The passage of Peter the Great

Moscow-to-St. Petersburg river cruise offers a peek into Russia's past

In the throes of winter's blustery cold wave, I received a travel catalog touting must-see sites for the upcoming summer travel season. The cover bore a compelling photo of the opulent, gold-laden Peterhof, the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, near St. Petersburg, Russia. I was heartened (even smug). There before me were the prolific landmarks from the final leg of the small-ship river cruise in northwestern Russia I'd been on last summer.

While sophisticated and chic St. Petersburg and the palace were spectacular finales to this Russia visit, the cliche about focusing on the journey and not the destination rings invaluable and true.

In this instance, the journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg consisted of a 13-day, 1,200-mile, water-borne voyage along the Volga and five other rivers, along the Moscow Canal, across the two largest lakes in Europe, along narrow water diversion canals and across huge reservoirs. The watery passage was made possible by an impressive system of 20 locks that raised and then lowered our vessel a total of 360 feet in elevation, sometimes in 50-foot increments. The periodic raising and lowering of the vessel by the locks almost always brought passengers deck-side, mesmerized by the mechanics and engineering of the massive operation.

On roughly the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, this watery sojourn is only possible six months of the year, as the temperatures in the region plunge to 40 degrees below zero during the winter.

The excursion was titled "The Passage of Peter the Great" in honor of the genius czar who ordered construction of the first canal in the system in 1703 and Russia's first lock 1708.

Subsequent czars advanced the waterway by building more locks and canals, some requiring ships to be towed by ropes at the hands of hardy sailors, Herculean acts memorialized in folk song.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin used hundreds of thousands of slave laborers from the infamous gulag prison camps to complete the vital segments, including the Moscow Canal that links the capital with the Volga River. The canal, built between 1932 and 1937, opened the "blue highway" that Stalin not-too-humbly envisioned as his legacy — one on the scale of the ancient pyramids in Egypt. Not only did the waterway facilitate commerce, but it was a strategic military advancement as it gave Moscow access to the Baltic Sea by way of the Gulf of Finland.

As a result of the construction and diversions, the Volga no longer is a free-flowing river but a series of reservoirs held back by huge dams. One is the Rybinsk Reservoir, which drowned a vast area of lowlands and some of the most fertile soils in northern Russia. Also eliminated were a prosperous town of 7,000 and some 600 villages and settlements, expelling tens of thousands from their homes.

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