Travels in Siberia (58 page)

Out in the middle of the lake the wind picked up; I remembered reading about horses in the old days that were pushed by strong winds
for great distances across Baikal’s ice until they fell and slid into fissures and drowned. I did not understand how the Niva was maintaining traction on ice that looked sheer. But when I got out to examine the roadway, I saw that it had a more granular surface than I’d thought, and in its heavily traveled sections the tires had roughed it up, so I couldn’t slide on it if I tried. Just a short distance from the roadway on either side, the ice was pristine. Several times when we stopped, I lay face-first on it and looked down. Within the ice I could see planes like in a cracked cube of crystal extending for six feet or more, and milky white fracture lines, and bubbles the size of baseballs or peas, and somewhere deep below, the blue darkness of unfrozen water.

Baikal’s ice road usually lasts from mid-December until mid-April, so this one still had about a month left. Trucks passed us coming the other way; several were huge industrial contraptions with giant tires. At this stage of thickness no vehicle would be too heavy for the ice. But the surface also had occasional big cracks, some of them miles long and new enough that they had not yet refrozen. Water was sloshing out of them in places. These cracks made me nervous, especially when Aleksandr and the other driver got out and began stomping beside them to test the ice’s strength. We had reached the biggest one of these so far—they’re called
treshchiny
—and had stopped to examine it when a small bus filled with Buryats approached from the other side. The Buryats got out, reconnoitered, and then all but one of them jogged up to the fissure and hopped over. The remaining Buryat got back in the bus, backed it up, sped toward the crack, and jumped the bus across. After seeing this, we backed up and jumped it at the same spot.

Sometimes tree branches set in holes in the ice marked the roadway on either side. Maintenance of the road seemed to be handled by the travelers themselves. Certain of the smaller cracks had been bridged with scraps of carpet onto which buckets and buckets of water had been poured, creating ice-rug patches of surprising sturdiness. On the lake surface within sight of the main north–south road, a lot seemed to be going on. Often we passed little gatherings of cars clustered around ice-fishing holes. Other random locations had been used, apparently, as party spots, where a half dozen or more seats made of blocks of ice cut from the lake formed loose rings, and beer and vodka bottles were scattered around.

The weather cleared and then lowered again; as clouds moved in at low altitudes, a fine snow fell, blurring the already minimal scenery. The Niva
ran all right in the 5° cold, but its heating system was insane. Furnace-hot air from the dashboard and backseat vents blasted our top halves so we sweated and suffocated, while from hidden gaps in the vehicle’s lower parts, air as cold as the outdoors, or even colder because of our speed, shot at our legs and feet. The Russians did not find anything strange in this. I was glad for my Glacier Extreme boots, but no readjustment of my gear could warm my thighs, shins, and knees. In midafternoon we stopped for lunch and ate our kielbasa, bread, and hot, sugared tea off the Niva’s back bumper. In the wind the food tasted delicious, seasoned with cold and engine exhaust. I was glad to be standing up and moving around.

Not much daylight remained when we saw the skyline of Severobaikalsk on the shore ahead. Driving up from the lake into the regular streets of a city was a peculiar, abrupt experience, and mildly disorienting. Our drivers said they knew of a good resort where we could stay. It was several miles outside the city, in a forest. They took us there and we got out and unloaded our luggage, and Sergei paid the drivers $350 in American cash—a dollar a kilometer. They turned right around and started back to Ust-Barguzin. Sergei went in to the resort office and talked to the manager, who showed us the cabins he had. They were more like sheds—pretty rustic, designed mostly for summer, and not what we needed at all. We carried our gear to the highway and boarded a local bus going back to Severobaikalsk. Again Sergei gave the bus driver some money at the end of the route and he drove us here and there, finally depositing us at what he said was the best hotel in town.

