The Volga Don Shipping Canal

Volga-Don Shipping Canal

Volga-Don Ship Canal is a part of the United Deep-Water System of Waterways. This canal connects the
Volga and the Don and

reduced twofold distances between the ports of the northern and southern seas
of the European part of Russia

The Volga-Don Canal is important to the area because it allows waterborne shipping from the Volga River to
the Don River, through the Sea of Azov, and into the Black Sea. The main European waterway is the Volga-
Don system, which connects the major river ports of Nizhniy Novgorod, Kazan', Samara, Saratov,
Volgograd, Astrakhan', and Rostov with the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and leads northward via canals to
link with the Baltic Sea at St. Petersburg.

The system links the Don and Volga rivers by the 60-kilometer Volga-Don Canal.

Peter the Great attached much importance to effecting a junction of the Black and the Caspian Seas.
the enormous trade that was developed in petroleum at Baku in the late 19th Century,
on the Caspian Sea, would have created a traffic for such a waterway
that was never dreamt of in the time of that Czar.

Stalin subsequently used Gulag labor to realize the centuries-old dream. Stalin used German POW's, as well
as Russian citizens to work on this project, but he never got to see it's completion. The complicated hydraulic
engineering of the Volga-Don canal was constructed in 1949-1952 rapidly - for 3 years and 6 months. Stalin
died in 1952, and the Volga-Don Canal was opened in 1953. Its completion inspired Soviet composer Sergei
Prokofiev's "The Meeting of the Volga and Don" tone poem.

Many untold stories are hidden among the more than nine thousand records of the Nobel companys
activities in the archives in Azerbaijan. One of them is connected to Villa Petrolea, which was well known
as a green haven or green oasis among the oil derricks. It long attracted the interests of oil industry
executives, workers and visitors.

Villa Petrolea was, in fact, not a single villa but a planned community located in the village of Keshle on
the outskirts of Baku. The Villa was established on the initiative of Branobels founders, with Branobel
funding. The community was built especially for the employees of the company.

The community occupied a considerable area, well over 20 acres, with a series of substantial houses for
company employees. One building, especially designed for entertainment, consisted of a huge hall for
performances and concerts, a restaurant, billiard tables and a library.

Entrepreneurs made a considerable contribution to modernizing the environment (with the construction of
buildings, roads, postal stations, telegraph, etc). By implementing Western standards and taking into
consideration the employees health, Branobel aimed to improve conditions in the very tough environment
around the oil fields. The plan proved noble but difficult to realize. The natural conditions around the
industrial region were very harsh. Alfred Nobel himself conceded that he never wanted to visit the Baku Oil
fields given the depressing environment.

Branobel did not limit its activity to the construction of houses. The most distinguished feature of Villa
Petrolea was the transformation of the site into a luxuriant garden with rare and valuable plants, hothouses
and a nursery. The companys systematic efforts led to observations from many contemporaries that the
houses were sinking in the greenery.

Contemporaries also noted that Branobel achieved this in an area that lacked fresh water and black earth. For
irrigation, a water pipeline was constructed along the length of the site, and black earth was brought from
Lenkaran, which is situated 200 km from Baku. The costs to the company were estimated at about 500,000
roubles.

Due to the lack of any other parks around Baku, except the maritime boardwalk, Villa Petrolea was also of
public importance, with people from the surrounding area as well as oil industry workers strolling along its
paths.

Villa Petrolea - an expensive oasis

By Brita sbrink

A harsh climate and many diseases claimed victims among Branobels employees in Baku.

In 1882, Ludvig Nobel decided to improve the conditions for the Northerners
and started construction of Villa Petrolea
a residential district for the companys employees.

At the start of the 1880s, conditions in Baku were tough.

The weather changed from snowy winters to tropically hot summers.

One minute the northerly wind was blowing icy blasts,
the next minute there were sandstorms.
Cholera, typhus, malaria and respiratory diseases
claimed victims, with Branobel losing good workers.
Ludvig Nobel realised that the Northerners needed better living conditions.
In 1882, dwellings were built in an area called Villa Petrolea.

