Building Socialism?: Crime and Corruption During the Construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway

Christopher Ward

Global Crime, 2007, vol. 8, issue 1, 58-79

Abstract: Beginning in 1974, the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) dominated public life in the Soviet Union for the next decade. Declared complete in 1984, BAM was arguably the greatest and most costly construction feat in post-war Soviet history. Officially, the mainline was to serve as the “path toward communism” that would unite all Soviet citizens. This article explores the crime and corruption that surrounded the propaganda-driven world of the BAM. Although the railway led to few concrete accomplishments in either the industrial or social development of the USSR, the sociological and criminological consequences of BAM were profound. The highly visible presence of both petty and hard-core criminals on the railway revealed that life on the rails was not as progressive or futuristic as the state claimed. Instead, the dynamics of crime and control that intersected during the BAM's ten years of prominence revealed that the peculiarities of human nature, not what the state termed “communist morality,” defined those who worked on the project.

Date: 2007
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DOI: 10.1080/17440570601121860

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