Rybinsk Reservoir is the next reservoir upstream on the Volga above the "Gorky Sea". It was formed by the dams of the Rybinsk hydroelectric complex. A Stalin-era project carried out by the NKVD. As a result, the town of Mologa was flooded. 130,000 residents were forcibly resettled from the Mologa-Sheksna interfluve, and a further 20,000 from the Upper Volga valley.
It takes its name from the Volga town of Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Oblast.
Lowering the Water Level
Filling the enormous basin took 7 long years and was completed only in 1947, when the planned "normal pool level" (NPL) was reached. In truth, this level (+102 m above the level of the World Ocean) can hardly be called normal. The fact is that, according to the original project approved by the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on 14 September 1935, the NPL of the upper pool of the Rybinsk Reservoir was to be +98 m. At that pool level, the town of Mologa and most of the territory of Mologa Uyezd would have remained unflooded.
However, contrary to the original decision adopted by the country's top leadership, obliging executors — young hydropower plant designers from the "Gidrostroyproekt" institute headed by Professor Rakhmanov — managed, with the help of Ya. Rapoport, the all-powerful head of Volgostroy-Volgolag of the NKVD, to push through Gosplan of the USSR (decree of 1 January 1937) a new NPL of 102 m, that is, 4 m above the previously approved level, in order to overfulfil the established targets for electricity output at the Rybinsk hydroelectric plant (raising the station's capacity from 200 to 330 thousand kW) and to create the "largest man-made sea". This led to a twofold increase in the flooded land area and to the emergence of vast shallow-water zones.
With the reservoir's total area equal to 4,550 sq. km, the shallow zone with depths of up to 4.5 m makes up more than 2,000 sq. km, or about half the area, including almost 20 percent of the reservoir's area with depths of up to 2 m. In a word, the sea turned out shallow, with an absurd configuration and an ill temper (it storms very often)…
After the reservoir's vast basin was filled, an eighth of all Yaroslavl land went underwater and was withdrawn from economic use, including 80,000 hectares of the finest floodplain water meadows in the Volga region — grasses whose quality was no worse than those of alpine meadows — more than 70,000 hectares of arable land cultivated for centuries, more than 30,000 hectares of highly productive pastures, and more than 250,000 hectares of mushroom- and berry-bearing forests. A devastating blow was dealt to the region's agricultural production, since the main butter-making districts of Yaroslavl Governorate were Mologa and Poshekhonye Uyezds, along with the northern parts of Myshkin and Rybinsk Uyezds — precisely the territories that were flooded or waterlogged by the reservoir.
Here, in the northwest of the governorate, up to 85 percent of Yaroslavl butter was produced, a significant part of which was exported before the revolution to Western Europe, in particular to England and Denmark. All this attests to the extremely high level of livestock farming development in the Mologa-Sheksna interfluve, comparable to present-day agricultural production in the Netherlands and France. Yet the region's richest base of highly productive livestock farming was thoughtlessly flooded.
But the heaviest losses are tied to the resettlement — or, more accurately, the eviction — of tens of thousands of people. In total, during the construction of the Rybinsk and Uglich hydroelectric complexes and the filling of the reservoir, about 800 villages, 6 monasteries, and more than 50 churches were destroyed and flooded.
It is known that the closer one gets to extremes, the further one is from the truth, and therefore an objective analysis is needed for making balanced decisions.
The idea of a partial drawdown of the Rybinsk Reservoir deserves close attention for many reasons. In energy terms, for example, it is one of the least efficient compared with the other reservoirs of the Volga cascade: by area it ranks second after the Kuibyshev Reservoir, while the Rybinsk hydroelectric plant ranks last both in installed capacity and in average long-term electricity output, lagging many times behind each of the five other hydroelectric plants.
There are also many other arguments in favor of a phased lowering of the Rybinsk Sea's level. It is known that reservoirs cause the surrounding area to cool and shift the growing season. On the Rybinsk Reservoir, in particular, an enormous ice sheet forms every year, with an area of more than 4,500 sq. km and a thickness of up to 1 m. The presence of this giant refrigerator shifts the onset of plant growth every spring by 2-3 weeks, sometimes up to a month. Yet folk wisdom says: a spring day feeds the whole year.
The artificial retention of enormous water masses (more than 25 billion tonnes) has substantially altered the hydrological regime of ground and subsurface waters in the territories adjoining the reservoir. Coastal forests are degrading, and crops fail to ripen and become waterlogged. At an NPL of 102.0 m, the area of waterlogged land in the Rybinsk Reservoir zone reaches 234,000 hectares. In spring this figure rises considerably. Annual losses of agricultural output amount to many tens of millions of rubles.
