Settlement types and settlement system along the eastern part of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (Amur Region and Khabarovsk Region)

Abstract

The construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), one of the largest “megaprojects” of the Soviet Union, left a significant mark in history. At the same time, fewer works consider villages along the mainline, their contemporary life and inhabitants. The authors make an attempt to describe the settlement system along the eastern part of the BAM (between Tynda and Komsomolsk-on-Amur) and provide a typology of settlements affected by the railway based on field and statistical data. The BAM settlement system is linear due to the policy of territorial development around the railway. Thus, the authorities gave priority to industrial development at the expense of social development, and the main decisions on the location of settlements, housing and infrastructure were made at the level of individual construction sites. They were supposed to form a highly urbanized settlement system with a developed infrastructure along the road (to attract employees), but the lagging development of settlements did not allow this. Moreover, the BAM settlement system incorporated the previously existing settlements, which allows to identify two waves in the development of this territory - the long-term pre-BAM and the BAM-period. Settlements can be divided into four types based on the time of establishment, ethnic-cultural and economic characteristics: premainline ethnic settlements of indigenous communities, pre-BAM fishing settlements that grew out of outposts of prospectors and hunters, BAM intermediate urban settlements, and BAM “failed cities” - settlements at the main stations, which were supposed to become key centers of the new territory. These differences determined different ways of settlement transformations in the post-Soviet period.