The Finnish manager Gustaf Trnudd describes in his diary how

the park with its houses lies in a charming valley between two high mountains.
Here we own around 10 acres of land
and are erecting our town intended to house one hundred of the companys employees.

All the houses are located on a slope, so the sea is visible from all the windows facing south and east, both
over the houses and between them. All the buildings are made from white, finely-hewn sandstone in a
Byzantine style, both one and two storeys high, and each house will be surrounded by an elegant park and
garden.[ABR1] Each house is surrounded to the east and south by broad, neat verandas on both the top and
bottom floors. Fresh water is drawn from the Volga to a cistern every day. Pipes run to the fountains,
kitchens, bathrooms and fire pumps.

He writes about an auditorium, skittle alley, annex with baths, laundry, mangle room and ironing room. He
also describes the apartments and then starts to describe the shared community rooms. The club house
contains a restaurant, music and ballroom, billiards room, library and reading room. The ice cellar is filled
with ice from the Volga, which is a blessing for everyone. An orangery, stables, wagon sheds, a chicken run,
duck ponds, barns and pigsties are also to be erected. We hope to get more land in order to set up large-scale
agriculture over time. Gas is piped from the factory to the homes in order to heat the rooms and cook food.
The lighting is already partially electric at the factory and in the settlement. There are already telephone
lines, but they will be extended to each department, to the offices in Balakani and in the town.

The cockroaches plagued Trnudd. In the morning, when the rooms are cleaned and all the fires put out,
you put petroleum (Nobels is the best) in a bowl and wash all the floors down liberally with it, close all the
doors and windows and then leave for an hour or so. When you enter later, it is as if they are nailed to the
floor by their long back legs. Here they can die, or you can kill them with a hammer. This method is
unerring, and has liberated me from sleepless nights. Trnudd bathes mosquito bites with ammoniac spirit.
He was bitten by a grasshopper and he knows that the tarantula is a large, poisonous spider whose bite is
slow to heal, but he has only seen one so far. A scorpion has been killed in the office, although he has not
seen one. The flies are a real pest and are here in their millions, worse than any barn in Finland, he writes,
adding:

I almost forgot to mention that we are erecting expensive equipment in order to use compressed air to
reduce the heat in our rooms in the town to the normal 15 to 20 C we Northerners are used to. A hospital
with a beautiful garden is to be constructed.

A neat barracks is being erected for our guards,

40 men selected from the guards in St. Petersburg,
some of these on horseback and all fully armed.

Does it not sound like a tale from the Thousand and One Nights? Nevertheless, it is true and shows that
Ludvig Nobel does not spare any effort or cost to make Baku as pleasant a place for us Northerners as
possible.

he dream of a small paradise...

By Brita sbrink

On 24 September 1884, Ludvig Nobel writes a letter to his daughter, Anna. He is happy about the acclaim he
has received for his own endeavours to create a good life for his employees in the "Villa Petrolia" residential
suburb. But the water needed to realise his dream of a green oasis in the semi-desert of Baku is still lacking.

... Often, yes, perhaps you think too often, you have heard Baku mentioned. For us, Baku is, of course, a
constant topic of conversation. You probably know that it is usually very hot here and the severe sand storms
are very unpleasant and that, in between, the air is full of thick clouds of smoke and unpleasant vapours from
foul-smelling oils - but I don't think that I have mentioned that, for part of the year, i.e. the autumn and
spring, the weather is divinely beautiful and that there are places here where you are untroubled by smoke
and foul-smelling vapours and where the air is always pure and fresh, Ludvig writes and continues:

One such place is the district where I have had my small residential suburb built, to which I have given the
name,

Villa Petrolea, and where a large part of our employees are housed.

That is where I now live with Carl and Hjalmar in a house intended for the Main Administrator. Since the
house is a big one and

Herr Trnudd is alone and has no family, we have sufficient space.

Several families and a number of bachelors are living in the other villas.
You know some of them, such as Rydn, Roman, Holmstrm, Lambert.

