Russia’s Way of Building Mega Projects

Big infrastructure projects are a problem everywhere.In the abstract, everyone wants them.In practice, the problems multiply.A first surprise is how difficult it is to tell a great idea from a terrible one beforehand.Next, the unexpected costs and delays pile up.Every new road, reservoir, or power plant has buried someone's backyard or displaced their ancestors' burial plot.Construction drags out.A project that has overspent its budget with completion still far in the future is surprisingly difficult to cancel.When at last commissioned, the assets start to depreciate, but the funders, who are often taxpayers, would rather spend the proceeds on other projects than set more funds aside to cover the wear and tear.There is one moment of euphoria, celebrated by champagne, backslapping, and the cutting of ribbons.Everything before that and everything after it is hell.In that setting, how does the Russian experience stand out?This question is addressed by Paul Josephson's new book about "hero projects" from Lenin to Putin.Josephson, emeritus professor of Soviet history at Colby College, has written extensively about Russia, technology, and the environment.His "Introduction" sets out a few main ideas about the importance of infrastructure investment in Russian history.Investing in infrastructure built more than just the economy: It also built the nation and, in Russia's case, an empire.The distances to the empire's borders and the spread and diversity of its natural resources offered irresistible temptations for autocrats to embark on "hero projects" to shrink space, extract minerals, and integrate markets over an immense, unevenly settled landmass.Russian history has featured many such projects since the late nineteenth century.They became self-replicating because each project left technical and institutional legacies that favored further efforts in similar directions.Among the legacies were teams of trained scientists and engineers organized in institutes for research and design, funded by production ministries or the Academy of Sciences, ambitious to develop prestige projects.Another legacy, at least for a time, was ready supplies of slave labor organized in labor camps and available for work in construction, logging, and mining.These legacies gave rise to "technological momentum," a form of "path dependence"