How bam stands for. BAM: the history of construction and the significance of the highway. Reference. Where is the highway

In June 1974, a joint resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline" was issued, since then this sonorous abbreviation has become one of the symbols of the Brezhnev era.
In reality, however, the Baikal-Amur Mainline, one of the largest in the world, has been under construction since May 1938.
In 1937, the general direction of the BAM route was determined: Taishet - Bratsk - the northern tip of Lake Baikal - Tyndinsky - Ust-Niman - Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Sovetskaya Gavan.
In May 1938, six railway ITLs (corrective labor camps) were created on the basis of Bamlag. In 1938, construction began on the western section from Taishet to Bratsk, and in 1939 preparatory work began on the eastern section from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Sovetskaya Gavan.
In June 1947, the construction of the eastern section of Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Urgal continued (mainly by the forces of prisoners of the Amur ITL (Amurlag)) . The first train on the full length of the line Taishet - Bratsk - Ust-Kut (Lena) passed in July 1951, in 1958 the section was put into permanent operation. However, further construction of the highway was canceled in April 1953, along with "most of the other great Stalinist projects."
They remembered the BAM project in the late 1960s, when relations with the PRC began to balance on the brink of war. The easily vulnerable Trans-Siberian Railway needed an understudy at a safe distance from the border. In April 1974, BAM was declared "an all-Union shock Komsomol construction site" and soon Komsomol guitars rang out among the boundless Siberian taiga.

One of the student teams at the construction of BAM, 1975:

The second part of the BAM epic has begun...

A rally dedicated to the arrival of the construction team named after the XVIII Congress of the Komsomol. Russia, Ust-Ilimsk, Irkutsk region, July 1, 1979:

RIA Novosti

10 years after the resumption of construction. the famous "Golden Docking" took place and through traffic was opened along the highway.

On September 29, 1984, at 16:05 local (10:05 Moscow) time, at the future Balbukhta Chita siding, the oncoming rail and sleeper links touched each other:


Officially, the "golden" links were laid at Kuanda station (42 km from Balbukhta) on October 1, almost two days after docking.

However, BAM was barely half ready by that time, thousands of railway infrastructure facilities had to be erected, housing was built along the entire route so that people could move into it from change houses and temporary barracks.
Leisure of BAM people:

On November 1, 1989, the entire new 3,000-kilometer section of the highway was put into permanent operation in the volume of the launch complex.

The longest Severo-Muisky tunnel in Russia (15,343 meters), the construction of which began in May 1977, was broken through to the end only in March 2001 and put into permanent operation in December 2003.

Severo-Muisky tunnel during construction:

The cost of building the BAM in 1991 prices amounted to 17.7 billion rubles, thus, the BAM became the most expensive infrastructure project in the history of the USSR (all facts according to the Wikipedia article).

By 1997, the traffic along the BAM had halved compared to the peak figure at that time in 1990 (only a few trains passed per day). By 2009, the volume of cargo transportation in the direction of Taishet - Tynda - Komsomolsk increased again and amounted to approximately 12 million tons per year. At the same time, even with such volumes of traffic, the road remains unprofitable.

I vaguely remember how, even in elementary school, a teacher told us about a very distant railway construction site where Komsomol members were working. Then, for us, the size of the country, the Komsomol and the railway were something abstract. Well, the country is big, the Komsomol is something after the pioneers, and the railways are choo-choo. But, nevertheless, the memories of the heroic-romantic construction site remained forever.

You can find out for yourself how it was by visiting the BAM-40 photo exhibition, which opened on Monday on Tverskoy Boulevard.

« The exhibition includes more than 400 TASS archive photographs from 1974-1984. about the great building of the century. The exhibition is a photographic history of the Baikal-Amur Mainline: here are unique shots of the construction of the railway, the life and life of builders, as well as shots of natural landscapes that have never been published in the media or shown before».

ITAR-TASS has prepared a gorgeous website dedicated to this photo exhibition, but it's better to see it live. The photos are worth it.

It was a discovery for me that BAM actually dates back to 1938, when construction began (the decree itself was issued in general in 1933) of the main route Taishet - Sovetskaya Gavan. Construction continued with long interruptions from 1938 to 1984. The construction of the central part of the railway, which took place in difficult geological and climatic conditions, then took more than 12 years, and one of the most difficult sections - the Severo-Muisky tunnel - was put into permanent operation only in 2003.

And now BAM, like the Trans-Siberian Railway, is waiting for a global reconstruction aimed at increasing cargo turnover and building new branches to deposits, developing industrial areas and ... maybe, finally, they will build a railway to Sakhalin.

1. If we discard all the officialdom, then the exhibition turned out to be very interesting and now I will show you a small part of it.

