to so-called “territorial industrial clusters,” centers of resource extraction and processing.⁴³ Thus, potential and ongoing development of the largest deposits of coal, gold and rare metals discovered in abundance in the region has informed the current strategies of regional development and railroad reconstruction.

According to local administrations and RZhD, the Soviet construction projects have remained almost unchanged: the ultimate goal of BAM-2 is the completion of the second track and of the full electrification of the railroad. In fact, the second track was constructed between the points of departure and delivery along selected railroad segments that already had strategic importance for cargo capacity during the BAM-1 era. At many sections of the railroad, one can find abandoned but still durable overhead wire supports and roadbed filling that had been prepared for the second track—the self- evident physical path-dependency of the rails. These material remains, as well as engineering surveys from the late socialist period, facilitate the laying of the second track and the construction of supporting infrastructure such as bridges, tunnels, and electricity lines. At the same time, not all of the initially planned infrastructure will be completed within the scope of the reconstruction program.⁴⁴

However, when it comes to the actual benefits for local communities from BAM-2, increasing volumes of raw materials flowing to China by rail are expected financially to bring the locals nothing but modest revenues for the transit. In contrast to BAM-1, BAM-2 does not foresee investments into urban infrastructure and social services in the settlements that once emerged together with the railroad. While federal investments in community development dry up, local revenues from exploitation of the railroad and resource extraction are not sufficient to fill the budget gap. In order to compensate for the high construction and maintenance costs of existing infrastructure, local authorities often apply to extractive companies operating in the region for funding. However, their support is officially recognized as voluntary, and federal administrators do not anticipate any regular revenues from mineral extraction flowing to local budgets. Thus, the current social programs of extractive companies in Kalarskii District are limited to occasional one-time funding of social and cultural events and selected construction and renovation projects. In Tyndinskii District, the Petropavlovsk and Priisk Solov'evskii companies make more visible investments in the social infrastructure of BAM communities.⁴⁵ At the same time, the potential and actual ecological impacts of logging and resource extraction cause public concern and complaints by local residents against turning northern Siberia into a new resource colony.

Reconstruction Works

The reconstruction process on BAM-2 involves RZhD, construction companies, bamovtsy and shift workers, as well as trains, tracks, and construction machinery. Following the institutional reform of 2003, the railroad was transferred to RZhD, while responsibility for the BAM communities, including housing and public organizations, was delegated to local administrations. RZhD has the legal status of a joint stock company, but in fact it is a fully state-funded and vertically integrated organization. This hybrid legal form, established when property was placed by the state under RZhD trust management, puzzles experts and the wider public alike, because nobody is sure to whom the company belongs. In reality, the main owner of the BAM (and most of the other Russian railroads) is the state, which invests money in the infrastructural modernization and maintenance and supplies RZhD's charter capital. RZhD acts as the main juridical person responsible for the realization of the program of modernization of the BAM and Transsib.

In the post-Soviet period, labor recruitment practices used by RZhD have increasingly favored the shift work method. This trend has become especially obvious in the process of implementing BAM-2. The federal funds allocated for the implementation of BAM-2 are centrally transferred to RZhD, the main responsible body, which then contracts larger and smaller construction companies. The latter might bring their own shift workers and machinery or subcontract local construction organizations that have the necessary labor resources and equipment. The majority of the shift workers involved in reconstruction works consist of poorly qualified men from other regions of Russia or from post-Soviet countries. In many cases, subcontracting construction companies transfer their labor resources to BAM-2 sites from other finished construction sites.

Most of the companies implementing the BAM-2 program are based in other cities of the country (e.g., in Belgorod, Sochi, Krasnodar, and others). While construction workers may arrive from one city or region, track maintenance cars and other equipment may be rented out and brought by the companies from other regions. Still, most companies come to BAM-2 with their own equipment and housing infrastructure that facilitate autonomous life. They accommodate their shift workers in trailers in industrial settlements during the summer—the only season when reconstruction works are feasible and least costly, considering the local climatic conditions.

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Reconstruction works along the BAM, 2017. Photo by author.

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Only a few local railroad construction organizations hired by RZhD for the implementation of BAM-2 are survivors from the times of BAM-1. Among them are BCM, the largest transportation construction and engineering company, and BTS, a company specializing in the construction of tunnels. These organizations, consisting primarily of bamovtsy, represent a pool of qualified labor resources. A few managers and high-skilled specialists who used to work on BAM-1 also received posts within the framework of BAM-2.

Companies submit tenders to apply to work under the reconstruction programs. In 2014, RZhD invited bids for the reconstruction of multiple costly infrastructure objects along the railroad. BCM, a descendant of a large-scale Tynda-based organization with the same name, which once did construction on BAM-1, won the competition for the reconstruction of the railroad's eastern section. BCM, similar to other general contractors, has a few minor subcontractors. Subcontracting firms are usually responsible for the construction of smaller railroad segments and are expected to organize the workflow at the local level and to purchase and deliver building machinery and materials.

