From Deseret News archives:
The passage of Peter the Great
Moscow-to-St. Petersburg river cruise offers a peek into Russia's past
While sophisticated and chic St. Petersburg and the palace were spectacular finales to this Russia visit, the cliche about focusing on the journey and not the destination rings invaluable and true.
In this instance, the journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg consisted of a 13-day, 1,200-mile, water-borne voyage along the Volga and five other rivers, along the Moscow Canal, across the two largest lakes in Europe, along narrow water diversion canals and across huge reservoirs. The watery passage was made possible by an impressive system of 20 locks that raised and then lowered our vessel a total of 360 feet in elevation, sometimes in 50-foot increments. The periodic raising and lowering of the vessel by the locks almost always brought passengers deck-side, mesmerized by the mechanics and engineering of the massive operation.
On roughly the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, this watery sojourn is only possible six months of the year, as the temperatures in the region plunge to 40 degrees below zero during the winter.
Subsequent czars advanced the waterway by building more locks and canals, some requiring ships to be towed by ropes at the hands of hardy sailors, Herculean acts memorialized in folk song.
Soviet leader Josef Stalin used hundreds of thousands of slave laborers from the infamous gulag prison camps to complete the vital segments, including the Moscow Canal that links the capital with the Volga River. The canal, built between 1932 and 1937, opened the "blue highway" that Stalin not-too-humbly envisioned as his legacy one on the scale of the ancient pyramids in Egypt. Not only did the waterway facilitate commerce, but it was a strategic military advancement as it gave Moscow access to the Baltic Sea by way of the Gulf of Finland.
Recent comments
Does anyone who was on the M/S Repin have any more details to offer...
Peter | May 15, 2008 at 10:49 a.m.
Mesmerizing fascinating trip. I felt I was on the boat viewing all...
Anonymous | March 24, 2008 at 7:34 p.m.
This is really a great trip. I plan to go again if possible. It is so...
elizabeth | March 23, 2008 at 9:43 a.m.
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