THE MIGHTY VOLGA

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 December 1929, Page 5

THE MIGHTY VOLGA

RUSSIA’S FAMOUS RIVER. • Stretching to its magnificent length of more than 2000 miles from the far north-west of European Russia to the largest salt lake in the world, the Caspian Sea, the Volga is pre-eminent-ly and indisputably Russia’s national river, writes a correspondent in the “Christian Science Monitor.” For uncounted centuries peoples have used this great waterway for trade and war and migration: “Matiishka Volga” (Little Mother Volga) is the central figure in many ballads and stories. One usually begins the popular steamboat trip down the Volga at the old city of Nizhni Novgorod, with its picturesque location on a high bluff overlooking the junction of the Oka and Volga Rivers. Nizhni Novgorod still preserves its character as a natural commercial meeting-place for Russia and the East; every Summer,

on a low tongue of land, which is regularly flooded during the spring rise of.the river, takes place the traditional fair. When the Volga passenger steamer Turgeniev (the Volga isteaniers are christened in about equal proportion after famous writers and natural scientists, and after revolutionists and Soviet leaders) cast off from Nizhni Novgorod and started its five-day cruise to Astrakhan, at the mouth of the river, one was immediately conscious of the change of atmosphere. The bleak, strenuous, restless life of the present-day Russian city gave way to the deep repose of the unchanging riVer.

One glides along the broad placid stream through a series of days that become gradually warmer and sunnier and nights that become For after the first day’s sail eastward from Nizhni Novgorod to the old Tartar stronghold of Kazan, the main course of the river is southward, toward the hot Caspian Sea, which washes the shore of so many desert lands. To travel down the Volga is to pass through a varied racial panorama. Soon after leaving Nizhni Novgorod one has on the right bank of the river the Chuvashes and on the left bank the Maris, of whom the former are a puzzle to anthropologists, while the latter are of Finnish, stock. The holiday costumes of the Chuvash women,

with their heavy many-coloured headdresses, jingling with old coins, are especially striking. A day’s sail brings the boat to Kazan, capital of the Tartar . Autonomous Republic, where the spires of the minarets and the bulbous domes of the Russian churches symbolize the mingling of the- two races. Among the peasants who rush on board at, every stop, and who bring bread and eggs and chickens for sale to the passengers who disembark, one can recognise various racial types — Russians, Tartars, Chuvashes, and Mordvians. As the boat approaches Saratav .gabled rooms and churches with steeples instead of domes on the left bank announce the presence of another people —the Volga German colonists who wete brought to Russia at the time of Catherine the Great and who still retain their native language, although with some modifications and additions. The Germans also possess {.heir autonomous republic, with the use of their language in Courts and schools.

Last and perhaps most picturesque of the races on the Volga are the Calniuck nomads, who roam, on their little ponies with their flocks through the desert that comes close to, the river during the final day’s sail, from Stalingrad (formerly Tsaritsin and re-, named, because of the part which Joseph V. Stalin, general secretary of the Communist. Party ‘.Central Committee, played ’in the defence during the civil war) to Astrakhan. The round Cal-/ muck tents, the figures of camels silhouetted against the landscape, the sight of an occasional mosque, crowned with a crescent, all emphasise the approach to the East.