2. One of the tasks solved by the construction of the BAM was to ensure reliable communication with the Far Eastern regions of the country in the event of a possible capture of the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian Railway, located almost at the very border, in the event of a military conflict with China. This railway was primarily focused on freight traffic, supplementing and unloading the Trans-Siberian.

3. In April 1974, BAM was declared an all-Union shock Komsomol construction site, masses of young people came here.

4. I don’t know how much the passenger route along the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok is now in demand (it’s more humane by plane anyway), but try to fly, for example, from Novokuznetsk to Irkutsk. This is where the railroad comes to the rescue, playing its role in "local" passenger traffic.

5. The construction was truly shock and gigantic.

6. Walking along the boulevard, it was nice to see that both veterans and young people are looking at these photographs with interest. Which 30 years ago could well have built a road according to a Komsomol permit.

7. Construction was carried out in the most difficult natural and geological conditions. And the photos show it very well.

8. And even in our time, the construction of the Berkakit-Tommot-Yakutsk highway, which began in 1985, continues.

9. Oh, what beautiful old aviation photos. Workers of the Far North and Far East - IL-14 and An-24

10. People had genuine joy at each new victory, crash and the first train.

11. A little mimimi :)

12. In 2009, the reconstruction of the section "Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Sovetskaya Gavan" (Far Eastern Railway) began with the construction of a new Kuznetsovsky tunnel. It is scheduled to be completed in 2016. The total cost of the project is 59.8 billion rubles. These works will increase the speed of trains, which will entail an increase in throughput and carrying capacity, and will also make it possible to increase the weight rate of trains on the section from 3600 to 5600 tons. And this is only the beginning of a huge project to reconstruct this highway.

13. You will be on Tverskoy Boulevard, stay for a while, be sure to look at these photos.

14. And parents build BAM at -50 in winter. And in the summer they feed the local midges, which almost eat them alive.

15. Yak-40 on a dirt strip. Jet bus.

16. Aviation, and especially helicopters, played a huge role in the construction of BAM.

17. Soviet-style BAM turned out to be a rather impractical thing. Single-track (and therefore low passable), almost not electrified, long and expensive to operate. At the same time, the road had a great economic impact on the development of the Far East - new cities and industries appeared around it.

18. Today, in order to master the prospective volume of traffic and pass the prospective cargo traffic in the direction of the ports of the Far East until 2020, a “Project for the reconstruction and modernization of the railway infrastructure of the Baikal-Amur and Trans-Siberian Mainlines” has been developed.

19. July 8 Russian Railways began the modernization of the road. Its main task is to increase the capacity of the BAM. According to the project, immediately after the completion of the reconstruction, by 2020, the volume of traffic on individual sections of the highway should increase by an average of 50% (to and from the ports of the Far Eastern Basin by 59% (+43 million tons), on the approaches to the Primorsky Territory - by 43 % (34.8 million tons).

20. As a result of the modernization, about 500 km of additional main tracks, 47 sidings, 680 km of automatic blocking will be built. More than 90 stations will be reconstructed, power supply devices will be strengthened along all main directions. Modernize a number of large and medium-sized artificial structures and railway tracks, marshalling, border, pre-port and port stations... Taksimo). All this is going to be fixed. In fact, the BAM will be rebuilt in a variant in which it can try to become cost-effective. The leadership of Russian Railways plans to unload certain sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway at the expense of BAM and partially “re-profil” the highways - to speed up passenger traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and freight traffic on the BAM.

21. Construction-construction, and life flows. Settlements are built, settled down, families and children appear.

22. Found one mistake in the signatures. The photo shows An-24, not An-12.

23. I read the signature, but still, what is it?!

24. A huge amount of foreign equipment worked at the construction site. Which for the USSR was, in my opinion, very atypical.

25. Glory! Now such slogans look a little ridiculous, but this is a huge part of our history.

26. The longest Severo-Muisky tunnel in Russia (15,343 meters), the construction of which began in May 1977, was broken through to the end only in March 2001 and put into permanent operation in December 2003.

27. Devil's bridge on the Severomuysky bypass. It was a discovery for me that there were two detours. I will quote a couple of paragraphs from the ITAR-TASS website: “The first bypass was built quite quickly, from August 1982 to March 1983. It was not much longer than the tunnel (24.6 km) and passed almost along the shortest route, through the mountains. This plus was balanced by a huge minus - very steep slopes, which reached up to 40 m per kilometer. To understand how steep it is, you can imagine a football field, one side of which is four meters higher than the other. For a motor road, this is still acceptable, but for a railway, it is already too much. To overcome the Severomuysky ridge along this path, freight trains had to be disassembled into short fragments and transported separately at low speed. Passenger traffic was completely prohibited here - people were disembarked from trains and transported in shift cars along the road running parallel to the railway track. Of course, it couldn't go on like this for long. In 1985, when it became finally clear that the commissioning of the Severomuysky tunnel was being postponed indefinitely, the construction of the second bypass began, much longer than the first - 64 kilometers. The new route meandered between the mountains from pass to pass. There were two loop tunnels on the route (2.14 km and 752 m). Traffic on the second bypass was opened in 1989. Here it was already possible not to disengage heavy freight trains and passenger traffic was allowed. Although the speed was limited to 20 km/h.”