Regular drawdowns of the reservoir lead to sharp fluctuations in level in the upper and lower pools of the hydroelectric complexes and cause large-scale bank erosion. This is aggravated by the powerful blows of asymmetric waves that arise during severe storms in the shallow reservoir. Contrary to the forecasts of the reservoir's builders, the intensity of coastal zone deformation is increasing, and today more than 35 percent of the Rybinsk Reservoir's shoreline is subject to erosion.
Advocates of lowering the reservoir's level by 4 m argue that this would make it possible to restore the town of Mologa, flooded more than 60 years ago, which went under water by only 2-3 m. Every year the ruined town emerges half, sometimes even two-thirds, from the murky greenish shallows. This usually happens in late autumn during a partial drawdown of the reservoir, but it also occurs in the middle of a dry summer, when the water inflow sharply decreases and the reservoir's level noticeably drops. On these days Mologa can be reached from the village of Dubrovo in Nekouz Municipal District along the old St. Petersburg postal road. The scene that opens up is striking: piles of brick where churches and buildings once stood, rusted iron, cobblestone streets half-buried in sand, and house foundations covered in silt deposits, dead algae, and peat rafts.
Restoring the town and its infrastructure on its former site is practically impossible, but building a new Mologa nearby, on land that historically belonged to Mologa, is possible. This proposal was put forward on the pages of "Severny Kray" (7 September 1996) by the well-known historian and local lore expert V. A. Grechukhin, who rightly believes that the ancient Russian village of Vereteya could be the optimal site for a new Mologa. This proposal has found understanding among the Yaroslavl public ("Severny Kray", 18 February 1999 and 11 May 2001). A new Mologa should become a living memorial to the many small Russian towns that have been destroyed. This is our duty to the memory of hundreds of thousands of forced resettlers, for "as long as we feel another's pain, as long as compassion lives in us, our life has justification".
The first step could be the re-creation of the Mologa administrative territory, incorporating the Mologa lands that remain unflooded.
The Problem of Navigation
Initially, the discharge flow of water from the Rybinsk Reservoir was 800 m3/s. This discharge was twice the domestic (baseline) flow, which created good navigation conditions for operating the fleet then in service.
Later, after the decision was made to guarantee a depth of 400 cm, it became necessary to increase the discharge flow through the Rybinsk hydroelectric complex to 1,100 m3/s, and as a result the Rybinsk Reservoir, short of water, began operating at the limit of its capacity and increasingly limited navigation in the lower pool of the Gorky hydroelectric complex. The efficiency of using the inland waterway declined substantially.
At the same time, although 45 years have passed since the decision to increase the depth from 365 to 400 cm, a depth of 4 m has still never been achieved. On the Volga near Gorodets and below the Volgograd hydroelectric complex, on the Lower Don below the Kochetovsky hydroelectric complex, and on the Kama River near Sarapul, the guaranteed channel widths are not maintained on a number of stretches of the Volga-Baltic Waterway. As a result, vessels built for a 4 m depth are forced to operate on inland waterways underloaded, which seriously reduces their efficiency.
Unfortunately, as practice shows, history teaches us nothing, and we still go by the formula: "We cannot wait for favors from nature; taking them from it is our task".
The gigantomania that swept Russia's waterways with the decision to create a 4 m depth on the Unified Deep-Water System continues to this day. Rivers and canals are still built for ships, whereas everywhere else in the world it is the opposite — ships are built for rivers and canals.
Design institutes are not particularly concerned that the world's inland waterway network shrank from 2.66% of the overall transport network in 1950 to 1.45% in 2006. The world's inland water transport freight turnover fell over the same period from 5.6% of total freight turnover to 2.7%.
The same trends are found in the Russian Federation and, judging by the development of other, more competitive transport systems, will continue to decline. The freight turnover of inland water transport fell over the same period from 8.8% of Russia's total freight turnover to 2.1% and, judging by the growth of freight turnover in other transport sectors, is not expected to rise.
Yet no one is willing to consider why the efficiency of Russia's inland waterways is more than 7 times lower than the world average. Why do we keep striving to build the biggest, the most expensive, and the least efficient? Why build what will never pay for itself? Water transport shipments in the Kuban basin have fallen almost 8-fold, from 11.5 million tonnes to 1.5 million tonnes? Less than 7 million tonnes of cargo pass through the Gorodets hydroelectric complex, while the existing lock could handle 40-50 million tonnes — a reserve capacity of 500-700%. And no significant growth in cargo flows through the Gorodets Locks is in sight.
Source: http://www.dpr.ru/journal/journal_35_24.htm