Post)Soviet infrastructure: Politics of identity and emotions on the BAM

The Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a railroad that crosses the northern areas of East Siberia and the Far East, was the last largest Soviet infrastructure project. Its construction in the 1970s and the 1980s propelled by ideological propaganda and material incentives attracted labour migrants from different parts of the USSR. Currently, BAM builders or bamovtsy constitute the majority in a number of settlements along the railroad. Against the background of the socio-economic crisis and the ideological shift following the dissolution of the USSR, the BAM project was publicly criticized. Due to the growing transportation of resources extracted in the region, the programme of its reconstruction (or BAM-2) was launched in 2014. It is aimed at building the second railway track and is, in fact, a continuation of unfinished Soviet construction plans. The article focuses on infrastructure as an embodiment of collective memory, identity and emotions. The emotionally charged memory of the BAM construction period plays a key role in reproduction and reinforcement of local residents' identities and constitutes non-material aspects of the BAM infrastructure in the post-Soviet period. Comparative analysis of the projects of BAM and BAM-2 unravels the temporality of infrastructure where promises and failures of modernization, boom and bust, construction, destruction, and reconstruction constitute the life cycle of the railroad and of the people entangled with it. The article is based on field materials including focus group discussions, biographical interviews, and archival records gathered in the cities of Tynda and Severobaikal'sk and in the town of Novaia Chara in 2013 and 2016 to 2018.

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