Ludvig also writes: In one of the large buildings, there is the club, where the entire colony gathers almost in
full numbers on Wednesday and Saturday evenings to play music, dance and play billiards. We have come up
with the successful idea of forming a musical corps, a real orchestra that has already achieved a rather
remarkable degree of virtuosity. The orchestra consists of 15 people playing. The conductor and teacher is an
excellent musician who has been head of the navy's music corps here for many years. Over a period of a
year, our dilettantes have made such progress that they have won great approval by giving concerts for the
benefit of charitable purposes. The newspapers that have spoken of this call them the Nobel Orchestra",
Ludvig points out proudly and continues:

I was of course invited to listen to a concert in the club. There was a party atmosphere everywhere to
honour me. They played March of the Bjrneborgers, sat me in a chair and carried me high in the air around
the large hall the entire time that the march was being played. Then they drank to my health from a large
bowl and speeches were given, in which they thanked me for having the idea of bringing about a pleasant life
for those in our service. All of this has given me immense pleasure because I had had a great deal of trouble
before succeeding in getting all this ready and when I now see that everything has been a success and that
our employees have a pleasant and healthy life and that they acknowledge that I have done so out of
goodwill, I feel great satisfaction in my heart and feel that I have ample compensation for my troubles and
my pains.

But one thing is still lacking before Ludvig is content: "I had constructed the residential suburb in the hope
of getting some greenery around us, but, unfortunately, I have not succeeded in this because there is no
water. All we have been able to achieve is flowerbeds and a scrap of a vegetable garden. In the summer, the
fields are dry and scorched by the sun. It never rains then. In the autumn, winter and spring it again rains
often. Then we have glorious greenery here and the air is full of delightful aromas. Last night, the first rain
fell, which has been eagerly awaited for a long time. The asters and stocks have benefited particularly well
from this and are already lifting their powerful clusters of flowers very proudly upwards. For next year, I
hope we will be able to supply ourselves with a better supply of water and then, with God's help, my dream
of a green Villa Petrolea, a small paradise in Baku, will become a reality", Ludvig writes hopefully.

Letter from Ruth

By Brita sbrink

What was life like for a young Swedish woman in Baku at the turn of the last century? We can find out much
about family life in Nobels Villa Petrolea from Ruth Grapengiessers frequent correspondence with her
mother and sister at home in Sweden.

The newly qualified physiotherapist Ruth Grapengiesser was just 23 when she arrived in Baku to become a
companion to the works manager Wilhelm Hagelins wife Hilda, to whom Ruth was related. She was also
going to be looking after the Hagelins children Boris and Anna, and later the youngest Volodja.

Through Ruths frequent correspondence with her mother Maria and sister Ava at the Manor Norrby in
Sweden, we can follow Ruths life as a young woman in St Petersburg and Baku, and later as a mother to
several children.

In her early letters home, Ruth increasingly mentions a certain Stickan. That was the nickname of the Finn
Lars Anton Isidor Stigzelius, a shipbuilder from Turku in Finland, who was employed at Nobels design
office in Tsaritsin in 1880. He went to Baku as a designer in 1887. In 1892, he became head of the
engineering department, and he built the vessel slipway in Baku in 1897-98.

Ruth and Lars married and moved into a staff house in Villa Petrolea. The company had installed a stove in
the kitchen that burned oil but did not work property, as Ruth explains in her letters. The stove was rebuilt
three times, which made a mess in the kitchen, to the annoyance of the kitchen maid. Over the years, the
family had housekeepers, whose quality Ruth commented on in her letters. There were also problems with
the electrics, and a telephone was installed.
About journalist Ida Bckmans report from Baku, Ruth wrote, it was 80 per cent untrue.

