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Volga-Don Canal |
Lenin Volga-Don Shipping Canal (Russian: Волго-Донской судоходный канал имени В. И. Ленина, abbreviated ВДСК, VDSK) is a canal which connects the Volga River and the Don River at their closest points. The length of the waterway is 101 km (45 km through rivers and reservoirs).
The canal forms a part of the Unified Deep Water System of European Russia. Together with the lower Volga and the lower Don, the Volga-Don Canal provides the most direct navigable connection between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Azov, and thus the world's oceans.
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As the lower course of the Don approaches the lower course of the Volga near today's Volgograd, the idea of connecting the two rivers by an artificial waterway goes back a long way in history. The first recorded canal work was done by the Ottoman Turks in 1569.
After taking of Azov in 1696 Peter the Great decided to build the canal, but because of lack of resources and other problems this attempt was abandoned in 1701 without success. In 1701 Peter initiated the second attempt (so-called Ivanovsky Canal) under administration of Knyaz Matvey Gagarin. Instead of connecting the lower course of the Don with the lower course of the Volga near the today's canal, Ivanovsky Canal connected the upper course of the Don, in today's Tula Oblast. Between 1702 and 1707, 24 locks were constructed, and in 1707 about 300 ships passed the canal, under remarkably difficult navigation conditions. But in 1709 because of financial difficulties of Great Northern War the project has been stopped. In 1711 according to the Treaty of the Pruth Russia left Azov and Peter the Great has lost all interest to the canal. Today this structure does not exist.12
Later on, several more projects for connecting the two rivers appeared, but were never carried out.
The actual construction of the today's Volga-Don Canal, designed by Sergey Zhuk's Hydroproject Institute, began prior to the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, which would interrupt the process. In 1948–1952 the construction was completed. Navigation was opened June 1, 1952. During this period, the canal and its facilities were predominantly built by prisoners, who were detained in several specially organized corrective labor camps. By 1952, the number of convicts occupied on the site topped 100,000.
Upon completion, the Volga-Don Canal became an important link of the Unified Deep Water Transportation System of the European part of the USSR.
The canal starts at the Sarepta backwater on the Volga River (south of Volgograd; Lock No. 1 and the gateway arch are at ) and ends in the Tsimlyansk Reservoir of the Don River at the town of Kalach-na-Donu. The canal has nine one-chamber canal locks on the Volga slope, which can raise ships 88 m, and four canal locks of the same kind on the Don slope, which can lower ships 44 m. The overall dimensions of the canal locks are smaller than of those on the Volga River, however, they can make way for ships with up to 5,000-tonne cargo capacity. The smallest locks are 145 m long, 17.0 m wide and 3.6 m deep; maximum allowed vessel size is 140 m long, 16.6 m wide and 3.5 m deep ( Volgo-Don Max Class )
The Volga-Don Canal gets its water from the Don River, which is pumped into it by three powerful pumping stations. Its water is also used for irrigation purposes.
Types of cargo that used to be transported from the Don region to the Volga region included coal from Donetsk, mineral building materials, and grain. Cargoes from the Volga to the Don included lumber, pyrites, and petroleum products (carried mostly by Volgotanker boats). Tourist ships traveled both ways.
The Volga-Don Canal, together with the Tsimlyansky water-engineering system (chief architect Leonid Polyakov), represent an architectural ensemble, dedicated to the battles for Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War and for Stalingrad during the Great Patriotic War. The Russian classical composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote the tone poem The Meeting of the Volga and the Don to celebrate its completion.
According to the Maritime Board (Morskaya Kollegiya) of the Russian Government, 10.9 million tons of cargo were carried over the Volga-Don Canal in 2004.3
According to (not necessarily comparable) data from another source, the total of 8.05 million tons of cargo was transported through the canal in 2006. Most of the cargo was moved from the east to the west: namely, 7.20 million tons were transported through the canal from the Volga/Caspian basin to he Don/Sea of Azov/Black Sea basin, and merely 0.85 million tons in the opposite direction. Just over half of all cargo was oil and oil products (4.14 million tons), predominantly shipped from the Caspian region.4
It was reported in 2007 that over the first 55 years of the canal's operations, 450,000 vessels had passed through, and 336 million tons of cargo had been carried. Recent cargo volume stood at 12 million tons a year.5
In the 1980s, construction started on a second canal between the Volga and the Don. The new canal, dubbed Volga-Don 2 (Russian: Волго-Дон 2, Volgo-Don 2; ) would start from the township of Yerzovka on the Volgograd Reservoir, north (upstream) of the Volga Dam, as opposed to the existing Volga-Don Canal, which starts south (downstream) of the dam.6 This canal would reduce the number of locks that the ships coming from the Volgograd Reservoir - or from any other Volga or Kama port farther north - would need to traverse on their way to the Don. The project was abruptly canceled on of August 1, 1990 due to financial considerations, although by that time more than 40 percent of the allocated funds had already been spent.67.8 Since then, most of the stone and metal put into the abandoned canal and its locks have been looted.9
As of 2007-2008, Russian authorities are considering two options for increasing the throughput of the navigable waterway between the Caspian basin and that of the Black Sea. One option, for which the name "Volga-Don 2" has been reused, is to build a second parallel channel ("second thread") of the Volga-Don Canal, equipped with larger, 300 metres (980 ft) long locks. This plan would allow for an increase in the canal's annual cargo throughput from 16.5m ton to 30m ton. The other option, which seems to have more support from Kazakhstan10 (who would be either canal's major customer), is to build the so-called Eurasia Canal along a more southerly route in the Kuma-Manych Depression, some sections of which are currently used by the much shallower Manych Ship Canal. Although the second option would require digging a much longer canal than Volga-Don, and would be of less use to vessels coming from the Volga, it would provide a more direct connection between the Caspian and the Sea of Azov. The Eurasia Canal would also require fewer locks than the Volga-Don, as the ground in the Kuma-Manych Depression is lower than in the Volga-Don area.11
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