The painting by Yury Podlyaskiy First through train is part of his series Western BAM. The artist dedicated this series to the construction of the Baikal — Amur Railway (abbreviated BAM in Russian). The collection of the Belgorod State Museum of Fine Arts has several works from this series.

The through movement of trains along the BAM railway commenced on 27 October 1984. It is this event that Podlyaskiy illustrated in the work which he completed in 1985. In the lower half of the painting a crowd of people with red flags is greeting the train. The rest of the canvas shows a huge mountain covered with a taiga forest. It was the artist’s way of emphasizing how difficult the construction was as the railway was laid by tunnelling, in cold winters, through rocks and permafrost, exposed to mudflows and avalanches.

The artist was born on 5 June 1923 in Khabarovsk and soon after the family moved to Verkhny Volochok where Podlyaskiy studied art at the local youth club. In 1938 he moved to Leningrad where he attended a school under the Academy of Arts, followed, between 1942 and 1949, by the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. Yury Podlyaskiy’s was mentored by Boris Ioganson, a well-known Soviet painter, one of the key masters of socialist realism.

Podlyaskiy travelled extensively in the Soviet Union and beyond. He visited France, Italy, Norway, Albania and Sweden. His memories of the trips led the artist to create landscapes and genre paintings. In 1989–1992, works by Podlyaskiy were displayed at exhibitions and entered into the L’Ecole de Leningrad’s Russian art auctions in France. Today the artist’s works are held by the Russian Museum, Tretyakov Gallery, museums and private collectors in Russia, France, Japan and Norway.