28. Many settlements and stations of BAM were built by one republic, region or city.

29. The total volume of investments for the modernization of the BAM and the Trans-Siberian Railway will amount to 562.4 billion rubles. Of these, 302.2 billion rubles will be invested by Russian Railways and 260.2 billion rubles by the state.

30. Cafe "Komariki". :) Humor, youth and enthusiasm allowed us to survive and build this railway.

31. Well, some cute shots from Tverskoy Boulevard.

33. Reads Dickens, by the way!

On April 13, 1932, a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway" was issued, according to which design and survey work was launched and construction began.

The idea of ​​creating the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), the main Soviet construction site of the 1970s, appeared in the 19th century. Even then, local entrepreneurs justified the need to build a road with the prospect of developing mineral resources to the north of Lake Baikal. In 1888, the Russian Technical Society discussed a project to build a Pacific railway across the northern tip of Lake Baikal, after which, in July-September 1889, Colonel of the General Staff N.A. to the places where the BAM route now lies. He came to the conclusion: "... drawing a line in this direction turns out to be absolutely impossible due to some technical difficulties, not to mention other considerations." Voloshinov was not a pessimist, but he was soberly aware that at that time Russia had neither the equipment nor the means to carry out grandiose works.

At that moment, the government was not interested in the idea of ​​building a road, and returned to it only in 1906-1907 - immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, which showed that the eastern borders of the empire were not as reliable as it seemed.

The fact that the design and survey work of the northern branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway began precisely in 1907 indicates a trend that will be visible in the future: the state was preparing for serious investments in the BAM only when it concerned security. The Trans-Siberian Railway passed too close to the border, and in order to conduct hostilities in the east, the state needed a rocade - a railway that ran parallel to the alleged front line of a possible war and made it possible to transport and supply troops. In all subsequent years, the state will seriously return to the construction of the road only in moments of tension on the eastern borders.

The first exploration work at the future BAM ceased in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, in which Japan turned out to be an ally of Russia, and China was not an independent player. The new government returned to the construction of the road only after almost 20 years. Although plans to build a road north of the Trans-Siberian were put forward in the mid-1920s, until the early 1930s they remained just an idea. The impetus for the start of the process, most likely, was the conflict on the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) - on the section of the Trans-Siberian Railway that passed through China, which was then the Soviet-Chinese joint venture and along which, before the revolution, the main part of the movement from Eastern Siberia towards the Far East.

In the summer of 1929, in China, after the nationalists came to power, Chinese troops seized the Chinese Eastern Railway and held it for half a year. By this time, the CER itself was no longer the only continuation of the Trans-Siberian to the Pacific Ocean, but the conflict showed a potential danger on the Soviet-Chinese border, along which the main Trans-Siberian highway passed. Already in 1930, the Dalkraikom of the CPSU (b) sent proposals to the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars for the construction of a second Trans-Siberian road. In this document, the name "Baikal-Amur Mainline" is mentioned for the first time. It was proposed to start the road from the Urusha station (approximately the middle of the current BAM in the Skovorodina area), and they planned to make Komsomolsk-on-Amur, which was then the village of Perm, as the final point.

By 1932, the proposals of the Dalkraikom had passed all instances, and in April the first resolution of the Council of People's Commissars "On the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline" appeared, which approved the BAM construction plan and the route proposed by the Dalkraikom. The People's Commissariat of Railways was instructed to ensure "an immediate start to all preparatory work for the construction of the BAM." The construction, according to the decree, was planned to be completed in three years: through traffic along the entire highway in the operating mode was to be opened by the end of 1935.

But almost at the very beginning of construction, it became clear that its terms, as well as for many other objects of the Stalinist five-year plans, were too optimistic and it would not be possible to complete the highway on time. The main problem was the lack of manpower: with an officially established contingent of 25-26 thousand people working at the construction site, only 2.5 thousand people were able to attract to the start of construction in 1932. Moreover, the first head of the BAM construction, Sergei Mrachkovsky, even considered the established contingent to be underestimated three times. Given the difficulties with the delivery of building materials and equipment, by the end of 1932, the project had formed, as it was then called, “huge breakthroughs”, construction funding had almost stopped by the fourth quarter, and its curtailment was already being discussed.

