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p Corn fields stretch away on either side of the road all the way from Rostov-on-Don till Tsimlyansky, rippling like water in spring floods. They roll away farther than your delighted eye can see. You know, of course, that what you have seen along your three-hundred-kilometres drive is only a particle of the country’s harvest, but still the fields before you seem boundless. The little corner of the world where you lived as a child also seemed vast and without end... .

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p The colours which are usually so tropically garish in July and are lavished by Nature with such wasteful generosity, appear beautifully softened on this slightly overcast day with only rare flashes of sunlight. A raincloud covers half the sky in the north-east, behind the rows of tumuli. A rainbow stretches upward from the ground, but it has not the strength to pierce the sombre thickness of the clouds, and stands there on the horizon in straight not very tall columns, feeble and almost colourless.

p Along the sides of the road runs an ashen-blue ribbon of wormwood—the former queen of the Don steppes. It has been shouldered out almost everywhere by cereals which have pushed right up to the road with proprietory disdain, leaving the poor bitter wormwood the dubious freedom of the collective farm pastures, the clearings in the woods and the slopes of the gullies. Immediately behind the ribbon of wormwood rises a greenish blue wall of ripening oats, covering an area of a hundred hectares, and behind that a dark yellow field with dim spots can be seen which must be either wheat or barley, late in ripening. After that comes a huge plot of bristling sunflowers, and beyond you see an expanse of winter wheat, overpowered by the winds, and lying in heavy, petrified waves, the crests gleaming like dull gold. Two combine harvesters are creeping across the field, and the sun catches a reflection in their darkgrey sides.

p The steppe is uneven here, but the view is infinite, and the rim of the horizon is barely visible. . . .

p The blue mist thickens in the depths of the wide valley, dissolving into a lilac haze on the farther side of the slope, and blending elusively with the sky at a distance of twenty kilometres or so from the road. There is only the solitary watch hill to mark with its solid base the hazy line of the horizon.

p There are many such mounds on the right bank of the Middle Don, both watch hills and burial tumuli. They stand on the Don heights, keeping watch over the meadow lands across the river whence in days of yore came the invading hordes of Khozars, Pechenegs and Polovtsi to raid or wage war on Russia. The invaders moved along the left bank of the Tanais (the ancient name for the Don) from the south-east, and left these indestructible memorials along their route.

p “Sarkel, an ancient Khozar fortress that has been routed by Svyatoslav and his host in the latter half of the 10th century, is now submerged in the artificial lake called the Tsimlyanskoye Sea. A strange feeling grips your heart and a lump rises in your 109 throat when looking down from the Kumshat Mountain you see not the familiar narrow ribbon of the Don, twisting and turning fancifully amid the green of the woods and meadows, but a spreading blue sea.. . .

p Glory to you, my native Don sea, created by the will of the Bolshevik Party, the will which the Party implanted in the hearts of our people and with which it inspired their heroic endeavour!

p Eternal glory to you, Volga-Don canal—a brilliant creation of the Soviet people’s genius and toil.

The Volga-Don canal has been given the name of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of our Party and our Soviet state. Along this canal sail fleets of ships loaded with coal, timber, grain, machines and paper—our country’s wealth, shipped down the new waterway.

p We, the contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the launching of the ambitious plan to conquer Nature, can do no more than briefly describe what we have seen. In due course, a writer will produce a masterpiece worthy of this great construction.

p The story of the Volga-Don canal is a story of heroism, courage and dedication. To think of the sleepless nights, the deliberating, and the energy that went into the construction of the mighty body of the dam, the canal, the locks, and all the other structures here! The whole of our multinational country did its share in manufacturing the installations and machinery for the Volga-Don canal, and the actual construction work was done by people from all over the Soviet Union.

p We have come to call the Volga-Don canal the realisation of the Russians’ centuries-old dream. Peter the Great had thought about it, and so did other progressive-minded men in Russia, but their dreams did not materialise. Prince Golitsin, the Governor of Astrakhan, to whom Peter the Great entrusted the supervision of the digging, lost faith in the possibility of accomplishing this fantastic undertaking and wrote to the tsar: “Only God rules the rivers, and it would be presumptious of man to unite what the Almighty has divided.”

p People, united by the will of the Communist Party, have accomplished what once seemed presumptious and impossible.

