Volga Region — the territories adjoining the Volga; following the course of the river, it is divided into the Upper (Verkhnevolzhye), Middle, and Lower sections.[1][2][3] Nizhny Novgorod stands at the junction of the first two: the Verkhnevolzhye is considered to extend from the Volga's source to the mouth of the Oka River — that is, precisely to Nizhny Novgorod.[1]

Verkhnevolzhye

Verkhnevolzhye — a natural-economic region occupying part of the main watershed of the Russian Plain. It encompasses the Tver, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Ivanovo, and Nizhny Novgorod territories — the stretch from the Volga's source to where the Oka flows into the Volga at Nizhny Novgorod.[1]

The river's source is near the village of Volgoverkhove in Tver Region. In its upper reaches the Volga passes through the Upper Volga Lakes — Bolshoy and Maly Verkhnit, Sterzh, Vselog, Peno, and Volgo — whose names are of Balto-Slavic origin. Following the construction of a dam in 1843, the lakes formed the Upper Volga Reservoir: 183 square kilometers in area, 0.52 cubic kilometers in volume, 85 kilometers long, and up to 6 kilometers wide at its broadest. The dam was damaged during the Great Patriotic War and restored in 1944–1947.[1] The largest tributaries of the Upper Volga are the Selizharovka, Vazuza, Tvertsa, Medveditsa, Mologa, Sheksna, Kostroma, and Unzha.[1]

Middle Volga Region

The Middle Volga Region encompasses Ulyanovsk, Samara, and Saratov Regions, as well as Tatarstan and Chuvashia — the latter sometimes assigned to the Verkhnevolzhye instead.[2] The largest tributaries of the middle course are the Kama River (1,805 km), the Oka River (1,500 km), the Vetluga River (889 km), the Sura River (841 km), the Samara (594 km), the Sviyaga (375 km), and the Sok (364 km).[2]

Three reservoirs are located here. The Cheboksary Reservoir, upstream of the Cheboksary hydroelectric dam, covers 1,080 square kilometers at its normal impoundment level of 63 meters, and would cover 2,170 square kilometers at a level of 68 meters.[2] The Kuibyshev Reservoir, created by the 45-meter-high Zhigulyovskaya hydroelectric dam built in 1955, is the largest in Eurasia at 6,150 square kilometers. The Saratov Reservoir covers 1,831 square kilometers.[2]

The Middle Volga Region occupies the southern part of the Volga Federal District. Its principal natural resources are oil and gas, which define its industrial profile: petroleum and petroleum refining, gas and chemical industries, and machine-building — above all automotive, with KamAZ in Naberezhnye Chelny, AvtoVAZ in Tolyatti, and UAZ in Ulyanovsk.[2] The economic center of the region is Samara; the largest cities as of 2022 are Kazan (1.2 million residents), Samara (1.1 million), Saratov (818,000), Ulyanovsk (623,000), and Cheboksary (498,000).[2]

Lower Volga Region

The Lower Volga Region comprises Volgograd and Astrakhan Regions and Kalmykia; unlike the other two sections, it belongs to the Southern Federal District and has access to the Caspian Sea.[3] The largest tributaries of the lower course are the Bolshoy Irgiz (675 km), the Akhtuba (537 km), and the Yeruslan (278 km); the Volgograd Reservoir, formed by the dam of the Volzhskaya hydroelectric station, covers 3,117 square kilometers.[3]

The Volga Delta begins 46 kilometers north of Astrakhan, where the Buzan channel branches off from the main river; it is the largest delta in Europe, comprising up to five hundred branches, channels, and smaller streams.[3] The principal natural resources are rock salt, gas, and oil; the main industries are electric power generation, shipbuilding, transport engineering, petroleum refining, chemicals, and fish processing. The economic center is Volgograd (1,001,000 residents); other major cities as of 2022 are Astrakhan (519,000), Volzhsky (321,000), Kamyshin (107,000), and Elista (104,000).[3]

Peoples and Culture

The Volga Region developed as a multiethnic territory: the indigenous population of the middle belt consisted of Chuvash, Mari, and Mordva peoples; later, Bulgars, Polovtsians, and Nogais settled here as well. Russian expansion into the Volga lands became one of the principal goals of the Russian state from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries onward, and many of the region's major cities arose as fortresses on the Volga frontier.

