Description: The first scholarly account of BAM (the Baikal-Amur Railway), Russia's most ambitious public construction project to be attempted in the final decades leading up to the collapse of the USSR. This is a rich social history based on a combination of original scholarly research and interviews with many of those who worked on BAM.
Review Quotes: A fascinating case study of youth, gender, ethnicity, and an emergent ecological consciousness in Brezhnev's USSR. This book also focuses on the near farce of an out-of-touch effort by the Soviet state to have BAM's builders inhabit a visionary future while living in a squalid present. This disconnect between officialdom's happy propaganda and the brutal reality of everyday life on BAM validates Havel's insistence that late communism can be reduced to mendacity incarnate. An important work that should become a classic in the field.-- "Matthew Payne, Emory University"