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.

The Beacon in the Belltower

1963. Vologda Oblast, village of Glushkovo.

Nine-year-old Tanya Petukhova stayed home that evening. All the grownups had gone to the club to see a film. From a carved picture frame that had formerly held a mirror, a portrait of Stalin peered out at her. Whether Tanya sat on her bed or on the couch where friends and neighbors who stopped in for long evening chats would sit, she felt as if Stalin’s gaze was following her. It was scary to be at home alone. Then, through the window, she saw the beacon in the church’s belltower come on. Tanya obediently extinguished her kerosine lamp and quickly got into bed. All the children in Glushkovo knew: when the beacon lit up, it was time to go to bed. All her life, Tanya remembered how each evening, as she drifted off to sleep, she would look out at the warmly glowing rays of that light – the last thing that connected her family with their ancestral homeland.

* * *

In 1953, the Petukhov family was one of the first to move their large wooden home from Krokhino to the neighboring village of Glushkovo. Their native village had fallen into the “mandatory flood zone.” The construction of the next section of the Volga-Baltic Canal would complete the Soviet government’s ambitious project to create a waterway linking the ports of five seas. Powerful hydroelectric power stations were being built along its length, requiring the destruction of 218 settlements, including Krokhino Posad.[1]

More than one thousand residents were forced to leave the places that they and their ancestors had called home for hundreds of years. A special commission appraised their homes. Those that were sturdy were dismantled and moved; those that were dilapidated were burned, and residents received compensation. But most often the amount paid was insufficient to purchase a new home. Families that had still not recovered after the end of the Second World War, that often had been left without men or a normal income, were again forced to endure incredible hardships. And most often it was the women who, in addition to their household goods, had to move their children and aged relatives, as well as the coffins holding the remains of their ancestors.

Once a bustling trading town, the village was turned into a wasteland with decimated gardens and scorched fields. Before the flooding, Krokhino had three stone churches and three wooden chapels. All of them were destroyed, but for the Church of the Nativity of Christ. It miraculously withstood the watery onslaught. 

The provincial archives contain a 1961 decree ordering that the church be dismantled, but somehow this was never done. And so it became an abandoned island when the Sheksna River rose five meters, flooding the village and surrounding the church on all sides. And in order to prevent passing ships from running aground, an acetylene beacon was installed in the cupola of the belltower. 

Years passed, and water and time did what people had not managed: the church’s brickwork was battered by waves and ice, the frescoes crumbled, and the cupola deteriorated and collapsed.

A few years later, it was decided to shut down the beacon, and the light that had reminded Krokhino refugees of their homeland went dark.

“There are places that are looking for their person.”

Vologda Oblast, the former site of Krokhino Posad

It is 2009, and 24-year-old Muscovite Anor Tukayeva is walking along the Sheksna River, every now and then falling into the snow. She is surrounded by dead reeds and willow thickets, but she knows that beneath her feet are sections of a town, albeit one that hasn’t been shown on maps for a long time. 

Anor is looking for the church that had once served as a sort of lighthouse. She had learned about it by chance, from watching a documentary about the Volga-Baltic flood zone. Ever since, she has been dreaming of seeing the church with her own eyes. Finally, she did.

“There are places that are looking for their person,” Anor says, recalling that first meeting. The sight of the leaning belltower provoked such profound emotion that she realized she wanted nothing more than to put an end to the church’s deterioration. 

Anor returned to Moscow and, after a year and a half of fruitless attempts to get a response or any assistance from officials, she realized she would have to save the church herself.

In 2011, Anor posted a message on social media that seven people responded to. They became members of the first volunteer expedition to Krokhino. Their task seemed insane: to build an island around the church with their own hands.

At first, Anor managed to combine her studies in a master’s program and consulting work with the volunteer effort. But in 2010, she realized that she wanted to dedicate herself to saving the church, and so she created a charitable foundation: the Center for the Revival of the Krokhino Cultural Heritage Site. Through the foundation, she was able to raise money to create a stable shoreline around the church. And for eight years, using a small boat, trip after trip, volunteers managed to transport tons of cement and sand, to clear rubble, and to fill in holes in the walls. Then, thanks to private donations, three barges of sand were purchase to fill in the area within the reinforcement wall they had erected, a platform was built, and ice cutters were installed. In 2023, conservation work on the belltower was completed, and a roof and solar battery were installed atop it.

