The Lenin Volga-Don Shipping Canal (In Russian Волго-Донской судоходный канал имени В. И. Ленина) is a canal, which connects the Volga River and the Don River in a closest location between them. The length of the waterway is 101 km (45 km go through rivers and reservoirs).
The problem of connecting the two rivers goes back a long way in history. First canal work was done by the Ottoman Turks in 1569. Peter the Great made an unsuccessful attempt to build a canal in the late 17th century. Later on, they would come up with several more projects for connecting these rivers, however, they would never be carried out.
The actual construction of the Volga-Don Canal began before the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, which would interrupt the process. In 1948-1952, the canal was finally built and became an important link of the unified deep-water transportation system of the European part of the USSR.
The Volgda-Don Canal starts at the Sareptsky backwater on the Volga River (south of Volgograd) and ends in the Tsimlyanskoye Reservoir of the Don River at the town of Kalach-na-Donu . The canal has 9 one-chamber canal locks on the Volga slope, which can lift ships 88 m high, and 4 canal locks of the same kind on the Don slope, which can lower ships 44 m down. 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 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. Types of cargo that used to be transported from the Volga region to the Don region included lumber, pyrites, petroleum products. 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.
