Moscow Canal
Waterway in Russia
The Moscow Canal (Russian: Кана́л и́мени Москвы́), named the Moskva–Volga Canal until 1947, is a canal in Russia that connects the River Moskva with the Volga. It is located in Moscow itself and in the Moscow Oblast. The canal connects to the Moskva River in Tushino (an area in the north-west of Moscow), from which it runs approximately north to meet the Volga River in the town of Dubna, just upstream of the dam of the Ivankovo Reservoir. The length of the canal is 128.1 kilometres (79.6 mi).
It was constructed between 1932 and 1937 by 200,000 gulag prisoners, under direction of the Soviet secret police and Matvei Berman.
Construction
By the early 1930s, Moscow had begun to experience a shortage of drinking and industrial water due to population growth, and the capacity of the Rublevskoye water pipeline did not meet the capital's water needs. On June 15, 1931, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party approved the report of Lazar Kaganovich on the water situation in the capital and other cities, and adopted the recommendation to use the resources of the Volga River, located 120 kilometres (75 mi) north of the capital, for water supply to Moscow, as well as for transportation purposes.
On June 1, 1932, by Resolution No. 859 of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, the route of the canal through Dmitrov was approved with the order to "immediately begin construction of the Volga–Moscow water canal"; the labor for only two years were allocated until November 1934. The former head of the OGPU Belomorstroy, Lazar Kogan, was appointed head of construction on June 9, 1932.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Moscow Canal” as waterway in Russia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q741351. VIAF identifies the subject as 267771749. Authority coordinates are 56.717, 37.133. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1932, 1937 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moscow Canal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.