From the Northern River Port in Moscow, the MS ILYA REPIN headed north along the Moskva River and soon branched off into the Moscow-Volga Canal. For a long time various tsars had tried to connect Moscow to the Baltic Sea. However, until the time of Stalin the canals and all the locks that were required had allowed only small river boats to actually complete the trip. Then, Stalin came along. He was determined to overcome that drawback. Even though the Moskva River and the Oka River already flowed into the Volga, making them navigable was not sufficient for him. The lengthy passage of some 620 miles and the meandering river beds made such a connection too long and too difficult to navigate. What he wanted was a canal going from Moscow norh to the Volga in a nearly arrow-straight line.

The construction of the canal and all its various locks and necessary buildings began in September of 1932 and was completed in the astoundingly short time of less than five years. There were a number of problems to be overcome. The first and probably most daunting one was that there was not enough money in the Soviet system to built such a huge project within the time limits Stalin had set. Secondly, that the Moskva River did not have enough water to supply the canal he was planning to build. Still, Stalin was not a man to be denied. If there was no money for such a huge project, then it would be built even without that. This canal and all its component parts were intended by him to become a memorial to himself and Communism.

And in a way that he clearly had not intended, it has become just that. The unofficial name that has attached itself to the Moscow-Volga Canal is rather gruesome for a canal running through such a pretty landscape. It is known as "The Canal of Bones". It is a memorial indeed, but clearly not one to honour Stalin - but rather one to honour the hundreds of thousands of innocent Russians who had died building it.

In order to assemble the vast labour force Stalin required to build the canal with the primitive tools available - pick axes, shovels and wheel barrows, ordinary, innocent Russians were accused of imaginary crimes and sent to slave labour camps (Gulags). There, being treated as "criminals", they were not only forced to work building the canal, but they neither had to be paid, nor even to be properly fed. Under these circumstances few of them survived for longer than two years; but for Stalin, they were an ideal labour force - one he did not have to pay or even to feed a reasonable diet. When the canal's construction was finished, Stalin was not quite finished with his inhuman scheming. He now gathered the supervisory staff, some 200 of them, had them arrested and executed. Not for their inhuman treatment of the workers, but rather in an attempt to make sure that there would be no one left who would be able to reveal the horrendous price that this monument to himself and Communism had cost.

There is no question, that today these Stalinist accomplishments make Russia a stronger, more efficient, a more modern state. But, Russians today remember how ruthlessly this modernization was achieved, and, while I have seen several statues of Lenin, there seem to be few or none of Stalin. The very fact that the canal Stalin had set about creating goes by the unofficial name of the "Canal of Bones" seems to make it clear that even though it did become a memorial monument of Stalin's reign, it clearly was not intended to celebrate him or his accomplishment.

And while Moscow has become the "Port of Five Seas", the population remembers. Moscow today, even though it is many hundreds of miles from those seas, can actually be reached by the largest river freighters and even by smaller ocean-going vessels from the Five Seas referred to: the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and the White Sea (part of the Arctic Ocean). Indeed, watching the river traffic, there were passing many good-sized river freighters and tied up along some river piers I even discovered a submarine and some kind of naval vessel. Since they were clearly not there to safeguard the Moskva river from speeding power boats, it semmed likely that they had made their way here from the various seas and oceans to be, perhaps recommisioned or repaired.

It was via the Moscow-Volga canal that our vessel left the city. Soon the urban, Muskovite landscape gave way to a lovely sylvan one. On either side as we passed, there was a nearly endless expanse of bush. These stretches of birch groves reminded me of the stories my mother told about her childhood in Latvia. And here, as we passed through a similar landscape, were the birches she had always talked about. Somehow, if only in my imagination, it now also had become an ancestral landscape of mine.

But even here, in this strangely 'familiar' country-side, there remained to be reminders of the man who in his singularly cruel and determined way, had been responsible for the Moscow Canal's existence. Every time we sailed through another lock, there were not only the purely utilitarian structures necessary to operate such a lock, but they were adorned with statues and other decorations, intended by Stalin to create an impressive memorial to himself.