The centuries-old dream of the Russians, which became the dream of all Soviet people, was made reality by the Bolshevik Party and, as in the Great Patriotic War, hundreds of 110 Communists were in the forefront at every section of the construction. They led the masses forward to harness the forces oi nature and accomplish this great project.

p We remember the words of Comrade Stalin: “Great energy is born only for a great aim.” Great energy was displayed by people serving the great aims of communist construction.

p Engineer Rezchikov, chief of the 4th section of the Tsimlyansky hydroelectric project, hails from Gorky and bears a remote resemblance in his facial features or perhaps his workingman’s build to his great fellow citizen whose name the city bears.

p “I had a team headed by Alyakin, and there were about twenty men in that team,” Rezchikov told me, smiling and obviously feeling a bit nervous. “Alyakin himself comes from Moldavia, and so do most of the team. They were exceptionally good workers, but that’s not all: last spring, when the breaking ice threatened to smash the starlings of the temporary railway bridge, they jumped down onto the moving ice and hacked at it with axes in order to save that bridge. They worked like sappers at the front.

p “At the beginning of winter I went down to the river early one morning. A very, very old Cossack came up to me and asked:

p “ ’So you’re building a dam, son? Think it will come out right?’

p “ ’Sure,’ I replied. ’When the Bolsheviks plan something it’s certain to come out right.’

p “ ’Go ahead, son,’ the old man said with an anxious frown. ’See, the willow’s red—that means the winter will be a warm one, but mind your step come spring. After the ice has broken, there’ll come warm water, and if you don’t look out it’ll give you a good washing. It’s only in books that the Don is called quiet, actually it’s real ferocious in spring, smashing everything in its way. So just keep your eyes peeled to see it doesn’t wreck that dam you’re building.’

p “He turned and walked away.

p “The ice-breaking on the river did cause us a lot of trouble and worry. Provision had been made for everything, one would hafe thought. But the water rose so high—the highest in the last seventy years—that only by a combination of powerful machinery and sheer heroism on the part of the people was disaster averted. People went without sleep for several nights, 111 working to save the dam and the temporary bridge. The water rose right up to the flooring, and the cracking of the starlings was terrible to hear. The old man knew what he was talking about: the freshet carried debris, logs, and trees that had been chopped down in the floodlands of the Don, and heaped them up against the piles of the bridge, threatening to push it over. TNT was used to blast the ice, but of course this could not stop the debris and the trees piling up. The men from Alyakin’s building team then jumped down from the bridge armed with axes and saws and, standing waist-deep in the madly swirling water, hacked at the tree trunks and the clutter of debris to cut a passage for the water between the bridge piles.”

p Neither Alyakin nor any of his team were at the construction site any more, but the feat they had performed will long be remembered by those with whom and for whom they had risked their lives.

p Although the construction was more than plentifully provided with the most up-to-date machinery and mechanisms, hard physical work, often very hazardous, was by no means excluded. During the freshet the spring before, the water rushed to the foundation pits for the locks and the hydroelectric power station, washing away the gravel on the roads and destroying the pipelines of the dredges which were scooping up earth for the dams. To save these pipelines the men worked in the icy water which came up to their necks. They braved the hazards entirely on their own initiative, it wasn’t a question of obeying orders. And they did save the right-bank part of the dam and the coffer-dam of the Tsimlyansk hydroelectric power station.

p It was not an easy job to dam the original and now narrowed channel of the Don as the mainstream was directed to the overflow weir. Thousands of people and countless dump trucks were employed. Besides the builders there were the inhabitants of the local villages and stanitsas who came to help in any way they could. It was a dark night, and innumerable electric lamps and floodlights were on. Fyodor Ivanovich Rezchikov, who was in charge of this section, told me that as he looked down from his command post—a hut built from boards for the purpose— he could not tell whether it was the buckets of the escavators or thousands of human hands that loaded the trucks with stones at that fantastic rate. All he could see were the sparks flying as the rocks knocked one against the other.

p The funniest thing happened to the documentary filmmakers who came over to shoot the damming. They missed the 112 event altogether, as they reckoned it would take sixty hours to dam the Don and the job, in fact, was completed in eight. When they arrived at dawn, it was all over, and they stared in astonishment and despair at the ridge of stones barring the way to the river. Alexei Gavrilovich Cherkassov, head of the political department of the construction, commiserated with the crushed cameramen, but there was a merry twinkle in his eyes as he said: “It really is a shame! The job was supposed to take sixty hours and the builders went and did it in eight, the wretches. I’d love to help you but I don’t see how I can. Shall we blow up the ridge and start all over again? It’s made to last, so wouldn’t it be a pity? I do sympathise with you in your disappointment, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

p Standing on the bank, together with the other engineers, was director of the project Vassily Arsentyevich Barabanov, his natural excitement held in check by a supreme effort of will. The older of the villagers wept seeing before them not the trouble-making Don they had always known, but a tamed river that would thereafter serve the needs of the population.

I also met Sergei Grigoryevich Petrov, a Leningrad engineer, and a very nice person with a likeable, open, workingman’s face. He has had a hand in the erection of sixteen electric power stations, travelling to the Far North, to the extreme south, the east and west of our land. He is always on the go, moving from one construction project to the next, and one feels a bit sorry for him. He only manages to get back to his home-town and his family once a year, but there is no helping this enforced separation. His children, the ones of school age, cannot be shifted from one school to another all the time to wherever the father’s nomadic way of life may take him. Petrov falls in love with every new construction project, he derives enormous personal gratification from each turbine which he puts into operation. I watched him now as he wiped his hands on cotton waste, and I imagined he was already thinking of his next job—in Takhia-Tash or somewhere.

