Informal transportation and social embedding of the railroad: the case of okurki on the Baikal-Amur Mainline

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the transformations of informal transportation practices in Siberia as an example of the process of social embedding of infrastructure in remote regions. Research about informal transportation is predominantly based on studies of minibuses, motorcycles, rikshaws and other small, low-performance vehicles. Meanwhile, the railroad often best exemplifies formalization, control, and surveillance, the characteristics opposite to informal practices. On the basis of information gathered from local and regional archives and semi-formal interviews with railroad workers, their families, and BAM builders (2016–2020), this paper traces the roots of embeddedness in specific norms and expectations that formed during construction of the railroad and persisted during its operation. Informal transportation became the norm and a resource for coping with a lack of infrastructure. Recent reforms have changed the railroad from a public system to a private, profit-seeking, dis-embedded enterprise. This process affects local communities’ access to the railroad. Workers’ trains, or okurki, are a last refuge for the retention of local mobility mostly in an informal way.

KEYWORDS:

• Baikal-Amur Mainline
• railroad
• remoteness
• social embeddedness
• informal transport
• okurki

Acknowledgments

This article is based on the findings of the research project ‘Configurations of “remoteness” (CoRe) – Entanglements of Humans and Transportation Infrastructure in the Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Region’ at the University of Vienna, Austria, the project “Informal Roads: The Impact of Unofficial Transportation Routes on Remote Arctic Communities” supported by National Science Foundation (#1748092) and the research project “The Baikal-Amur Mainline and the northern regions of Buryatia: from the modernization project of developed socialism to the post-Soviet (re) industrialization” supported by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and Government of the Republic of Buryatia (#19-41-000001). We thank the reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments and suggestions. We are very grateful to the informants along the BAM who shared their time and stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As Zamyatina (2014) argued, the ability to travel is highly important for the residents of remote settlements because it is almost the only way to stay connected with places in central or southern Russia.

2. The “Extreme North” and similar territories were defined in 1967 in recognition of the extreme climate conditions and corresponding additional expenses and challenges that residents in those areas face (Ukaz 1945).

3. The Irkutsk, Buryatia, and Zabaikalski regions.

4. The Omsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Tomsk, and Altai regions and the Republic of Kazakhstan.

5. The Krasnoyarsk, Khakasia, and Kemerovo regions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund [P 27625]; Division of Polar Programs [1748092]; Российский Фонд Фундаментальных Исследований (РФФИ) [19-41-000001].