She soon got a teaching job in Ahus coeducational school from 1895 to 1898 and then Sofi Almquist
coeducational school in Stockholm 1900-1907. Then she left education and became a journalist.
She traveled in Russia for two years and wrote about the increasing political unrest. She witnessed the
peasant uprisings and demonstrations on estates and experienced bloody street riots in Moscow and Odessa.
She was in Warsaw in the middle of the street fighting. As a war reporter, she went to the trouble spots and
did interviews with famous and influential people. She made acclaimed visit to Leo Tolstoy in his estate
Yasnaya Polyana. His story she sent to Dagens Nyheter and Stockholms Dagblad. They were published as a
series: "Dangerous journeys and fun". [6] She was a correspondent for several newspapers and made reports,
including from Russia, South America and South Africa. [7]

1906 Hazardous journeys and fun

1906 Hazardous journeys and journalistic wanderings in Africa
1906 Hazardous journeys and journalistic wanderings in Holland and Belgium
1906 Hazardous journeys and journalistic wanderings in Russia

Ruth and Lars had three girls and one son. On 15 April 1903, they celebrated the christening of their first
child, Ester. They invited 18 guests. Ruth wrote to her mother Maria that it had exceeded expectations and
that

Emanuel Nobel had said that he had never had so much fun in Baku.
The godparents were Emanuel Nobel and Hilda Hagelin,
and Gustaf Eklund and Berta Tauson. Ruth writes,
Mr Nobel presented us with a christening font in the shape of a scoop in matt silver,
inset with precious stones. It must have cost at least 500 roubles.

At the start of the twentieth century, there was increasing unrest in the area, and things were not as they had
been in Baku.

The Scandinavian colony nonetheless tried to carry on as normal, and Ruth took big groups of 14 people on
long walks to Tatar villages and fire temples. They continued to hold parties with dancing at the Swedish
club, fancy-dress balls with collections for the needy after the earthquake in Italy 1912, played tennis and

went to the Lutheran-evangelical church in Baku on Sundays.

Ruth and her family left Baku in 1913 after her husband Larss diabetes became worse. Lars Stigzelius died
in Stockholm three years later.

Villa Petrolea became a real oasis, a sight worth seeing in the tropical summer and infertile semi-desert that
surrounded Baku. The gardens flowered with the help of humus from the fertile landscape around the city of
Lenkoran, to the south, and irrigation from the Volga. Drinking water was arranged first by means of fresh
water processors and, later, a fresh water pipeline was laid from springs in the mountains. At the beginning
of spring, boats collected 800 tonnes of ice before the summer season.

In order to attract skilled specialists and ensure the necessary conditions for their work and social life,
Ludwig Nobel initiated the creation of a beautiful park in the Black City suburbs [faktaruta 1] on wasteland.

This beautiful park, called Villa Petrolea or Oil Villa was created during the years 1887 and 1888.

By importing various plants and trees

many from the Lankaran region [faktaruta 2], Tbilisi and Batumi, Russia and Europe
he was able to create a huge green ensemble of more than 80,000 plants and trees.

The pools with fountains were also used to store fresh water. Offices, comfortable residential houses for
scientists and engineers, a theatre, library, canteen and billiard rooms were built around the park. The soil for
the park was imported from Lankaran, and fresh water from Astrakhan [faktaruta 3]. The park was designed
and created by the well-known European botanist, E. Bekle. The construction of Villa Petrolea cost 250,000
roubles, an incredibly large sum at that time. The park is still there, today called Nizami Park.

One consolation was the park that had been established with soil from Lenkoran in the southern part of the
country. Ruth writes, We have such beautiful flowers in the garden: stock, wallflower, hyacinths, crocuses,
lilies, tulips, pansies and, not to forget, daisies. We also pick a little asparagus every day, so we have enough
for about a meal every other day.

Adventurous journeys in the hunt for more land

By Brita sbrink

At the beginning of the 1880s, Branobel needs new land for its plants.

The Finn, Gustaf Trnudd is the new managing director in Baku

 and sets off on adventurous buying trips to the north and west.

In the winter of 1882, Gustaf Trnudd returned to Baku.

Here, 2,000 men were working on the expansion of the oil industry in Baku
under the direction of Ludvig Nobel, who offered Trnudd
the position of managing director after Robert Nobel,
Carl Ullner and Alfred Trnqvist.

In a letter to his family in Viborg in Finland, the new managing director writes: "I can say in the passing that
my future prospects in association with Ludvig Nobel are so agreeable and grand that I should never need to
rue the day that I left Viborg's workshop. Ludvig is planning enormously large new constructions at our
factories in the winter. I am totally astounded at the colossal sums that have passed and are still passing
through my hands on a daily basis."

