Unlike the busy cities along the Trans-Siberian, which have undergone rapid change over the last few years due to increased train traffic and an influx of foreign travellers, the towns along the BAM remain part of the land that time forgot, their Sovietarchitecture virtually unchanged.
The Georgian government, however, is unperturbed by the critics, saying the move makes a clean break from the brutalist Soviet-era architecture that dominates Tbilisi.