Travelling along the Volga

Earlier this month I made a longer trip to Russia, where I travelled along the Volga upstreams from Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea to Volgograd, Samara, Kazan and Murom, before finally arriving in Moscow. The Volga region is certainly one of the most fascinating regions of Eurasia, featuring a multiplicity of languages, cultures and religions that make the traveller forget that he or she actually remains in one and the same country: Russia.

But the Volga itself is also an intriguing body of flowing water, with a mesmerizing history of its own. In the early 1870s Ilya Repin painted his famous “Barge haulers on the Volga”, which gives quite a good idea of how the river was used by humans for navigation at that time.

Just a decade later, the barge haulers had become redundant, as the river barges were switching over from sails and oars to petroleum; the new fuel oil was becoming available in large quantities thanks to the Swedish brothers Ludvig and Robert Nobel, who led the explosive growth of the Russian oil industry down in Baku.

The real transformation of the Volga as a river landscape shaped by humans, however, came in the Soviet era, when technological hubris led the country’s communist water wizards, championed by Sergei Zhuk, to dam the river at a number of places, creating the world’s largest hydropower plants and a number of huge artificial lakes that totally changed the Russian map. Meanwhile Gulag workers created a canal interconnecting the Volga with the Don, which I went to see in the outskirts of Volgograd (a city more known under its earlier name: Stalingrad).

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Volga – as well as the Volga-Don Canal – became sites of nuclear construction. In Samara I spent a few days in the historical archives held by that city, which turned out to contain fascinating materials about Soviet water history, of relevance not least to our NUCLEARWATERS project.