History
The Soviet government decided to construct the Manych Waterway connecting the Black and Caspian Seas via the Kuma-Manych Depression in May 1932. In the same year construction started in the West Manych River Valley. According to the 1936 construction project, the shipping route consisted of three sections. The first, western, section from the Don River to the Chogray Reservoir on the East Manych, 448 km long, was planned as a cascade of reservoirs, the torages); the second section – from the Chogray Dam to the Kuma River – was to be built as a canal with a water depth of 3 m, bottom width of 67 m, and length of 73 km. The third, eastern, section, 150 km long, was intended as a free-flow navigable and irrigation canal (along the lower course of the Kuma) reaching a port on the Caspian coast. Of these three sections, only the first was ever built.
By 1941, the cascade of dams on the West Manych was completed. It created three reservoirs, in the following (east to west) order: Proletarsk (Proletarskoye) Reservoir (Пролетарское водохранилище), 150 km long, Vesyolovsk (Vesyolovskoe) Reservoir (Весёловское водохранилище), 100 km long, and Ust'-Manych (Ust'-Manychskoye) Reservoir (Усть-Манычское водохранилище), 62 km long. The uppermost reservoir of the cascade, the Proletarskoye, is in fact connected with the source of the Western Manych, Lake Manych-Gudilo, the Proletarsk dam raising the water level in the lake. This system of reservoirs and ship locks creates the so-called Manych Waterway, 329 km long but only 1.3 m deep. It is still used for shipping, but on a very minor scale.
With the outbreak of the Second World War further construction of the Manych Ship Canal was suspended. After the war, destroyed or damaged dams and locks of the shipping canal were reconstructed, but the plans for continuing the construction further eastward were canceled, since the much deeper Volga-Don Shipping Canal was built instead, and the existing demands for freight transport did not justify a second canal between the Caspian and the Black/Azov Sea basins.
Further east, on the East Manych River (which flows east), the Chogray Reservoir, 48.8 km long, was constructed in 1969-1973, but at that time the focus was on irrigation, not shipping.
Read more about this topic: Eurasia Canal
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