Hero Projects

Abstract “Hero projects”—such large-scale technologies for military, resource exploitation, and power production as smelters and mines, pipelines and railroads, hydropower stations and canals, and nuclear reactors—have been central to Russian development from Lenin and Stalin to Putin. Because Russia’s military might and economic strength depend on its resources, its leaders determined to mine them, enrich them, fire up boilers and turn turbines with them, and use poorly equipped workers and gulag prisoners to tame them. From Arctic tundra to deep forest taiga, from the northwest to arid Central Asia and the Far East, they built roads and railroads, boilers and factories, canals and irrigation networks, all for the benefit of the state. The embrace of “hero projects,” “projects of the century,” and megaprojects, as successive regimes have called them, continues to be a major feature of Russian political rule in the twenty-first century. If the tools and devices were modernized and became more powerful and efficient, the purposes of enhancing state power and military might have remained. Many Soviet-era and Soviet-inspired projects have been reborn in the twenty-first century through massive infusions of state funding, to the benefit of oligarchs. All of them reflect the desire to enhance state power, placate citizens in a time of economic or military challenges, and demonstrate to the world the nation’s technological verve. Sadly, hero projects have served the Kremlin’s military to seize territory, as the conquering of Eastern Europe after World War II and the ongoing war against Ukraine reveal.