The Council of People's Commissars finalized plans for the Moscow Canal, connecting the Moskva and Volga rivers to give the landlocked capital access to the sea. Built between 1932 and 1937 primarily by forced labor from the Gulag system, the canal cost tens of thousands of lives but transformed Moscow into a river port, solving its chronic water shortages.
Moscow in the early 1930s faced an existential problem: its river was too shallow and its water supply too meager to support a modern industrial capital. Stalin's solution was audacious even by Soviet standards — dig a canal 128 kilometers long connecting the Moskva River to the Volga, opening a water route from Moscow all the way to the Caspian and, via other canals, to the Baltic, White, and Black Seas.
The project fell under the control of the NKVD's Gulag administration, and the workforce was drawn overwhelmingly from Dmitlag, a labor camp complex established specifically for the canal that at its peak held roughly 190,000 prisoners. They dug through frozen earth with primitive tools, wheelbarrows, and sheer numbers, since heavy machinery was scarce.
Estimates of deaths during construction range from 20,000 to over 100,000, though precise figures remain disputed and incomplete. When the canal opened in 1937, complete with grandiose neoclassical locks and monumental statues of Lenin and Stalin along its banks, Soviet propaganda celebrated it as a triumph of socialist engineering, rarely mentioning the human cost buried beneath its waters.
Key people: Joseph Stalin