The decision was common for that time: in October 1932, when it became finally clear that the plan to recruit free workers could not be fulfilled, the construction was transferred from the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat for Railways (NKPS) to the OGPU, which at that moment was completing the construction of the Belomorsko -Baltic Canal. The number of prisoners in the OGPU camps grew every year, the construction of the White Sea Canal was completed in 1933, so the problem with the labor force at BAM was solved: by 1934, about a quarter of more than 500 thousand prisoners were employed in the structure of the Baikal-Amur camp (BAMLAG) who served time in the camps of the OGPU. The most famous of the BAMLAG prisoners were the philosopher Pavel Florensky and the future marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky.

The question of the labor force was removed, but the original plans by 1934 still had to be changed: the territory of the future route turned out to be poorly explored, and a significant part of the labor force was abandoned ahead of time for the construction of the second tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway. So far, it has been decided to carry out work on the construction of a new highway only on the connecting section from the BAM station on the Trans-Siberian Railway (near Skovorodina) to Tynda. But it was also opened very late - only in October 1937. In the same year, after the start of a full-scale Sino-Japanese war in northern China, the Soviet government adopted a second decree on the construction of the BAM, approving the modern route of the highway from Taishet through Ust-Kut, Nizhneangarsk, Tynda, Urgal, Komsomolsk-on-Amur with access to the port of Sovetskaya Gavan.

The total length of the route has grown from the originally proposed 1.65-2 thousand km to 4 thousand km or more. For the design of BAM, according to this decree, for the first time a special design institute "BAMtransproekt" was created (since 1939 it was renamed "BAMproekt"). In 1937, work began on the construction of the second connecting part with the Trans-Siberian Railway - the Izvestkovaya-Urgal line. In 1938, after the first open conflict between the Red Army and the Japanese troops on Lake Khasan, another decree of the Council of People's Commissars followed, which approved a new deadline for putting the line into operation - 1945.

The Great Patriotic War, which broke out in 1941, confused all plans for the construction of the highway. Two months before the start of the war with Germany, in April, the USSR and Japan signed a non-aggression pact. The Japanese military industry began to prepare for a naval war with the United States, and the likelihood of a large-scale war in the Far East, and with it the strategic need to build the BAM, significantly decreased. On the contrary, in the European part of the country, with the start of the war with Germany, the situation worsened every day, and in these conditions the NKPS used the BAM materials as a reserve. Rails and railway equipment were used in the restoration of destroyed sections of railways in the southern sectors of the front, for example, in the construction of a supply road along the western bank of the Volga near Stalingrad - the Zavolzhskaya Mainline, in the construction of railway sections of the transport corridor to organize supplies of allies under Lend-Lease through Iran.

As a result, almost all BAM lines built have actually ceased to exist. In 1941, the BAM-Tynda line, introduced back in 1937, was dismantled, the construction of the Urgal-Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Taishet-Padun and Komsomolsk-Sovetskaya Gavan sections was mothballed. The Izvestkovaya-Urgal line was tentatively put into operation in 1942, but a year later it was also dismantled. Railway communication on already constructed sections with a total length of approximately 400 km was discontinued.

Nevertheless, even during the war, BAM remained a priority project for the Soviet leadership. As soon as the situation at the front began to improve, in 1943 the USSR State Defense Committee resumed the construction of the Komsomolsk-Sovetskaya Gavan line, at that time the most important in the event of a war with Japan, at an accelerated pace. With the help of American deliveries of railway equipment under lend-lease in July 1945 (a month before the USSR declared war on Japan), the line went into operation. Construction continued immediately after the war. Work resumed on the western section of the BAM, in 1947 the Taishet-Bratsk line was opened, and in 1951 it was brought to the Lena station (Ust-Kut city), in fact forming the current western section of the route. True, the full commissioning of the site took place only seven years later - in 1958. The lines were necessary to ensure the operation of large construction projects - the Ust-Ilimsk hydroelectric power station, the Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk forestry complex.

But these lines were the last to be introduced before the start of the new construction of the Brezhnev period. There was no longer a real threat to the Soviet borders in the east: with the coming to power of the Communists in China, Soviet-Chinese relations seemed to forever become exclusively friendly, and Japan as a military entity in the region after the defeat in the war no longer existed. In addition, the new leadership, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, who came to power, proposed new large-scale projects in other regions, in particular, the development of virgin lands.

