BAM Video
These three films track the BAM railway across the full arc of its myth, from launch to disillusionment. The first installment of Troshkin's official chronicle captures the 1974 send-off—rallies, departing brigades, and the verse of Robert Rozhdestvensky promising that the taiga would yield to socialist labor. A later entry in the same chronicle stages the project's climax, the driving of the silver spike joining the eastern and western lines before fur-hatted officials and rolling cameras. Pavlov's 1986 documentary then strips away the march music to show what the heroic era left behind: broken machinery, unfulfilled promises, and the permanent residents of an unfinished zone.
Give Us BAM! (1974). BAM begins with a burst of enthusiasm as a Komsomol Hero Project.
Maximalists (1980). Komsomol workers on BAM drive the "silver spike" connecting East and West.
Mikhail Pavlov: BAM Zone: Permanent Residents (1986). Zvezdny, the first settlement for BAM's pioneer, stands abandoned after the rail line is completed.