There is a clear dividing line between bamovtsy and shift workers involved in the reconstruction works on BAM-2. Bamovtsy are both local residents and professionals who have the knowledge, professional skills, and ingenuity required to build tunnels, cities, and bridges and to lay rails in difficult mountainous landscapes under the challenging climatic conditions. By contrast, shift workers are temporary residents coming from other, primarily southern, regions with different environmental conditions. In addition to that, they often have previous experience in other construction industry segments, which predetermines their skill set and limited knowledge of the railroad reconstruction process. Last but not least, bamovtsy, in contrast to newcomers, have a particular emotional and mnemonic entanglement with the railroad that reaches back to the time of the socialist construction project BAM-1.

Sergei got involved in BAM-2 as a dedicated bamovets and an experienced professional, proud of his achievements on BAM-1 and believing in the continuation of the Soviet construction plans. According to Sergei, financial reasons played a role in his decision to join BAM-2; however, his enthusiasm for completing the BAM was his overriding motivation. The Moscow-based company responsible for laying down the thirty-kilometer segment of the second track and the reconstruction of the railway station at Yuktali was to deliver work worth 1.7 billion rubles in 2017. In July of the same year, when I met with Sergei, the reconstruction work was still at the preparatory stage. The responsibility for remaining issues was delegated from top management down to Sergei's subcontracting enterprise in Yuktali. Nevertheless, the Moscow-based manager called several times a day to “control” the situation.

They tell me to spend 240 million in August. I say: “Are you crazy? I have not even gotten the machinery yet!” They keep telling me that they sent the machinery two weeks ago. And this was three weeks ago! (SM, BAM builder, Yuktali, 2017)

The long-distance chain of command does not properly connect the political and financial center in Moscow with the remote railroad town of Yuktali. Moscow-based managers seem to lack the expertise that bamovtsy and some other local residents have—knowledge of the landscape and climatic conditions, as well as engineering skills to dig the soil, lay new tracks and start an engine at low temperatures.

The distribution of finances is another item of discord between Moscow and Yuktali. The Moscow-based firm does not pay its bills and seems to economize on essential things, such as accommodation for shift workers and railroad security services ensuring the safe delivery of building machinery. As a result, the delivery of the equipment is delayed and subcontractors are often concerned that it has been stolen en route.

Conclusion

The socialist BAM was a large-scale infrastructure project involving extreme forms of technological and social engineering. The BAM harnessed feelings of enthusiasm, pride and patriotism that continue to be associated with the railroad's construction and feed identities and memories of the bamovtsy, the migrants who came to the sparsely populated region to build the railroad and towns along its way. The BAM that historically shaped local communities continues to be a formative infrastructure. The current socio-economic role of the railroad institutionally represented by RZhD is hard to overestimate. It provides employment, maintains the population in remote places and serves as a framework of transportation and regional development.

In this article drawing on a comparative case study of the socialist BAM project and its current reconstruction program BAM-2, I traced the continuity and change of the railroad infrastructure that assembles construction plans, individual human actors and organizations, material objects, as well as identities and emotions. I have shown how Soviet development programs, as well as existing, but often unfinished, infrastructure objects (the railroad bed filling and overhead wire support for the second track, abandoned buildings in railroad towns), predetermine the material path-dependency of the reconstruction program. My ethnographic materials also illustrate a certain degree of discursive and ideological continuity between BAM-1 and BAM-2. The myth of the BAM as the central part of the propaganda campaign that surrounded the Soviet construction project has survived, at least on the pages of newspapers and other mass media. It was a useful instrument of the Komsomol labor mobilization and remains part of the idealized collective memory of the BAM construction among the bamovtsy. At the same time, it no longer has the same effective mobilizing power over local communities that have been experiencing dramatic socio-economic transformations throughout the post- Soviet period. The ethnography of the reconstruction work helps to explore the functionality (and malfunctioning), durability and transformation of the BAM as an infrastructure that stretches beyond a single construction site or historical period. Such attention focused on infrastructure unpacks the myth of the BAM as a Soviet ideological construct and a propaganda resource and, at the same time, examines the durability of material objects as an embodiment of collective memories, identities, emotions, expectations and disenchantments.

Following Collier,⁴⁶ I argued that the reconstruction and development efforts of the postsocialist state are predetermined by the material and bureaucratic constraints of its socialist infrastructure. The tracks, tunnels and bridges being completed under BAM-2 follow the original plans of the 1970s and 1980s. As such, the existing material infrastructure enables but also constrains the reconstruction project. At the same time, socio-economic change, institutional reform and new political regimes and actors characterize the postsocialist BAM-2 program. The fact that neither the state nor the private companies represented on BAM-2 anticipate providing social programs or investments in the construction of new housing, or to help secure basic social services in shrinking settlements along the BAM, mark the most dramatic difference between BAM-1 and BAM-2.

Publicly voiced hopes and expectations of BAM-2 among bamovtsy, the carriers of the social memory of the BAM construction, are still affectively anchored in the promises of Soviet modernity with its unfinished construction plans. However, interviews with bamovtsy involved in the reconstruction work show a growing disenchantment and nostalgia for the socialist BAM in the context of rapid postsocialist socio-economic transformations that negatively impact local communities. Thus, boom and bust, construction-decline- reconstruction, and enchantment and disenchantment seem to form the life cycle of the infrastructure of the BAM as a materialization of collective identities and emotions and an open-ended (post)socialist (re)construction site.