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The waterway was begun in 1709 to connect St. Petersburg with the interior. The major canals were built in the 1930s. Reconstructed and modernized in the early 1960s, the principal addition to the deepening of the waterway was a dam across the Sheksna River.
The Canal consists of the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Volga River, the Rybinsk Reservoir, the Mariinsk system (composed of the Sheksna River, the White Lake Canal, the Kovzha River, the Mariinsk Canal, and the Vytegra River), the Onega Canal, the Svir River, the Ladoga Canals, and the Neva River to St. Petersburg.
In the Stalinist Era, GULAG prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Moscow-Volga Canal, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in these remote regions. The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn states that the first of the great forced labor projects, the building of The Belomar (White Sea) Canal between 1931 and 1933, was undertaken because "Stalin simply needed a great construction project somewhere which would devour many working hands and many lives (the surplus of people as a result of the liquidation of the kulaks [wealthier peasantry]), with the reliability of a gas execution van but more cheaply, and which would at the same time leave a great monument to his reign of the same general sort as the pyramids." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. II [New York: Harper & Row, 1975], p. 86.) He estimates that 100,000 workers, perhaps more, died during the first winter of work on the Canal (p. 98).
The Rybinsk Reservoir was formed in 1941 between the upper Volga River and its tributaries, the Mologa and Sheksna rivers. Towns along the waterway disappeared, often without advance warning to the villagers who, noting the rising waters, moved as much of their belongings as they could carry. Along the way, one sees the mute wreckage of flooded churches.
Another melancholy sight is the St. Nicholas Cathedral of Kalyazin, its tower pierces the surface of the river to mark what was once the center of the town of Kalyazin. Stalin ordered the town leveled and the area flooded to provide water for the Uglich power plant.
More on Soviet Labor Camps - http://users.1st.net/dhancock/blkbook.html