And since the late 1950s, to the already known problems of construction - difficulties in attracting labor, permafrost and difficult terrain - another one has been added. In the late 1950s, high seismic activity was recorded on the BAM route: seven earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 to 10 occurred at once in the highway zone. In 1957, on the northern spurs of the Udokan Ridge, the most significant in the USSR since 1911, the Muya earthquake with a magnitude of 10-11 points occurred, which caused the formation of a system of cracks and faults with a length of about 300 km, a shift in river beds, and the collapse of mountain slopes. In 1961, the Institute of the Earth's Crust of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences began seismological studies along the BAM route, which took several years.

Until the end of the 1960s, only minor work continued at BAM - embankments were filled and rocks were cut to the west of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the constructed section of the main highway and the connecting line Izvestkovaya-Urgal were used as a logging road. Construction at BAM was almost completely suspended until the mid-1970s.

The state decided to return to the topic of BAM only in the 1960s. As before, the impetus for the resumption of investment and the start of new design work was geopolitical considerations. Since the late 1950s, relations between the USSR and China began to deteriorate, the Chinese leadership insisted on revising the border with the Soviet Union. By the second half of the 1960s, it became clear that an armed conflict on the Soviet-Chinese border was quite real, and it could be quite large-scale: 658 thousand Soviet and 814 thousand Chinese soldiers were deployed on 4,380 km of the Soviet-Chinese border. In 1969, these assumptions were confirmed - the first open border conflict took place between the USSR and China on the disputed Damansky Island, where 300 Chinese soldiers landed. Fortunately, the conflict did not escalate into full-scale hostilities, but skirmishes between Soviet border guards and Chinese troops continued after that.

Of course, military-strategic considerations were not the only reason for starting new work at the BAM. Soviet economists viewed the construction of the railway as the main element in the integrated development of the productive forces of the Irkutsk region, Buryatia, Transbaikalia, Yakutia, the Amur region and the Khabarovsk Territory. The route of the route passed the largest undeveloped deposits located in these regions, including the copper Udokanskoye, the largest oil and gas (Chayanda and Verkhnechonskoye) and coal (Neryungri and Elginskoye) deposits of Yakutia, polymetallic (Chineyskoye) and uranium (Kholodnenskoye) deposits of Buryatia and the Chita region .

Economists substantiated the need to create nine territorial production complexes (TPK) in the BAM zone. In addition, during the 1970s, high oil prices stimulated public investment, and traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway increased significantly, causing the country's leadership to fear that the capacity of the main road would be insufficient for the foreseeable future. In the future, the task was to continue the BAM north to Yakutsk, then to Magadan, Chukotka and Kamchatka.

In 1967, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a resolution on the resumption of design and survey work at the BAM, which were entrusted to the institutes Mosgiprotrans, Lengiprotrans and Sibgiprotrans. The design work, in fact, had to be carried out again - both due to the clarification of the natural conditions on the route route compared to the 1930s (including increased seismic hazard), and due to changes in the technical conditions for the operation of the route, on which instead of The previously planned locomotive traction was now supposed to organize movement on diesel and electric. By this time, only the westernmost section of the Taishet-Lena route was electrified.

The first work on the new construction site began even before 1974, from which it is customary to count the history of the modern BAM. The first construction division of the highway, the BAMstroyput department at the Skovorodino station, was created in November 1971, and the construction itself began in 1972. In April, the first cubic meters of soil were backfilled at the BAM-Tyndinsky section, and in September, the first link was laid at the zero kilometer of the line.

In March 1974, at a speech in Alma-Ata, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev for the first time called BAM "the most important construction site of the ninth five-year plan." Four months later, on July 8, the Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR N 561 "On the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway" appeared, which is now considered the official start of construction. It was planned to complete the construction of the highway in ten years. The plan involved the construction of a 3,145 km long highway from Ust-Kut (Lena station) to Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the laying of a second 680 km long track on the already built Taishet-Lena section and a single-track 400-kilometer BAM-Tynda-Berkakit railway - a total of 4,225 km of tracks.

At the end of July 1974, Pravda published an article "From Baikal to Amur" on the front page, which launched a mass propaganda campaign that continued until the end of construction. True, very little was written about the initial stage of the BAM construction in the 1930s in numerous books, brochures and newspaper articles that were published in millions of copies. By this time, the state preferred not to tell the real story of even relatively successful projects, such as the White Sea Canal. And about the sections of BAM built and dismantled during the war, for example, in the Soviet encyclopedic dictionary of the 1980s, there was nothing at all - the date of commencement of construction was 1974, and only a passing mention was made of two sections built "in the late 1940s - early 1950s.

