For a Lot of Bucks,BAM!

Why Moscow is working on a new Siberian railroad

To Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, it is "the project of the century." In the Soviet press, it is BAM. But whatever it is called, the Soviet Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway is the biggest construction project under way anywhere in the world today. To tap directly into the varied resources of Siberia, the Soviets are laying track across a 1,965-mile stretch of wilderness running from the frontier town of Ust-Kut near Lake Baikal to an eastern terminus at Komsomolsk, 565 miles north of Vladivostok. By the time the last rail is laid in 1983, the cost of the project, now one-third cornplete after three years of work, may reach $15 billion--twice the price of the Alaska pipeline. TIME'S Moscow bureau chief Marsh Clark flew from Khabarovsk on the Manchurian border to a construction site on BAM's eastern end for a look at the work in progress. His report:

While our plane came in for a landing, Siberia loomed as a forbidding vista of seismic scars and snowcapped mountain ranges. Our destination: a tiny pioneer village aptly named Alonka (wasteland). The temperature: 50DEG F. below zero. On even chillier days, the cold at Alonka becomes literally audible: the moisture of exhaled breath freezes instantly, and the colliding crystals make a rustling sound. The Jeep-like vehicles used by the construction crews had quilts on their hoods; at a bridge construction site, workers were busy "cooking" concrete in warm elevated shacks before pouring it into foundations. The bridge, begun eight months ago, was due to be finished at the end of March. "I'll be here for the victory," said Foreman Vladimir Zudilov, 32, whose fur ear flaps were covered with hoarfrost. "And then we'll move on to start another BAM bridge."

Since the days of the czars, the Russians have dreamed of harvesting Siberia's wealth, but its remoteness has frustrated them. As one Soviet expert on BAM puts it: "When God was distributing the elements over the earth, he grew tired when he got here, mixed up everything he had left, and dumped it haphazardly." BAM will eventually carry a marvelously mixed bag of these riches: petroleum from major new oilfields in Western Siberia, coal from Neryungri and Chulman, iron ore and gold from Aldan, diamonds from Yakutia, and salt, asbestos, molybdenum, copper, tin and bauxite from various areas. Shipped to Japan and other resource-hungry nations, such exports will help Moscow earn the foreign currency it needs to pay for technological development.

BAM's route covers mountainous regions where there have been earthquakes, and broad areas of permafrost and innumerable bogs where the ground heaves during the short summer thaw; pressure tests of the Siberian soil are conducted at an underground Permafrost Institute at Yakutsk. Some 3,700 bridges and culverts must be built across rivers and streams. Subway experts from Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev have helped drill tunnels (one of them 9.5 miles long) through seven mountain ranges.

Since the BAM boom began in 1974, 100,000 workers, most of them young, have signed up, lured by salaries that are two to three times the national average of $215 a month and by bronze BAM medals awarded by the Supreme Soviet. To minimize language problems and make the most of a spirit of ethnic competition, the BAM planners have set up separate work camps for at least 20 Soviet nationalities, including Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Moldavians and Uzbeks. Students from Zaire, Chile, Nigeria and other African and Latin American countries attending Moscow's Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University have been used as summer "volunteers." The Soviet army has also lent many hands.

With all this, maintaining BAM's manpower has been a problem. Workers must pass difficult physical examinations and receive special inoculations before going to Siberia, where the natural hazards include swarms of mosquitoes and gnats in summer, and frostbite and conjunctivitis caused by the glare of sun on snow in winter. Most of the workers live in settlements in the BAM service area, a corridor, 50 to 100 miles wide, running along the track. Although there are such amenities as movies and theaters, life is harsh. Food must be flown in, mail service is irregular, and even such necessities as warm clothing are often in short supply.

BAM workers have sometimes struck over the conditions. In one such episode, a Soviet publication observed, party officials had to be sent "to straighten the matter out." One measure of the size of the project: BAM planners are concerned about how to improve worker productivity before the low birth rate among European Russians will begin to cut into the skilled-labor pool in the early 1980s.

Another concern has boosted BAM to a "shock" (top priority) project. The only other railroad through the entire territory, the 73-year-old Trans-Siberian, runs along the north bank of the Amur River, which is part of the Soviet-Chinese frontier. The "River of the Black Dragon," as the Chinese call it, has been the focus of disputes for 300 years. Soviet and Chinese troops have repeatedly clashed along it and the nearby Ussuri River in the past decade. In Khabarovsk, where soldiers were much in evidence, an official says: "Things are calm here right now, and we hope they'll stay that way." By building BAM 110 to 310 miles north of the border, the Soviets are seeking insurance against the possibility--if things do not stay calm --that a Chinese attack could immediately sever their vital ground link between European Russia and the Pacific.

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