After Stalin’s death, large numbers of prisoners were released under amnesties – perhaps 8 million out of an estimated 12 million interned at the time – but most of the reprieved were common criminals, and in 1956 there were still over 1 million political prisoners in the Kolyma-Magadan camp complex alone. Dalstroy was dissolved and “corrective labor” camps officially abolished as a separate category in 1958, but the Gulag structure, not completely dismantled, was adapted to serve the modified penal code. In May 1961, a decree on “parasitism” was passed under Khrushchev, which stipulated that “anyone who had not had a proper job for more than a month could be exiled for two to five years to one of the traditional Russian places of exile... and forced to do physical work. This punitive measure,” one writer observes, “was evidently meant to kill several birds with one stone: liquidate unemployment, provide a labor force for the remote areas, and cleanse the large cities of their ‘antisocial elements.’ ”774 It was also a useful way of dealing with “awkward intellectuals,” although the decay of the totalitarian bureaucracy made the uniformly ruthless application of arbitrary laws less efficient than before.
Up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, dissidents suffered exile, and even under Gorbachev, drunks and other “vagrants” could still be rounded up in the cities, given pro forma trials (without legal counsel, or the presentation of evidence) lasting no more than a couple of minutes, and sent to camps. Without question, the camp regime was much less severe than had been known under Stalin (so much so that comparison is scarcely to be made), and in August 1990 Gorbachev, to his credit, issued a sweeping decree to restore the rights of unrehabilitated victims of Stalin’s repression. Huge memorials have been planned for Vorkuta, Sverdlovsk, Magadan, and elsewhere, but “the phenomenon of the Gulag,” Solzhenitsyn has stated, has yet to be “overcome either legally or morally.”775
In the aftermath of World War II, reconstruction was initially focused on European Russia and the Ukraine. Some of the transplanted industries and their labor force were returned to their original locations in a major, if temporary, blow to such cities as Omsk and Novosibirsk; after Stalin’s death in 1953, the abolition of the use of forced labor on a large scale obliged Siberia to depend on free labor. This led to a more natural organization of the economy in the sense that European Russia reassumed its historic role of shouldering labor-intensive industries, with Siberia tending toward those having large fuel and energy requirements. Major regional resource-based development programs (inspired by the Urals-Kuznetsk Combine) were the order of the day. Under Stalin, the iron and steel industry in the Urals and Western Siberia had been greatly expanded, with additional manufacturing stemming from the war. Beginning in the 1950s, work went forward on several hydroelectric power plants and dams designed to harness the power of the Angara and Yenisey rivers – at Irkutsk, Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, and elsewhere. Construction on the Bratsk Dam began in 1954, and for 13 years an army of 54,000 labored to build the country’s largest hydroelectric plant. “For Siberians,” wrote one enthusiast of Soviet development,
dams symbolize Russian might, just as do troops and rockets. They embody man’s conquest over nature and they are an article of the Communist faith. In his drive to modernize Russia, Lenin preached: “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country,” and his apostles took him so literally that they have zealously been erecting what the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko called “temples of kilowatts.”... Bratsk epitomizes the New Jerusalem, the Soviet blueprint for Siberia – a huge hydroelectric project feeding a cluster of new industries, a new city hacked out of pine forest beside a gorge on the rushing Angara River at an isolated spot 750 miles further north than Montreal.776
It remains to be seen whether the new Russia will adapt that blueprint as its own. Among Siberians, however, enthusiasm for the project was not universal. A number of riverside villages were deliberately flooded as a result of the construction, and as their remnants floated to the surface they were bombed from the air. The inhabitants were resettled in forestry camps nearby, but (like the Siberian environmentalist and writer Valentin Rasputin, whose village was among those to disappear) many came to regard themselves as “belonging to the ranks of the drowned.”777 The original hamlet of Bratsk, founded in 1661, is itself buried at the bottom of the Bratsk Reservoir or “Sea.” Twelve miles wide and 350 miles long, the reservoir is the largest man-made body of water on earth.
Other industrial works – an aluminum factory and a large timber combine, for example – grew up nearby, and railroad connections were forged to Zheleznogorsk (meaning “mountain of iron”), a mining center 100 miles to the northeast, Ust-Kut, and other towns. Before long, the 4.1 million-kilowatt capacity at Bratsk was surpassed by a still larger dam at Krasnoyarsk powered by ten gigantic turbines, each weighing over 200 tons, made in Leningrad and shipped to the mouth of the Yenisey via the White Sea-Baltic Canal.
Such projects were followed in the mid-1960s by other undertakings on a similarly Promethean scale to develop the newly discovered oil and gas reserves of Western Siberia, both for export and to fuel the manufacturing centers of the western Soviet Union. In the mid-1970s, two additional programs were launched: one, to develop the large lignite reserves of the Kansk-Achinsk Basin “to feed a power-generating complex for high-voltage electricity transmission westward”;778 the second, the Baikal-Amur Mainline project, or BAM, to open up new resource areas in Eastern Siberia and the Far East for export through the Soviet Union’s Pacific ports. In magnitude, the Baikal-Amur line was almost a second Trans-Siberian, extending for 2,000 miles with tunnels through seven mountains, from Tayshet north of Lake Baikal to Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur north of Vladivostok. Originally begun in the thirties with slave labor to provide a line of communications beyond the range of aerial attack by the Japanese, BAM was to have been the most important undertaking of the Third Five-Year Plan (1938-42). As World War II began, track had been laid as far as Tynda, but during the Battle of Stalingrad the rails were torn up and hauled to the Volga to create a supply line to the besieged city from Saratov. When the project was revived in 1974, strategic consideration once more assumed importance because of the vulnerability of the Trans-Siberian to attack by the Chinese. But its paramount aims were economic – to relieve the overburdened Trans-Siberian (the world’s busiest track), and give access to Eastern Siberia’s huge untapped deposits of strategic minerals and fossil fuels.
Much understandably was hoped for, and BAM was cast as a “Hero Project” in the tradition of the Urals-Kuznetsk Combine and the Bratsk Dam. Some $25 billion was poured into it, and like the Trans-Siberian itself, it had to traverse some of the world’s most difficult terrain. In 1984, the track-laying brigades finally met near Kuanda and bolted down the last sleeper. Film footage, we are told, “showed tears of joy on the weather-beaten faces of the thousands of people who had rallied together to mark the occasion,”779 but their jubilation and relief were premature. The road remained inoperable for another five years due to repair work, and when traffic eventually opened in December 1989 between the Amur and Lake Baikal, the track proved almost useless because the infrastructure needed to support it – the forty-five towns, settlements, and industrial complexes envisaged by the plan to make it pay – had not yet come about. As a result, there was practically nothing for the line to haul. Its only industrial fruit thus far (thanks to a $3 billion Japanese investment) has been the emergence of the coal-mine city of Neryungri on a northern spur known as Little BAM.