Francesco Pennacchio - Along the Volga

Вдоль Волги
Francesco Pennacchio

Francesco Pennacchio
Вдоль Волги
Along the Volga
together with Antonella Ruggiero,
7milamiglialontano
& the Volga

Волжские открытки
VOLGA POLAROIDS
To connect:
Putting together two or more objects, entities, or elements, joining them or combining
them so that they come into contact, without solution of continuity, and
form a whole and solidary whole.
A river connects. The Volga, covering 3530 km in the heart of Europe, brings
together 3 time zones and 8 ethnic groups, making Russia an immense country.
Looking at its turbid, almost insignificant springs, one would not say that Volga
Matushka, Mother Volga originates from here. Only a wooden chapel underlines
the sacredness of the place.
In Russian, R’yba means fish, and there is no way a traveler could not learn this
word. Along the road stretching from Volga’s spring to her mouth, these four
letters are part of the landscape. The eyes and noses of the foreign traveler get lost
amid the market stalls. Smoked, salted, roasted, there is something for all tastes.
Along the river, however, the pace mutates, slows down to the rhythm of the patient
fishermen awaiting their reward.
Some of them have been able to get as close as possible to the river. Quietly, and
covering car plates to avoid police drone controls, those fishermen have been able

to bring containers and tin houses on the Volga banks. It is worth to defy the 300
m from the shore provided by the law, to get drunk with the Volga. To feel its
essence, to gain the river, and be overwhelmed by its greatness.
There seems to be no connection between the mild rhythm of the banks and the
abundance of life on the streets. The man has emptied his river. Fish farms and
repopulation programs have been implemented to mitigate the human action on
the river and preserve the ecosystem. Sturgeons, carps, and trouts, the R’yba is
bred. The man tries to repair what he has compromised. The Volga biodiversity
had been put to the test by massive fishing and hydropower development.
Dams are the tangible sign of the robust Russian industrialization between the
30s and the 60s. One in every major city: Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd, Kazan.
Artificial barriers, hectoliters of water taken from agriculture to produce electricity
and feed urban centres with their single-issue factories. Togliatti, the Russian with
an Italian name, is a typical example of monogorod - monocity.
A significant part of the city developed around the chemical industry. In the
north-west section, the landscape is marked by concrete giants that spit smoke
and pollutants without respite. But what is the price to pay in terms of health and
environment? Too high for a country where 40% of the economy and population
revolves around the river. A sick body, fortunately not abandoned to himself. In
recent years, the Russian government has implemented Volga redevelopment
policies.
The purification plants grow slowly, and the problematic political situation prevents
any kind of help from abroad. As if the country had no memory of its past.
Faded war photographs mix with old memorabilia, guarded in small museums
where no visitor has ever been. The guardians of memory hope that suffering will
not repeat and the Russian people will not forget. Someone also put an eternal
flame on a hill in Volgograd to commemorate the 22 million Russian casualties in
the Great Patriotic War (WWII).
Heedless of human affairs and concerns, Mother Volga continues its course,
encounters small villages and imposing cities. Her tributaries merge with her.
Sometimes, while having a break from the long hours driving, she is so wide and
blue that the other shore is hidden from the view. In the ride toward the Delta, it is
impossible to always remain on the banks of the river. Once Astrakhan is overtaken,
water is only a memory. In this region, lost in the steppe, people traits change.
Black silk hair and the Asian physical features are the new protagonists.
The landscape becomes arid, the ocher yellow dust plucks the eyes. When the
river gets far away, it is where its importance is understood even better.

It is impossible to get to the exact spot where Volga Matushka flows into the Caspian.
The Delta extends and branches off for hundreds of kilometres.
A couple of hours later, the Caspian is within reach. While approaching, a windswept
open landfill scatters waste as far as the eye can see. Desolation and degradation,
this is what this piece of coast bathed by the Caspian, one of the most polluted
seas in the world, gives. And Mother Volga is not very merciful, considering
the substance that she gathers on her long journey toward this unfortunate sea.
The journey of the Volga ends here. However, its flavours of fish, vodka and tomato,
remains, together with the blue, white, and red tones of an authentic Russia.
A Russia that still knows how to astound.
Antonella Ruggiero

Their silhouettes show white in the air,
Their towers loom dark like a forest
Oh, how much I love the evening time, full of fascination
Listen attentively, oh majestic Volga!
Poetic voice of your sacred waves,
They echo the glory of ancient Russia
Petr Vyazemsky, Evening on the Volga River (1815)