Branobel needed land for new plants and, together with the administrator, Areas,

Gustaf Trnudd travelled by train to Georgia's capital, Tiblisi.

He describes a journey across "smiling" fields and through verdant valleys.
He sees the ruins of ancient fortresses located "like the eyrie" high up on the crags.
The people up in the mountains have blond hair and blue eyes
and the children remind him of the children home in Finland.

After a 24-hour journey, they arrived in Batum, an old Turkish city that had been conquered by the Russians
a few years earlier. Here, they found the land they wanted to buy,

which was owned by the mountain dweller, Gemius Achmat.

On the way up into the mountains, they suddenly hear a thundering, "Halt",
and see the barrel of a rifle shine behind a parapet of stone up in the forest.
It is the old man, Achmat, a majestic 80-year old with a big white beard,
a splendid aquiline nose and a fiery look in his blue eyes.

Gustaf Trnudd tells him his business and Achmat wants to see what his family thinks about the matter.
Men and the, until then, invisible, veiled women march in. Achmat's wife, Kacimba, decides the matter. A
surprised Gustaf Trnudd hears her declare that they should accept the offer.

The stranger greatly appeals to her and will certainly be a good and faithful friend of the Kabaltzs.
Unlike other ethnic groups in the east, the Kabaltz woman
 were in a strong position and her vote decided every matter, Gustav Trnudd explains.

And she also stands by her husband's side when it matters, just as armed and brave as him, he concludes in
his narrative.

For the process of purifying paraffin, it was also necessary to obtain sulphur.
Gustaf Trnudd and Hjalmar Crusell therefore set off for the sulphur mines in Dagestan.
We swept like a whirlwind over mountains and steams,
projecting, planning and predicting; everything needed to be ready for his [Crusell's]
departure and this could not be postponed because he is celebrating his wedding today
and distinctly opposed my suggestion that he marry by telegraph! //
Because yesterday, on Christmas Day itself, I bought the sulphur mines on our behalf in Dagestan
that have supplied sulphur to Schamyl's gun powder factory for a time
when he was fighting for a quarter of a century against Russia's superior troops.

Things are going like a fairy tale here. We need 100,000 pounds of sulphur a year for our paraffin
purification. The sulphur from Sicily became far too expensive. When our need is at its greatest, Schamyl's
former henchmen turn up and tell us a wonderful story of

enchanted mountains and inexhaustible sulphur mines deep

in Dagestan's inaccessible mountains and forests.
Hey presto, a Scandinavian [himself] is sent under escort to the location.
The latter is fed exclusively on donkey meat on his journey
and returns with the mountain's wild owner to Baku
and in a trice, before even having time to bless himself, Nobel owns the mountain!
Hurray! It was a nimble manoeuvre!
All this before Nobel has any idea of what is brewing.
I do not think he will mind either if we manage to save him something
like a hundred thousand roubles a year?

Another interesting fact of the Villa Petrolea story is that the land on which Villa Petrolea was built did not
belong to Branobel but was rented by the company. According to the agreement between

Branobel and Keshles landowning peasants,

a 50-year lease was signed for the period 18 February 1882 to 18 February 1931.
On the day of signing,
the parties to the contract are unlikely to have guessed
that it would eventually be cancelled with the rise of Bolshevik power.
Signs of peasant uprisings were seen long before the arrival of the Bolsheviks however.

On 7 April 1907, a group of Keshle landholders claimed that the Villa Petrolea site encroached on its
boundaries. They declared the agreement invalid and sought to take back the Villas territories with all the
existing structures. Finally, in May 1908, the local Branobel office was able to send the following telegram to
the companys head office in St. Petersburg:

The Keshle peasants have agreed to surrender the land under settlement at Villa Petrolea, but, conditionally,
during the contracting, another lease agreement was signed. That lease will run for 30 years and we will pay
5 roubles gratuity per square sazhen.

The head office replied:

Close this case with the Keshle peasants on these aforementioned conditions.

With the arrival of Soviet power, Villa Petrolea was adapted for use by schoolchildren. Other parts fell into
disrepair. The building and premises have only recently been renovated.