КАНАЛ МОСКВА — ВОЛГА [THE MOSCOW-VOLGA CANAL].

Description

“Our whole country is proud of the world’s greatest hydraulic structure, worthy of the Stalinist era.”

So reads the text in the lower left column of this poster map of the Moscow-Volga Canal, published in 1938 by the All-Union Institute of Visual Geodesy under the authority of the Soviet State Planning Commission. The map blends technical cartography and  Stalinist propaganda, presenting an engineering achievement built on the labor of hundreds of thousands of prisoners as the fulfillment of a great leader’s vision.

The Map in Detail

The poster is organized around a large central map: “Схема Канала” (Scheme of the Canal). It shows the canal’s full 128-kilometer route from the Volga River in the north to Moscow in the south, with the seven connected reservoirs, locks, hydroelectric stations, pumping stations, and surrounding terrain rendered in color. Towns, rail lines, rivers, and the sprawling approaches to Moscow fill the lower portion of the map; the great Ivankovskoe Reservoir (the “Moscow Sea,” at 327 square kilometers the largest of the connected water bodies) anchors the northern end.

Above the central map, a longitudinal cross-section of the canal (“Продольный Разрез Канала”) shows the elevation profile across the full length, from the Volga intake to the Moscow River terminus. Water is pumped uphill from the Volga into a summit level, then descends by gravity into Moscow. A legend at the bottom of the central map keys the symbols for locks, hydroelectric stations, pumping stations, bridges, construction sites, and passenger stops.

Four supplementary panels flank the central map. At lower left, bar charts compare freight tonnage on the canal in 1937 and 1942 (suggesting either a projected figure or a later insertion), broken down by commodity: timber, grain, oil, coal, building materials. At lower right, before-and-after route maps show the water distances between Moscow, Leningrad, and Rybinsk before and after the canal’s construction — the canal dramatically shortened the navigable route between Moscow and the northern river system.

The text columns are dense with statistics and rhetoric. The canal required 202 million cubic meters of earthwork and more than 3 million cubic meters of concrete, three times the concrete volume of the Dnieper Dam and eight times that of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. It incorporates 8 hydroelectric stations, 5 pumping stations, 11 locks, 11 dams, 19 bridges, and approximately 240 structures in total. A dedicated 28-kilometer water supply canal feeds the Stalin Municipal Water Supply Station. The passenger line is served by steamships named Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Mikhail Kalinin, Klim Voroshilov, Soviet Republic, and Professor Mechnikov.

Historical Context

The Moscow-Volga Canal was the second of the great Stalinist forced-labor infrastructure projects, following the White Sea-Baltic Canal of 1933 (also referenced in this map’s text). Construction began in 1932 under the NKVD’s Main Directorate of Camps (Gulag), which supplied the labor force: estimates of the number of prisoners who worked on the project range from 180,000 to over 200,000, drawn from labor camps established along the canal route. The death toll during construction is estimated at over 22,000, though the true figure may be higher. The canal was completed and opened July 15, 1937, and was presented to the Soviet public as a triumph of socialist construction.

The poster was published in 1938, the year the Great Purge reached its peak, and the same year many of the engineers and camp administrators who had built the canal were themselves arrested. The canal was renamed Canal Named After Moscow in 1947, when Stalin’s name was quietly removed from Soviet infrastructure nomenclature in a small anticipation of the larger de-Stalinization that would follow his death. The ships named after Molotov, Kalinin, and Voroshilov were similarly renamed at various points after 1953.

Publication History

Published by the All-Union Institute of Visual Geodesy (IZOGAT), CIKU, USSR Gosplan, Moscow, 1938. Printed at the typolithographic workshop of the Institute, Marshrutny Lane 3, Novokuznetskaya 3, Moscow. Print run: 10,000. Price: 1 ruble. Entered production November 19, 1938; signed for press November 24, 1938. Editor: N.M. Porgomársky; technical editor: O.S. Gavrin.