As in the 1930s, during the years of the second construction of the BAM, the state faced the task of providing labor to the construction site, and relatively cheap one at that. This problem had to be solved in other ways. Even before the July decision of the Central Committee, at the XVII Congress of the Komsomol in April, BAM was declared an all-Union Komsomol construction site. Right at the congress, the first Komsomol detachment was formed, which went to the highway. By the summer of 1974, there were already 2,000 Komsomol members working at BAM. The share of those who arrived at the construction site "on a public call" in the first year was 47.7% of the total number of employees, and in individual departments - up to 80%. In addition to volunteers, university graduates who came to BAM for distribution also worked at the construction site.

The second driving force was the railway troops - the same Komsomol members, but who got to the construction site no longer voluntarily. The first military construction units arrived at BAM in August 1974. The republics of the USSR took patronage over the construction of the BAM infrastructure - the Urgal station was built by Ukraine, Muyakan - Belarus, Uoyan - Lithuania, Kichera - Estonia, Tayura - Armenia, Ulkan - Azerbaijan, Soloni - Tajikistan, Alonka - Moldova, Tynda was built under the patronage of Moscow. In parallel, construction was also carried out "at the exit" - in the ports of Vanino and Sovetskaya Gavan.

Komsomol members and the military built the road almost as quickly as the prisoners. In 1979, the Komsomolsk-Berezovka section was completed, which closed the eastern ring of the BAM (Izvestkovaya-Urgal-Komsomolsk-Volochaevka). By 1981, when the line in the system of the Ministry of Railways officially became an independent Baikal-Amur Railway with management in Tynda, the operational length of the tracks of the new road was more than 1.6 thousand km. On the western section, the Lena-Nizhneangarsk line was put into operation in the same year. In 1982, the working movement of trains from Tynda to the Verkhnezeysk station was opened on the eastern section of the BAM, and in November of the same year, the 300-kilometer section Urgal-Postyshevo was put into permanent operation.

The docking of the western and eastern sections of the tracks took place in September 1984, and on October 1, the solemn laying of the "golden" links of the BAM took place at the Kuenga station in the Chita region. For another five years, work continued on the completion of the BAM infrastructure and auxiliary branches. In 1989, an act was signed on the acceptance of the main line, and through train traffic began on it. But the final work on the construction of the BAM was completed only 14 years later, when in 2003 the world's fifth largest 15-kilometer Severomuysky tunnel was opened, the preparatory work on which began back in 1976. Before the tunnel was completed, trains had to take a 64-kilometer detour.

In the Soviet Union, they knew a lot about “great construction projects” - those that the whole country, in unison, “The Party said: it’s necessary! The people answered: Yes!
Since the end of the 1920s, there has not been a single year, with the possible exception of the most difficult war years, in which dozens and dozens of impressive industrial or infrastructure giants were not built or surrendered by the next Congress of the CPSU or the anniversary of the Great October Revolution.

But even against this background, the object stands out, whose name has become a household name for the generation of the 1970-1980s. Nearly a century passed from the idea to the final implementation of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, and naturally, this long journey had its own exploits and tragedies.
Long road to the taiga.


In the public mind, the Baikal-Amur Mainline is perceived as the main construction site of the Brezhnev era. Indeed, the abbreviation BAM, starting from the mid-1970s and over the next decade and a half, did not leave the pages of Soviet newspapers and TV screens, and in the 1990s this railway began to be equally enthusiastically scolded. In fact, by 1974, when dear Leonid Ilyich called BAM "the most important construction site of the ninth five-year plan", a significant part of the highway was already ready. The builders had to connect these sections, but it was necessary to do this in the most difficult conditions.


For the first time, the construction of a railway to the Far East bypassing Lake Baikal from the north and its further extension to Khabarovsk, which stood on the Amur, was thought about back in the 1880s. However, on sound reflection, having assessed the level of development of science and technology at that time, the option with a northern bypass through practically deserted areas was recognized as unrealistic. The Trans-Siberian Railway, this largest infrastructural construction of the Russian Empire, passed along the southern tip of Lake Baikal. However, the development of the geopolitical situation in the region soon forced us to recall the northern route again.


The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 showed the vulnerability of transport communications in the Far East. Belonging to the Russian Empire, the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) passed through the territory of Manchuria, Chinese territory. The constant threat of its loss forced the government to first build its backup already exclusively on Russian soil - the Amur Mainline, and then think about building an additional railway, which would be located at a certain distance from the country's border.


However, until 1914, only the most initial surveys were carried out on this promising northern bypass of Baikal. Due to the First World War, revolutions, the collapse of the empire and the Civil War, one of the main centers of which was just in the Far East, the future of BAM was forgotten for 12 years, but starting from 1929, the foreign policy situation on the Soviet-Chinese border began to worsen again, and the project of the "second Trans-Siberian Railway", which, unlike the first, would take place in the depths of the territory of the USSR, was reanimated again.