The land, mineral deposits, waters, forests, mills, factories, mines railways, water and air
transport, … are state property, that is the property of the whole people.
Constitution of the Soviet Union, Article Six

Wide is my Motherland,
Of her many forests, fields, and rivers!
I know of no other such country
Where a man can breathe so freely.
From Moscow to the borders,
From the southern mountains to the northern sea
A man stands as a master
Over his vast Motherland.
Throughout life, and freely and widely,
Just like the Volga flows.
The youth are always dear to us,
The old are always honored by us.
Wide is my Motherland,
Of her many forests, fields, and rivers!
I know of no other such country
Where a man can breathe so freely.
Широка страна моя родная,
Много в ней лесов, полей и рек!
Я другой такой страны не знаю,
Где так вольно дышит человек.
От Москвы до самых до окраин,
С южных гор до северных морей
Человек проходит, как хозяин
Необъятной Родины своей.
Всюду жизнь и вольно и широко,
Точно Волга полная, течёт.
Молодым везде у нас дорога,
Старикам везде у нас почёт.
Широка страна моя родная,
Много в ней лесов, полей и рек!
Я другой такой страны не знаю,
Где так вольно дышит человек.
Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, Wide is My Motherland

That the organization of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology,
on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an
end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the
level of culture in the countryside and to overcome even in the most remote corners
of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease and barbarism.
Lenin, Pravda (3 February 1920)

The Russian provinces are pretty much the same everywhere. There
is only one thing in them that’s quite unique, and that’s the Volga itself.
From the early spring right up to winter it is always and everywhere
extraordinary, in all weathers and whether it is day or night. At night
you can sit …. And look out of the windows … and when they are
open to the air on a summer night you look straight into the darkness,
into the blackness of the night, and somehow you sense especially keenly
all the wild magnificence of the water wastes outside.
Ivan Bunin, The Gentleman From San Francisco

The Bolsheviks nevertheless constrained Mother Volga to change her course. In four years,
they dammed up the Volga, created an enormous reservoir known as the Moscow Sea and
built a canal joining the Volga with the Moskva River. The ancient walls of the Kremlin are
now washed by the waters of the Volga.
URSS in Construction, n.2, 1938

Moscow, the capital of the USSR, was under the Tsars one of the most filthy and backwards
cities of Europe. Its water supply was inadequate and could provide an average of only 88
litres per inhabitant a day. Under the Soviet government, this average has been raised to 156
litres a day, When the Stalin waterworks fed by the Moscow-Volga canal are completed,
Moscow’s water supply will be more abundant than that of any other capital in the world. The
average daily consumption per inhabitant will be about 600 litres, compared with 484 litres in
New York, 460 Litres in Paris, 148 litres in Vienna and 126 litres in Berlin.
USSR in Construction, n.2, 1938

Человек, река, город.
THE MAN, THE RIVER, THE CITY.
In Togliatti, the utopia of the “ideal city” of industry and work - that it would
have loved becoming - can still be guessed by spying from above on the weave
sketched by the placement of its houses and industrial plants. As a chessboard
lying on the vast sarmatic plain, Togliatti is watched - as far as the eye can see - by
chimneys spitting gray clouds into the clear sky at the first light of dawn. Alongside,
inexorable and unhurried, the waters of the Volga, on whose shores Russia
has been born and recognized over the centuries, slide off.
Below the drone’s detached gaze, the city slowly awakes. A town that came to
existence when a man, a son of Matushka Rossija, Mother Russia, observed, for
the first time, the Earth from the porthole of a small spatial “box” in orbit around
the planet - with pride and probably with a shade of fear.
Yuri Gagarin: pioneer and prisoner, who found himself up there, in a run-up to
power revealed illusory and without a future.
Launched into space and under construction on Earth was the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. In the wake of the de-Stalinization - between the late 1950s
and early 1960s - Togliatti took the place of Stavropol-on-Volga, erased from the
dam that harnessed the energies of the great river, to transfuse them in the growing
industries in the area.