In fact it was not a hotel but a
profilaktorii
—defined by my Russian-English dictionary as an “after-work sanitorium”—for workers on the Baikal–Amur Railway. This
profilaktorii
had doctors’ offices, a clinic, pools for hydropathy, an exercise room, a cafeteria, and quiet bedrooms, a few of which it rented to travelers when vacancies opened up. I’ve almost never stayed in a more restful place. Its atmosphere was calm and soothing, with a kind of low hum, like a test pattern on TV; even the entrees in the cafeteria were peaceful, down to the mild cream sauce on the cutlets and the vaguely sweet tapioca dessert. You couldn’t walk in the
profilaktorii
door without the lady security person telling you softly to stop and take off your coat and hat—as if all troublesome rustling must be left outside. And right next to the building, just below the window of our room, the train yard of BAM’s Severobaikalsk station gently sighed and creaked and rattled with trains moving back and forth all night.

Only one off note jarred the mood, and that was the safety posters in the halls. These posters warned against drunkenness and other kinds of inattention on the job by showing their grim consequences, in the form of train wrecks. Such hair-raising photographs! There were engines crashed head-on into other engines, and jumbled-up derailments with shredded passenger cars accordioning into one another and bodies spilling out, and freight cars tumbled like toys in a deep ravine, and so on. It made a person think twice about going for a sightseeing jaunt on the BAM. You could understand why this railroad might need a sanitorium.

The
M
in BAM stands for
‘Magistral’
, which means “highway,” “railway,” or “main line.” It’s a word of suitable grandeur for the Baikal–Amur enterprise. The idea of building a second railroad across Siberia to the Pacific dates from before Soviet times. As conceived (and eventually more or less built), the route of the Baikal–Amur Railway would begin at the city of Taishet in central Siberia, where the Trans-Siberian angles toward the southeast. Branching off from there, the BAM would head more directly eastward, go around Lake Baikal on the north side just as the Trans-Siberian does on the south, continue through remote and mountainous country until it intersected the northeastward-flowing section of the Amur, cross that river, and eventually meet the Pacific Ocean at the port city of Sovietskaya Gavan. This route would traverse fastnesses where even sending the surveying teams would be a challenge. Some surveyors had to be flown in, some traveled by reindeer. Only small progress in actual construction was made before the Second World War. A north–south line connecting the central BAM city of Tynda with the Trans-Siberian was completed in 1940, but in 1942 it was dismantled and moved west to provide ties and rails for tracks bringing Soviet trains to the Battle of Stalingrad. That Tynda section would not be reconstructed for thirty years.

Two hundred miles of railway, from Taishet to Bratsk, were finished in 1947. Surveying of the route continued in the 1950s, but not much additional track got built. Then in the ’60s, more mineral deposits were discovered in the parts of Siberia accessible to the BAM route, and hostilities between the USSR and China demonstrated the need for a second line across Siberia, one not so near the Chinese border. In the early ’70s, the Soviet government restarted the building project with full and official enthusiasm.

President Leonid Brezhnev told the country that the BAM project would be “a great labor exploit of our people,” while the deputy minister of railways said it “outranks every other project in the history of railroad building anywhere in the world.” “The track we are laying,” said the deputy minister, “passes through a wide and rich range of practically every element in Mendeleyev’s table.” BAM’s engineers studied the four-thousand-plus bridges that would have to be built along the line’s two thousand miles and the dozens of tunnels—one of them almost ten miles—that would have to be dug through mountain ranges. Other giant projects, like the Magnitogorsk Dam at Bratsk or the Dnieper Hydropower Project, were referred to for comparison and inspiration. Nor were BAM’s promoters exaggerating; the building of this railroad would turn out to be the last great construction project of Soviet times.

It also would be the last great Soviet enthusiasm among the country’s youth. After the authorities of the BAM project announced that it needed young workers, tens of thousands of them left everything and headed for Siberia by any means they could, even on foot, to be a part of BAM. Those who went by the Trans-Siberian to Taishet were greeted with brass bands and cheers at every station. BAM wanted construction workers, welders, carpenters, lumberjacks, ironworkers, chemists, teachers, machine-tool builders, geologists, electricians, truck drivers, tailors, laundresses . . . Early arrivals lived in tents or in dugouts in the ground. Uplifting slogans proliferated, such as “We are building the Baikal–Amur Railway and the Baikal–Amur Railway is building us.” Official artists were shipped in to record the glory on epic spreads of canvas. Different cities and regions of Russia sponsored different sections of track and settlements along the route. Moscow sponsored Tynda, Leningrad sponsored Severobaikalsk. For motivation, people recited this rhyme:

      Let us warn you, friends,

      Answering the taiga’s call,

      The railway wants no

      Chickening out at all.

Somehow everything built in Russia looks as if it has been made by hand. Even in the most generic industrial structures, the concrete looks
hand poured, the corners as if shaped, sometimes clumsily, by individual hands. To me, BAM had the one-of-a-kind appeal of a completely handmade railroad. No book in English exists describing the construction of BAM from beginning to end, so I have no way of knowing, for example, the numbers of workers who died in the labor. Individual sacrifice and effort are evident everywhere. Work on the BAM project went on for seventeen years, and although it was supposed to be completed in 1982, the railroad didn’t officially open along all its length until 1991, the year the Soviet Union disappeared.

Government support for Siberian enterprises dried up after that, and people started leaving the remote places. By 1994, instead of the predicted flowering of cities and resource extraction and industry along the BAM route, fewer people occupied the 580,000-square-mile region served by BAM than had been there in 1991. As a result, the great achievement of building this railroad got buried in events and forgotten. Nowadays you often hear of impressive feats of construction in the world—in modern China, especially—but after BAM I can’t think of another grand construction project that was carried out with so much soul.

Take the city of Severobaikalsk. It doesn’t even qualify as a city, really; its highest population level, about thirty-five thousand, had dropped to less than half that in recent years. But the people who planned and built Severobaikalsk had cared about it, you could tell. No settlement at all existed on this site in 1973. The next year the first work crews came out and lived in tents and railroad cars and cleared the timber. On the ceiling of our room at the
profilaktorii
hung a light fixture of an elaborateness beyond the needs of the situation. As I lay in bed I contemplated the fixture’s embellishments of leaflike metalwork, scrolled tracery, and small cascades of faceted glass lusters. It reminded me of similar extravagances I’d seen out West in America—those almost heartbreaking domestic items (a spinnet, a chiffonier) that the pioneers brought from their former homes in the hope that fanciness would civilize the wilds.

This city, or town, was as charming as any Soviet-era relic could be. Its street grid had been laid out satisfyingly and comprehensibly. The lakefront and the hills around the town had prevented the characteristic Soviet-era gigantism from spreading too far. There was the usual wide central avenue, the public square, and the drab bureaucratic buildings, but all within a small-town radius and scale. In the telephone building, the room of phone booths of hand-carved wood had a pleasantly overheated stuffiness after the cold, and a woolly, intimate, school-coatroom smell. In the post office, an ingenious system had been devised where people waited sitting down, sliding along benches one after the next in sequence as they moved up to the front. When I went in to mail some postcards, almost everyone waiting was an old or middle-aged woman.

At the head of the wide central street, the Severobaikalsk train station dominated the town. The station was another work of wilderness-defying whimsy. A guidebook said that the station’s design was supposed to suggest a sail, in tribute to the great port city of Leningrad/St. Petersburg, sponsor city for Severobaikalsk. Once I’d read that, I could see the station as a sail, or sails, but what it had first reminded me of was a dramatic wide-brimmed hat like the Three Musketeers wore. A narrow middle part corresponded to the high crown, and the sweeping, upward-tending parts on either side were like the flaring of the brim. The brim, or sails, made the station’s roof, and glass panels that came all the way from the brim down to the ground were the sides. The spirit and strangeness of the structure drew your eye wherever in town you happened to be; it cried a bold modernist
yawp
into the land’s wide silence. Of all the pieces of Soviet architecture I’ve ever seen, this was the only one I’d describe as fun.