Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing to spend billions of dollars on a bizarre trip into the Soviet past, restarting construction on the storied and ill-starred Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad. Sadly Putin's nostalgia will come at great cost to the country's future.

In the late 1990s, the American writer Fen Montaigne traveled across Russia for his fly-fishing book, "Hooked." Among other adventures, he rode on the BAM, a major railroad through the wilderness of Eastern Siberia and the Far East that was meant to unlock the area's vast natural resources.

BAM was conceived under Stalin in the 1930s but built in the 1970s and 1980s at a cost of $25 billion, paid for mainly by oil exports.