The Volga-Don canal celebrates its jubilee

The Volga-Don shipping canal named after Vladimir Lenin is preparing to mark its 50th anniversary on July 27th. That day in 1952 navigation was opened in the canal.

As the management of the canal reported, for this date some locks and other facilities, as well as the dams of the hydroelectric stations have been modernised.

All union republics of the USSR and the best builders took part in the construction of the canal. The Volga-Don canal crowned the joining of the five seas: the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the White Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea; it connected river ways and crossed the arid steppes.

The canal begins in the Krasnoarmeisky district of Volgograd and ends in the area of the town of Kalach-on-Don. It stretches for 101 kilometres and has fifteen locks.

During the fifty years of its existence, more than 400,000 ships and more than 350 million cargoes passed through the canal. Only beginning with 2002, 2,500 ships used the canal. The amount of cargoes that passed through it has reached more than 3.7 million tons. As the canal management has reported, crude oil and oil products account for 94 percent of the freight traffic through the canal.