The 'Soviet Power Reserve': Daily Working Life in the Narratives of BAM Builders

Abstract

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the daily working life of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) builders by analyzing the narrative memory of the participants and contemporaries of the All-Union Socialist Construction. Memories of former builders, their families, and local people not participating in the project were collected in the settlements of the Western section of the BAM during 2005-2018. Along with oral history sources, the author used archival documents of construction companies, district and township Soviets, the Communist Party bodies and other public organizations, regional non-fiction, and personal materials of the BAMers. The theoretical and methodological basis of the article includes current research works in the field of oral history and memory studies. Such aspects of daily working life as the system for selecting workers for the construction, motivation for arrival, team building, labor and living conditions, socialist competition, etc., were examined through the prism of informants' personal perception and individual autobiographical experience. The analysis of the memories showed that the way of life and rhythms of the BAM settlements were completely subordinate to the tasks of building the railway. Each construction company or industrial enterprise built their own separate working districts with clubs, kindergartens, schools, libraries, and other social and cultural facilities. The workers spent most of their free time in the teams of their brigades, Komsomol detachments, and enterprises. Living in the same street or dormitory, they celebrated holidays, played sports, participated in amateur activities together. During off-hours, the workers set up their own settlements, built houses, playgrounds, stadiums, and swimming pools. As a result, memories about life at the BAM often make up an image of a common permanent construction that did not finish with the end of the working day or the week. The author believes that informants reproduce biographical plots narrating about various difficulties in the context of glorification of the builders' everyday work and feats. The processing of negative events into positive ones is associated with the retrospective effect of narrative memory. Being in difficult life situations today, many veterans of the BAM appeal to the theme of courage, hardship, endurance, thanks to which they managed to take part in the lifetime project for the nation, feel their need, find their own collective identity. In the post-Soviet crisis, everyday practices developed during the construction project became the main symbolic resource for the survival of the population in the BAM areas.