Flooded History

As a teenager, I saw a film about the inundation of Soviet villages during the construction of the Volga-Baltic Canal. The forced removal of families from a place their ancestors had settled centuries earlier struck me as monstrously unjust. I promised myself that someday I would use my camera to document this story. Last summer, thanks to Takie Dela’s “We Are Leaving” project, I was able to turn my dream into reality. 

The trading town of Krokhino, in Vologda Oblast, first appears in the historical record in the fifteenth century. In 1961 it was subsumed to make way for the Volga-Baltic Canal. But, through a miracle, its church has mostly survived in the middle of the Sheksna River to the present day.  And for more than ten years Anor Tukayeva has spearheaded work to save it. Rather than restore the majestic structure, her goal is to make its ruins a symbol of the tragic destruction of all the Russian villages that have been intentionally flooded and a testimonial to the hundreds of thousands of lives upended as a result.

1963. Vologda Oblast, village of Glushkovo.