p The Volga-Don project is one of the greatest creations of the people. The world’s largest  [112•*  thirty-kilometre earthen dam rises like a mountain ridge over the floodlands of the Don. The 113 hydroelectric power station transmits electric energy to the industrial centres and stanitsas in the Don country, and water Hows along the Don canal into the depths of the arid steppes.

p A marvellous stairway has been built from the Don to the Volga at the high watershed, and cargo is carried over it in an endless stream.

p What we see here on the Volga-Don canal is only one of those many grandiose projects which are presently under construction or are going to be built in our country for the benefit and happiness of people.

p No capitalist country can dream of launching construction for the benefit of the people on such a scale. At one time foreign engineers drew up an ambitious project for transforming part of the Mediterranean Sea. They proposed damming the straits of Gibraltar and Dardanelles, lowering the level of the sea and bringing to the surface vast tracts of fertile land. An electric power station built on the Gibraltar dam would be a powerful source of energy capable of transforming Sahara’s 6,000,000 sq km of desert into a flowering garden. The total cost would have been fifteen times less than that of the First World War. But in conditions of capitalism such projects of immense benefit to mankind are unrealisable. Capitalism buries in its “graveyards of projects" the fruits of progressiveminded people’s scientific and engineering thought.

p Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote: “On all sides, at every step one comes across problems which man is quite capable of solving immediately, but capitalism is in the way. It has amassed enormous wealth—and has made men the slaves of this wealth. It has solved the most complicated technical problems—and has blocked the application of technical improvements because of the poverty and ignorance of millions of the population, because of the stupid avarice of a handful of millionaires.”

Our Volga-Don project has been built for peace and the happiness of people. As many as 2,750,000 hectares of arid land will be irrigated. Fresh energy will be poured into our vigorously developing socialist industry, and hundreds of electric tractors will begin to operate.

p The construction of the Volga-Don Canal necessitated the re-settling of many Cossack villages and farmsteads situated in the area which was to be flooded. The people did not stand to lose anything by this migration. ... The Soviet Government showed truly fatherly concern for the Cossack collective 114 farmers, making ample provision for their immediate needs and their future.

p The Cossacks received generous compensation in cash for their houses, cattleyards, water wells, apple and cherry trees. The state provided transport facilities tor the moving, made building materials available to the re-settlers and, in addition to a number of other privileges, gave them plots of land on the shores of the future artificial sea.

p For the old people, of course, it was a wrench parting with their homes. When they were ready to leave, many of them kissed the ground where they themselves, their fathers and grandfathers had been born.

p Still, it did not take the people very long to settle down in their new homes and grow accustomed to the new sea.

p It was thus with the inhabitants of the Solenovsky village who have been re-settled on the very shore of the artificial sea not far from the original site of the village where the dam of the hydroelectric power station has been built.

p The Solenovsky village has quite a history. In 1918, all the Cossacks there joined a Red partisan unit, and later they were among the first to set up a collective farm, naming it after Chernikov, their partisan commander who had been killed in battle. Hundreds of Solenovsky people fought in the Great Patriotic War, and now many of them are working on the Volga-Don construction.

p They were re-settled not far from the Tsimlyanskaya Druzhina collective farm whose old hands—carpenters, roofers, and blacksmiths—helped their new neighbours with truly brotherly kindness.

p The ashes of the four celebrated Solenovsky partisans: Alexei Chernikov, Vassily Teiskov, Moisei Yermakov and Vassily Frolov, have been reinterred in the centre of the new village.

p By joint effort, new timber cottages were built for Yevdokia Kurbatova, a soldier’s widow, and for Terenty Kurochkin and Alexander Skorbatov, two invalids who used to live in shabby cottages in the old village.

p The Solenovsky collective farm has taken root in the new place. Orchards have been planted, and in due course of time they will bear plentiful fruit.

p ^The winds from the east will tousle the crowns of the young apple and pear trees, the thick wheat will ripple on the irrigated fields of the Don steppe, and a new generation of communist builders will grow up here to gladden the heart of our Mother country.

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p Projects even more magnificent and grandiose than the Volga-Don will be accomplished. But in the minds of people, the Volga-Don will always remain the firstborn of the great construction projects. And mothers, although they do not like to admit it, always love their firstborn best.

p People, my dear countrymen upon whom all the thoughts of our wise Bolshevik Party are centred, you have ample cause to rejoice in your great creations built for peace and happiness!

p The plan of Russia’s electrification conceived by Lenin’s genius was launched by Soviet people in incredibly difficult conditions of Civil War, imperialist intervention, and economic dislocation. In the first two years, power stations with a capacity of a mere 12,000 kw were put into operation. The results so far achieved were extremely small. But, calling on the Soviet people to perform their heroic civic duty, Vladimir Ilyich said:

p “Twelve thousand kilowatts is a very modest beginning. This may sound funny to the foreigner who is familiar with electrification in America, Germany, or Sweden. But he laughs best who laughs last.”

p We do rejoice in our great constructions, and we do smile, but without any smugness: we smile the smile of victors, the smile of people who confidently believe in mankind’s coming happiness.

1952