Development of the BAM Zone: Semicentennial Results

The uncertainty of the concept of the BAM zone and of its territorial composition and boundaries is illustrated. The composition of the zone has been clarified and its following structural elements have been identified: (1) a subzone of direct influence in the form of a latitudinal chain of municipalities directly crossed by the railway and consisting of three sections: the head, Taishet–Ust-Kut; the middle, Ust-Kut–Komsomolsk-on-Amur; and the tail, Komsomolsk-on-Amur–Sovetskaya Gavan, and (2) the subzone of indirect influence in the form of municipalities adjacent to the first subzone. As a result, the BAM zone includes 31 municipalities (taking into account the addition of urban districts to the districts of the same name) and occupies 29.1% of the total area of the six BAM regions: Irkutsk oblast, Republic of Buryatia, Zabaikalskii krai, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Amur oblast, and Khabarovsk krai. The results of the development of the zone are considered according to two main components: settlement and industrial. It has been established that, due to the steady decline in the population of the zone at the post-Soviet stage, its number and share in the total population of the BAM regions (with the exception of the middle section) have now almost returned to their original state half a century ago, and the population of the base cities (Ust-Kut, Neryungri, Tynda, and others) turned out to be 2–3 times less than planned. The industrial development of the BAM zone was suspended until the early 2010s and the plans for the formation of 8–13 territorial production complexes and industrial hubs were not implemented; in fact, only Yuzhno-Yakutsk and Verkhnelenskii complexes were formed from the planned complexes. It is concluded that, in the near future, more intensive industrial resource and raw material development of the mainline is expected, but its settlement development and demographic potential will continue to decrease due to the introduction of new low-labor-intensive technologies and the use of a shift method of labor organization.