Abstract:
This thesis deals with the Baykal Amur Mainline (BAM). This railroad line was built through the Siberian tayga during the 1970s and 1980s under enormous difficulties. It was the single most important large technical project in the final decades of the Soviet Union, and it was a prestige object of the Brezhnev administration. It was to be the starting point of the economic, military, and power-related development of Siberia.
The Soviet leadership promoted the development of a downright cult of the BAM. Contrary to this, the BAM must be seen as a social, legitimatory, economic, and ecological failure. The analysis of this contrast forms the core of the thesis.
On the basis of the study of this large technical projects some characteristic mechanisms of power in the Brezhnev era are to be brought out.