It was in 1930 that the name "Baikal-Amur Mainline" appeared for the first time in the proposal sent to Moscow by the Far Eastern regional authorities, which later became an indispensable attribute of the Soviet media. In the 1930s, the approximate BAM route was determined, which was supposed to start at the Taishet station already existing on the Trans-Siberian Railway in the Irkutsk region, go around Baikal from the north and then go east, ending in Sovetskaya Gavan, a large port located on the coast of the Tatar Strait opposite Sakhalin.


In fact, the BAM was supposed to become a rocade, a special railway line running parallel to the potential (or real) front line and used to supply troops engaged in hostilities. The Trans-Siberian Railway, located close to the border of the USSR, was too unreliable for this task, especially in the context of a brewing conflict with Japan, which had actually occupied Manchuria. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union had already entered into two local confrontations with the Japanese army in those parts (on Lake Khasan and near the Khalkhin Gol River). The war was brewing, and in this regard, the issue of building the BAM acquired strategic importance.


Initially, it was planned to build it in record time (it was about three years), but even for the Stalinist economy, such Stakhanovite rates turned out to be completely impossible. The Baikal-Amur Mainline was supposed to go through a practically undeveloped, deserted mountain taiga, crossing a number of large ridges and rivers. The route of the future road was not studied, and in such conditions it was necessary to build more than 4,000 kilometers of railway tracks, dozens of large bridges and tunnels. The USSR at that stage and within the specified timeframe simply could not pull this project off, because other large-scale construction projects were being carried out in parallel throughout the country, and the labor force, even taking into account the Gulag system, was not enough for everything in preparation for the coming war.


Nevertheless, a certain (and rather big) amount of work was done before 1941. Three connecting branches were built with the existing Trans-Siberian: the BAM station - Tynda, Izvestkovaya - Urgal and Volochaevka - Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Thus, three new railway junctions appeared on the future Baikal-Amur Mainline (Tynda, Urgal and Komsomolsk-on-Amur). From each of them, in two opposite directions, the parallel construction of six sections of the BAM was supposed to unfold at once. By 1945, these fragments were planned to be combined into a single road, thus forming the intended rocade. Naturally, the Great Patriotic War stopped this process.


Moreover, during the Second World War, the tracks already mounted on the connecting branches to the Trans-Siberian Railway were dismantled and sent to the European part of the country to railway construction sites that were much more needed in combat conditions. The newly launched BAM was actually destroyed. But this does not mean at all that Moscow has forgotten about him. As soon as a radical turning point was outlined in the war, its construction resumed, because the threat of war in the Far East had not disappeared. In 1943, thanks to, among other things, American assistance, the rapid construction of one of the six fragments of the road, the final section of Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Sovetskaya Gavan, began. It was completed just in time for the declaration of war on Japan.
At the same time, in 1945, work began on the opposite, western section of the BAM. There, they managed to stretch the highway from the junction of Taishet on the Trans-Siberian Railway (the starting point of the road) to the city of Ust-Kut. BAM reached the Lena River, the gateway to Yakutia, but further work stopped, and for a long time.
New stage.


After Stalin's death, his former associates promptly froze many of the projects personally patronized by the "leader of the peoples." The Transpolar Highway, the tunnel to Sakhalin, and a number of other large facilities, the need for which was not obvious to the new government, but which sucked huge money out of the country's budget, fell under the distribution. Khrushchev found his own priorities (space race, virgin lands, "big chemistry", hydropower), the situation in the Far East was discharged (temporarily, as it turned out), BAM was forgotten for a while. By that time, the highway consisted of two extreme appendixes, western and eastern (Taishet - Ust-Kut and Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Sovetskaya Gavan). The central, longest and most complex fragment of 3145 kilometers between Ust-Kut and Komsomolsk-on-Amur was still occupied by the "green sea of ​​taiga". In order for the project to be remembered again, it took a combination of two important factors at once.


First, by the end of the 1960s, relations between the USSR and China became extremely aggravated. Chairman Mao began to enthusiastically fight not only against sparrows, but also against "socialist imperialism" and "Soviet revisionism." Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo, engaged in the policy of "détente" in the West, in turn, were disgusted by the radicalism of the Chinese comrades. The apotheosis of tension between the formerly fraternal countries was the conflict on Damansky Island, where in 1969 a full-fledged Soviet-Chinese war almost began. The PRC at that stage was still very behind in development from the Soviet Union, but there were enough fighters in the People's Liberation Army of China, and the Trans-Siberian Railway still passed close to the border. In the minds of the generals from the Soviet Ministry of Defense, the word "rockade" loomed again.


