For a long time, people were thinking about a water connection of the
White Sea
in the North of Russia to regions in the south. This could help a lot to make
cargo and passenger transportation easier and much cheaper. Despite of many
talks, the plan of a canal construction between the White Sea and Onego Lake
was not realized until the Stalin times, when it was ordered to build the
facility in a very short time. So, in 1931 the construction began. The success
of the project, which was finished in 1 year and 9 months (very fast for those
times), was conditioned by the wide use of a very cheap labour force of numerous
prisoners, including many political ones. Advanced technical devices were almost
not in use - the Canal was built with simple hand implements, like spades and
picks. The total length of the Canal is 227 km, of which 37 km are human built,
with the average depth of 5 meters. About 100 complicated hydro engineering facilities, including 19 water locks, numerous dams and weirs were
erected of wood, sand and stone.
While passing the Canal, a boat firstly rises up to 70 meters in compare with Onego Lake, and then lowers down by 102 meters to the water level of the White Sea.
More than 100,000 prisoners worked on the construction, and over half of them died because of bad treatment and executions, nobody knows exactly how many (estimated as 86,000 people).
Along the Canal, a lot of memorials and several museums were set in the modern days to commemorate the memory of those who lost their lives during the Canal construction. The locks and other facilities of the Canal can be considered as memorials themselves, because they reflect hard working and sufferings.
The Canal has been used a lot for its major purpose - transportation, but nowadays it has well lost it significance, and only a few boats a day pass it in summer. Still, population of several settlements gets the job by maintaining the Canal.
Transport:
By water: boats that cruise along the Canal.
By land: from Petrozavodsk or other Karelian settlements along the Canal.