The Volga Region on Old Maps

The formation of the cartographic image of the Middle Volga Region was traced by Ulyanovsk historian and local scholar Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gurkin in his essay "The Middle Volga Region through the Eyes of Cartographers of the 17th–18th Centuries."[4] He shows that the interior provinces of eighteenth-century Russia were mapped less thoroughly than the newly annexed borderlands: academic expeditions set out for new territories, while the Volga Region was left to government departments — and, from the nineteenth century onward, to provincial statistical committees, learned archival commissions, and local scholarly societies. As a result, sources on the region's development are scattered across central and provincial archives.[4]

The Nizhny Novgorod stretch of the Volga Region appeared on maps primarily in connection with ship timber. By 1727, the oak groves marked for the fleet along the Volga upstream from Simbirsk had been almost entirely stripped, as Captain-Commander Kozlov reported to the Admiralty College.[4]

The ship-quality oak forests, which by survey were marked from Simbirsk upriver along the Volga and along other rivers to Nizhny Novgorod District, a distance of 480 versts in length and 50 versts or more in breadth to either side, have been depleted, and no hope can be placed in them for the future…[4]

— Report of Captain-Commander Kozlov to the Admiralty College, 1727

The Svechin Survey

The response to the depletion of the oak groves was a major survey. In February 1763, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Ivanovich Svechin received a Senate commission to inspect the ship-timber forests and settled areas of Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, and Orenburg Governorates; the work took three years, lasting until 1766.[4] In August 1763, six navigators and assistant navigators of the Admiralty were attached to the expedition — among them Vasily Kipriyanov — and from November onward they compiled maps of the cleared oak groves.[4]

The result was a manuscript atlas of forest maps produced in the Admiralty's drafting office. It opens with a general map bearing a long title that lists everything the survey was to cover:[4]

Land Map of Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Orenburg Governorates, containing part of the Volga River and the Sura River flowing into it, showing the cleared oak groves and other wild forests, and indicating how many oak saplings are to be found in each grove under various numbers.[4]

— Title of the map from the atlas of the Svechin Expedition, 1760s

The Mende Survey

A detailed topographic survey of European Russia was conducted between 1848 and 1866 under the direction of Alexander Ivanovich Mende. The scale varied by province: Tver, Ryazan, Tambov, and Vladimir were surveyed at one verst to the inch; Yaroslavl at two; Simbirsk and Nizhny Novgorod at three; and Penza at eight.[4] These maps long remained the most detailed cartographic record of the province.

A grim fate awaited the cartographic collections themselves: on 30 May 1963, the entire holding of eighteenth- to early twentieth-century maps at the State Archive of Ulyanovsk Region was reclassified as secret and withdrawn from scholarly use for nearly forty years. Among the items placed under restriction were an 1885 map of the forests of an imperial estate and a map of average rye yields. The collection was declassified only in 2000.[4]

Rehabilitation of the Volga

About 60 million people live on the banks of the Volga.[5] In 2018, a presidential decree launched the federal project "Rehabilitation of the Volga" with a budget of 127 billion rubles: discharges of polluted wastewater into the river were to be reduced threefold by the end of 2024.[5]

In 2023 the Accounts Chamber flagged delays, after which the State Duma conducted a parliamentary inquiry. A working group visited 121 facilities — 98 wastewater treatment plants and 23 stormwater and snowmelt treatment stations — and reported in July 2024 that only six of them were meeting regulatory treatment standards: facilities located in Vologda, Nizhny Novgorod, and Samara Regions and in the Republic of Mari El. A further 25 facilities, including some in Nizhny Novgorod Region, were placed in the most problematic category.[5]

See Also

Sources

  1. bigenc.ru — Verkhnevolzhye — BRE — Great Russian Encyclopedia — …
  2. bigenc.ru — Middle Volga Region — BRE — Great Russian Encyclopedia
  3. bigenc.ru — Lower Volga Region — BRE — Great Russian Encyclopedia
  4. archeo73.ru — Antiquities of the Simbirsk Land — Gurkin V. A. The Middle Volga Region through the Eyes of Cartographers of the 17th–18th…
  5. pnp.ru — Parliamentary Newspaper — Dmitry Litvinov, 3 July 2024 — Who derailed the federal project "Rehabilitation of the Volga"