The second important factor was the desire of the USSR government to begin the development of the vast Trans-Baikal expanses. By the second half of the 1960s, bearded geologists in thick sweaters had already established that almost the entire periodic table was located in the bowels of the region. The richest deposits of coal, iron ore, tin, gold, copper, molybdenum, oil and gas were discovered. At the same time, only bears enjoyed all this wealth: the Union did not have large bases for their development. But there was money.


West Siberian hydrocarbons were regularly exported, their prices were at their peak, the flow of currency into the country seemed inexhaustible. BAM was again remembered not only by the generals, but also by officials from other ministries. The Council of Ministers developed a plan to create nine so-called "territorial production complexes" along its route at once. New deposits, strung on the railroad, were to become the basis for new industry, new combines, plants and factories, and new cities were to be born around them.


Beginning in 1967, work on the BAM resumed. New surveys were carried out, the route was specified, engineering structures were being designed. In the spring of 1974, Brezhnev declared BAM to be “the most important construction site,” a month later, at the Komsomol Congress, it was given the status of “All-Union Komsomol shock”, after which the first construction team went straight from the congress to Transbaikalia. The project, designed for 10 years, was re-launched.


BAM was really built by the whole country. There were not enough youth construction teams and railway troops - one or another republic or region was assigned to most of the sidings, stations, created near-station settlements and towns. Moscow builders built the Tynda hub, Leningraders - Severobaikalsk, Armenians - Kuchelbekerskaya station, Ukrainians - Novy Urgal, Lithuanians - Novy Uoyan. The architecture of these stations and settlements reflected the national characteristics of the "curators". Now Muscovites are surprised to see the familiar series of panel houses in Tynda, and the Armenians enjoy the Kyuchelbekerskaya station from their native volcanic tuff.


The Belarusians also had their own station. The Muyakan station and the village attached to it were to become the area of ​​responsibility. Unfortunately, unlike other national BAM projects, the Belarusian one was never implemented. Muyakan remained just a railway siding, and the project of the station of the failed station, born in the bowels of the Belgosproekt Institute, was preserved only in the form of a model and on the corresponding commemorative badge.


At first, they did not spare money for BAM. More than 10,000 construction trucks alone were purchased, and the contract was signed with the German company Magirus-Deutz. Bought for more than a billion German marks, Magiruses were able to work both in frost down to minus 45 degrees and in 30-degree heat. They turned out to be so reliable that individual copies of this technique continue to plow the expanses of Siberia even today, 40 years after their release.


By today's standards, this sounds strange, but the builders, Komsomol members, and the military practically met the originally announced deadlines. BAM was completed in ten years announced in 1974. On October 1, 1984, at the Kuenga station in the Chita region, in a solemn ceremony, symbolic "golden" links were laid in the roadbed. Of course, the highway was not yet ready, it was being completed for another five years - through traffic began only in 1989, but nevertheless, given the scale of the project and the rapidly developing "crisis phenomena" in the Soviet economy, it was still an outstanding result.


However, the construction of BAM continued further. Only in 2003 was the Severomuysky tunnel, the most difficult object of the road, finally put into operation. It was built under the ridge of the same name, it took a painfully long time, more than a quarter of a century. The fifteen-kilometer giant (the longest railway tunnel in Russia) was built in the most difficult geological conditions, crossed tectonic faults and quicksands, took a lot of lives from tunnellers, and God knows how much money from the state, but still it was completed.


Since 1984, the Severomuysky bypass has been used as a temporary replacement - a series of serpentines and tunnels 64 kilometers long, on which trains sometimes had to be literally pushed. Despite the difficulty of overcoming it, this is the most beautiful section of the highway, and its main and most spectacular object is the famous "Devil's Bridge" - a curved viaduct 35 meters high.


According to some reports, it was BAM that became the most expensive infrastructure project in the entire Soviet history. Its commissioning took place during the collapse of the USSR, difficult years for the history of the highway. The load was much less than expected, the road brought losses year after year, the deposits, for the development of which it was mainly built, turned out to be useless in the 1990s. Neither new factories nor new large industrial cities appeared.


However, the country, for the sake of combating which BAM was reanimated, can become a country for which it exists and develops. Insatiable China demands resources, Russia has them, and the capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which is no longer threatened by anything and no one, is simply not enough. The Baikal-Amur Mainline is an excellent alternative: it is a shorter access to the ports through which it is very convenient to export the same coal. The Russian government is already making plans to expand it, laying a second track, and some work (for example, the construction of the second branch of the Baikal tunnel) is already underway. Perhaps BAM, the “gluttonous senseless protracted construction project” that was cursed in the 1990s, is still destined for the bright future promised to it at the beginning of the last century.