Eight Soviet Engineering Mega Projects That Shaped the USSR

Key facts

• The Trans-Siberian Railway began construction in 1891 under Tsar Nicholas II and was completed in 1916; the Soviet-era Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) was finished in 1984, connecting 4,324 kilometers from the Pacific Coast to Siberia.
• The Moscow Metro opened in 1935 with 13 stations and 11 kilometers of track; it now has 250 stations and 435 kilometers, serving up to nine million passengers daily.
• The Kyiv Metro opened in 1960 as Ukraine's first underground system and has expanded to three lines and over 52 stations, including Arsenalna Station at 105.5 meters deep.
• The Zhiguli Hydroelectric Station was built across the Volga River from 1950 to 1957 and has a capacity of 2,300 megawatts.
• The Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) was built under Stalin's first Five-Year Plan in the early 1930s in the Chelyabinsk region and became one of the world's largest metal processing plants.
• The Volga-Don Canal was constructed between 1948 and 1952, spans 101 kilometers, and employed approximately 900,000 workers, many from the Gulag system.
• The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic with Soviet support, spanned roughly 155 kilometers, and fell in 1989.
• The Mir Space Station was launched in 1986 as the first modular space station and operated until 2001, setting records for human spaceflight duration.