One, in particular, was about to enter the history and imagination of its epoque:
the Vaz, the industrial complex built following the Togliatti Project, started in
1966 with the agreement between Moscow and the Italian car builder: the Fiat of
Turin. This cooperation opened a gap in the “iron curtain,” which then separated
the East from the West, and simultaneously embodied the (very Western) dream
of a car for the Russians. Another sign of the renewed friendship with Italy. Baptized
after the name of the leader of the largest western communist party, Togliatti
arose stimulated by the massive influx of Italian engineers and marked by the
ambition of an announced modernization. The AvtoVaz plants would release the
legendary Zhiguli, renamed in Russian with the nickname of taz, “basin” for its
unmistakable shape. Today the car that served as a pioneer to mass mobility in the
immense Soviet landscape is the cult-car for the Russian internet generation.
Autovaz, Fosfor, Tol’yattiAzot, KujbyievAzot ... The assertive, graceless
typefaces that the Soviet chose to forge their epigraphs still bear the names of the
enormous industrial complexes. The reverberations of the “fabulous” Sixties that
saw a growing and developing city are now faded memories. The Soviet Union
has dropped its flag for almost three decades, and the world is currently facing
global warming and the ecological challenge of sustainability. And yet, despite the
crises that have shaken it over time, Togliatti still stands. It holds on to work (and
hope), and these giant plants are a reminder of other times and other dreams. Like
every day, thousands of its citizens set off rapidly and silently in the urban buzzing
that accompanies the rising of the sun, towards the factories that mark their
destiny.
Alongside, the Volga flows without haste: far from here - today as always - it is
waited by a sea that - a sea - maybe it is not.
Gabriele Colleoni
Il Giornale di Brescia
Translation from Italian by Francesco Pennacchio

When Volga awoke, she set off neither slowly nor hurriedly, but with just
befitting speed. Ad Zubtsof she came up with Vazuza. So threatening was
her mien, that Vazuza was frightened, declared herself to be Volga’s younger
sister and besought Volga to take her in her arms and bear her to the Caspian
sea.
William RS Ralston, Russian Folk Tales (1873)

Tell us, tell us, orphan, who bore you?
My own Mama bore me, an orphan,
I was nursed and fed by Mother Volga,
I was brought up by a light boat of white willow,
I was rocked by nana and mama, the fast waves,
I was raised by the strange far-off land of Astrakhan,
And from this land I went to become a robber.
Traditional, Down along the Volga

Every Soviet school child knew the lyrics (of the ‘Song of the Volga’ by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach),
which praised the Volga as ‘beautiful, like the sea’ and ‘the Motherland, free, wide,
deep, strong’. Immersed in the throes of modernization, the Soviet Union still looked to the
Volga River when crafting national identity.
Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted, Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building (2015)

Don’t be stupid, river, calm down, or it’ll be worse for you! The Volga did not
abate, but raged worse than before. Send the executioner here! Yelled the tsar,
I’ll teach you a lesson! The executioner arrived, a mighty man – and the tsar
ordered him to whip the river with his knout, to teach her not rebel against the
tsar and his army. The executioner took his knout, rolled up the sleeves of his
red shirt, took a run, and as he whipped the Volga, the blood sprayed upwards
a yard in height, and a bloody wound appeared in the water, as thick as a
finger. The waves in the river went calmer, but the tsar yelled, Show no Mercy,
strike harder.
…
And now, they say, at the spot where the crossing took place, you can see three
bloody wounds on the Volga, especially on a summer evening, if you look into
the sun when it is setting behind the hills.
N. Ya. Aristov, The Punishment of the Volga

RUSSIA’S LAMENT
Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov
Dost thou know, my native country,
Any house or corner lone
Where thy Tiller and thy Sower,
Russia's peasant, does not moan?
In the fields, along the highways,
In the cells and dungeons black,
In the mines in iron fetters,
By the side of barn and stack;
'Neath the carts, his nightly shelter
On the steppes so wide and bare,
All the air is filled with groaning
Every hour and everywhere.
Groans in huts, in town and village -
E'en the sunlight's self he hates -
Groans before the halls of justice,
Buffetings at mansion-gates.
On the Volga, hark, what wailing
O'er the mighty river floats?
'Tis a song, they say - the chanting
Of the men who haul the boats.
Thou dost not in spring, vast Volga,
Flood the fields along thy strand
As our nation's flood of sorrow,
Swelling, overflows the land.
O my heart, what is the meaning
Of this endless anguish deep?
Wilt thou ever, O my country,
Waken, full of strength, from sleep?
Or, by heaven's mystic mandate,
Is thy fate fulfilled to-day,
Singing thus thy dirge, thy death-song,
Falling then asleep for aye?

Oh Volga … My Cradle!
I wonder if anybody loved you as much as I do.
Alone, at early dawn,
When everything in this world was sleeping
And scarlet shine was gliding on the dark-blue wavers,
I ran away to the native river.
Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov