On the long gentle curve of the river, the overheads had picked up a shot of a giant two-part articulated transporter barge making its way slowly upstream. A Tolkach such as this has a load capacity of ten thousand tons, and while there are many big freight barges plying their way along Russia’s greatest river, these monster nine-hundred-footers are comparatively rare. Powered from the stern (the name means pushers), they utilize a large rising wheelhouse on the bow deck to operate a massive for’ard rudder, without which they’d never get around a sharp bend.
In line astern, this particular barge was followed by another Tolkach, not so long, but all of six hundred feet. Both were of the Class of the XXIII S’ezd (KPSS, the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party), and both were making approximately five knots through the water on this busy industrial reach. They were the type of barge used by the Russians to transport submarines.
In the West it is traditional to build submarines in yards close to the sea, or at least to a major estuary. The Russians, however, have a mammoth shipbuilding industry in the old city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, which is situated bang in the middle of the old Soviet Union almost a thousand miles south of the Barents Sea port of Murmansk, and almost a thousand miles north of the former Black Sea Naval base of Sevastopol. Thus generations of Soviet warships would have been, to the Western eye, stranded at birth, like so many Atlantic salmon born upriver. Or more graphically, it is as if the new Trident submarines were being built in central Kansas or Bedfordshire.
But the frozen heartland of Russia possesses one major natural asset — missing from both central Kansas, and indeed from England…the 2,290-mile Volga, the fifteenth longest river in the world, the very soul of the Communist Dream to construct a great waterway interconnecting the entire Soviet Empire.
A series of canals have made it possible for the Russians to transport big submarines and other warships between the Black Sea in the south and the White Sea in the north. The route begins at the Kercenskij Strait, east of the Crimean Peninsula, and crosses the Sea of Azov, heading northeast. Entering the Volga-Don Canal, the route continues northeast through the lakes, and along a further canal joining the Volga just south of Volgograd.
From that point heading north, the great river widens into breathtaking river-lakes, up to two hundred miles long, before swinging west past the city of Kazan to Nizhny. Here the River Oka, flowing in from the southwest, converges with the Volga and forms a great wedge of land called the Strelka (the arrow), home to the 150-year-old shipyards of Red Sormovo. The Russian word Strelka is painted in massive red letters on the concrete bank.
In recent years this yard has built a succession of merchant and low-draft passenger ships, but it has a long tradition of building submarines — which can be transported by barge, south to the Black Sea and also to the Northern Fleet. The Red Sormovo shipyard constructed the Charlie II nuclear boats, and the old Julietts. The 7,200-ton Barracudas of the Sierra II Class were built here as well, and so were the nuclear-powered Victors, and the Tango Class diesel-electrics. The yard also has an acknowledged capacity for construction of the most modern Kilos.
Because of the landlocked geographics of the Black Sea, and with the Mediterranean another virtual dead-end ocean, most of the submarines built at Nizhny are transported north through a colossal waterway masterminded by Joseph Stalin. It begins on the Volga as the great river winds its way north along silted-up shallows, and along the timber-growing west bank with its barge loads of sweet-smelling birch logs.
Right off the town of Yurevetsk, seventy-five miles upstream from Nizhny, the river swings left, zigzagging its way on a lazy westerly course to the huge Rybinsk Reservoir. Here the Volga swerves hard south, eventually joining Stalin’s astonishing creation, the Moscow Canal.
At that point, the Russian Mother, as the Volga is known, turns its back on the frozen north, and the submarines must continue their journey toward the Arctic Circle in colder waters. The great Tolkach barges continue north up the seventy-mile-long reservoir, traveling through the wide waterways and canals that skirt Lake Beloje. They journey a total of 150 miles before entering the tranquil northern waters of Lake Onega, which is 120 miles long and the second largest lake in Europe.
This is the most beautiful part of the journey, for the lake is wild, and Russian, and spotted with picturesque islands, and quite exquisite wooden churches, many of them standing beneath carved onion-shaped domes. On the island of Kizhi, the Church of the Transfiguration is decorated with twenty-two domes, all perfectly shaped and carved by local eighteenth-century craftsmen. Not one nail was used in the construction of this building.
Along these near-silent waters the Tolkach freighters shoulder their huge underwater warships, malevolently moving across the surface against a backdrop of some of the most lovely waterscapes in all of Russia.
At the end of the idyllic and peaceful Lake, the submarines enter the black shadows of the Belomorski Canal, the embodiment of Stalin’s cruelest ambitions. Thousands of slave laborers perished in a frozen hell while making the canal, as the commissars forced them beyond the limits of human endurance.
The result is a masterpiece of engineering, a straight 140-mile-long waterway joining the lake to the White Sea and the Baltic — a military thruway designed to serve the remorseless ambitions of the Communist dictator. But the endless deaths among the political prisoners and thinkers who formed that terrible army of forced labor scarred the name Belomorski. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who was judged to have approved the canal because he joined 120 writers on a 1933 press trip, was attacked for it years later by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Today the tourist boats do not enter here. And the military keeps a watchful eye on the canal to make sure that it is running efficiently. But just as the submarines looked so alien, so outlandish, on the lovely waters of the lake, their jet black hulls look at home in the waters of the Belomorski — because they are ultimately instruments of death, and the canal is a place of remembered death. The shades of sadness will never leave here.
The slow eight-hundred-mile journey from Volgograd to Nizhny through often congested industrial waters would be a long one for the empty Tolkach barges. Admiral George Morris looked at the pictures taken off the Volgograd waterfront, and then at those of the three Kilos. There was little doubt in his mind. The Russian diesel-electrics were nearing completion, and the two gigantic transporters were on their way to pick them up. The Admiral assessed they would average sixty miles each day, which would put them off the Red Sormovo yard in about two weeks.
He went to a computerized screen and pulled up a map of central Russia. It was hard to assess the speed of the Tolkachs when loaded, but they’d probably average five knots and make a steady 120 miles a day. That would put them at the entrance to the canal a week after their departure. George Morris thought the loading time in Red Sormovo might take anything between two and four weeks, given last-minute corrections and repairs. He guessed, correctly, that the Chinese would have their top technicians at the shipyard, signing off on everything before China would pay the next installments on the $900 million price of the three Kilos.