Historical Legacies of the BAM: Mechanisms of Persistence and Contemporary Effects
On April, 24th at the 13th LCSR International Workshop Alexander Libman (Free University of Berlin, Germany) presented the study “Historical Legacies of the BAM: Mechanisms of Persistence and Contemporary Effects”.
The presentation is based on an article published several months ago in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, with Alexander Libman being one of the co-authors. The paper examines how the legacy of the Great Construction Project of Communism may have influenced social phenomena in contemporary Russia, in particular, political attitudes and electoral behavior. To illustrate this point, Alexander Libman draws attention to the natural experiment of the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM).
The establishment of a project of this scale had not only an instrumental but also an ideological role. Its main goals were to create a new, safer way to connect the west and east of the country and to legitimize the Soviet regime. Young people, many of whom were students, constituted the main labor force of the BAM. Coming to the Far East, they participated in the construction not only of the railroad, but also of the infrastructure surrounding it, new towns began to appear around the BAM. Construction attracted investments; the region developed intensively. In addition, it is worth noting that the basis of the population was made up of highly educated people, so the areas around the BAM construction were not only materially wealthy, but also had a high human capital. However, after the collapse of the USSR, the active development of the region stopped, and there was no more inflow of new population.
The paper presented at the conference examines how the legacy of BAM influenced voting behavior during the 2011 and 2016 Russian legislative elections based on data collected in the Amur region. Initially, the authors had two hypotheses. On the one hand, the heirs of the BAM builders should have been more likely to vote for the CPRF, given the broad ideological background of the Great Construction Project of Communism. On the other hand, according to the modernization hypothesis, the more affluent and educated population of the BAM construction areas should have preferred one of the more progressive parties over the CPRF.
As a result of the econometric analysis, the authors concluded that people living in the BAM area are more inclined to vote for the LDPR party. Firstly, this result may be related to the image of the LDPR in the Far East as a party that defends local interests. Secondly, voting in favor of the LDPR may be a kind of protest vote of more progressive strata of the population, for whom no party fully meets the modern socio-economic demands of society.
By Alina Gasanova