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National Geographic : 1973 May
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May 1973 THE NATIONALGEOGRAPHICMAGAZINEVOL. 143, NO. 5 COPYRIGHT© 1973 BY NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY,WASHINGTON,D.C. INTERNATIONALCOPYRIGHTSECURED TO RUSSIANS the name means "holy," and the longest river in Europe has indeed been venerated by poet, priest, peasant, and musician. But they also call her Matushka, or Mother, Volga, for along her banks the Russian nation came to be. There the Soviet Union survived the holo caust of Nazi warfare. There it harbors the past, in a thousand dusty villages moving to the creak of a peasant's cart. And there it strives toward the future, in Space Age fac tories humming with power from seven of the world's largest hydroelectric projects. "Yes, the Volga flows in the heart of every Russian," Benedict Vitalyevich Kisten said to me. The ship's youthful captain and I stood on the bridge of the sleek new river steamer he commands-the Yuri Dolgorukiy, named for the prince who founded Moscow. On each side a wide bow wave curled away as I be gan, on the busiest and most historic stretch of the famed 2,300-mile river, a three-month journey along it by ship, car, and plane. "I was born beside the Volga," Captain Kisten said. "I have studied it all my life. It is a thing of size and strength, like Russia itself. Where the Kama joins it, the stream is 30 miles wide. The channel is sometimes 300 feet deep. But the important thing about the Volga is its power-its political power." Inside the cabin he unfolded a large map and ran a finger from the far-northern White Sea down through the heart of modern Russia to seas named Caspian, Azov, and Black. "This huge piece of a planet, all of it joined by a single river and its canals. A trade route between north and south since prehistoric times. Finns from the north, Turks and Slavs from the south and west, Mongols and Tatars The author: Burly and quiet-spoken Howard Sochurek is one of the most experienced U. S. re porters covering the Soviet Union. He first went to Moscow in 1958. After two years as Time-Life's only correspondent there, he won a Nieman Fel lowship to study Soviet affairs at Harvard Univer sity. This Volga trip was his thirteenth to Russia. Russia's Mightl River Road THE VOLGA ARTICLE AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY HOWARD SOCHUREK 579 % w~un~~~~
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