SOVIET UNION: For a Lot of Bucks,BAM!

Why Moscow is working on a new Siberian railroad

To Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, it is "the project of the century." In the Soviet press, it is BAM. But whatever it is called, the Soviet Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway is the biggest construction project under way anywhere in the world today. To tap directly into the varied resources of Siberia, the Soviets are laying track across a 1,965-mile stretch of wilderness running from the frontier town of Ust-Kut near Lake Baikal to an eastern terminus at Komsomolsk, 565 miles north of Vladivostok....

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