In July of 2024, a beacon was once again lit in the church’s belltower.

Anor says that her goal is not to restore the church, but to preserve it. In its ruined state it will serve to commemorate all the country’s flooded cities and villages, a reminder of all the lives upended by the monumental projects that required their destruction.

“It’s as if the space itself dictates everything here”

In early August 2024, I was standing at the Krokhino boat launch. I was met by Ilya Matvienko, Anor’s husband. He was piloting an ancient motorboat. It was the same boat that volunteers had been using for eight years to transport sand to build up the island. The boat had as many patches on it as Ilya has jokes: plenty. He wears many hats beside his main job as the foundation’s technical director, including carpenter, cook, and driver. A military veteran, Ilya had known Anor since 2001, but their fates became definitively joined after they both went through a divorce. Anor says Ilya had to take her with her entire “dowry,” meaning her two sons and the foundation. Today he is her main helper in the task of preserving Krokhino’s heritage.

Two girls, eight-year-old Yeva and nine-year-old Ksyusha (short for Oksana), help to tie up the boat. We immediately find a common language. I learn that what they like most in Krokhino is the oatmeal porridge and the kitchen, “because there are no mosquitoes there.” In the days that follow, they enthusiastically join in my effort to create images worthy of this story: helping me snap photos of old pictures submerged in the river and posing in the traditional outfits being recreated as part of the project.

As I get the lay of the land, the girls and I climb the belltower. The view takes your breath away. The church stands almost at the source of the Sheksna, which originates in the huge Beloye (White) Lake. The water’s surface has a strange optical quality here: the horizon is almost indistinguishable – water and sky merge into a single canvas. A flight of swifts are like a dotted line drawn across it. Below, Anor is having a heated conversation on her phone.

The volunteer camp is bustling with activity: the women are cooking and the men are putting up new residential buildings and a summer kitchen. Vitaly was born in Pushkino, a city northeast of Moscow where he works in a planetarium. He is fully absorbed in his task of straightening bent nails with a hammer. Like many others, he learned about Anor and her work from Leonid Parfyonov’s documentary “The Color of the Nation.”[2] Vitaly is on his third visit and says he is from a family of Volga-Baltic flood victims. His ancestors are from the village of Kozmodemyanskoye, also on the Sheksna. 

“When the light was turned on in the belltower, it was an indescribable feeling,” he says, continuing to hammer away at the nails. “It is very important and meaningful to see the fruits of our labor. There were about 10 episodes of repression in my family. For example, my great-grandfather was a village intellectual, a poet. He knew that they would come for him, and he buried his library in the garden. The whole family was exiled, some were shot, some were imprisoned, some went missing. The flooding and forced resettlement are just as violent an act against people.” 

Ilya rings a small bell on the wall. It’s time for lunch. 

Everyone gathers in the kitchen around a large table. I examine the furniture with amazement: ornately painted decor, a wicker chandelier, a basket of flowers on the wall, and beautiful dishes. Looking more closely, I realize many of these things are living their second lives: restored chairs that were found in dumps, a submerged log raised from the river bottom that serves as a stand for hot food. In the building where the volunteers sleep, there are tidy bunk beds, above each of which is a shelf for books and small personal items. Nothing here resembles the field conditions I expected to see in a volunteer camp.

When I am finally able to pull Anor aside, I ask why she invests so much in creature comforts.

“From the very beginning,” she says, “I had an inexplicable feeling of comfort in this place, as if you were sitting in your favorite chair in your own home. But at the same time you’re on the dirt, in boots and in the mud. Five years ago, when we were looking for a campsite, the water here was quite high. We built a footbridge from the church to the marshy bank and looked for a dry area. We found it under this spreading tree. And later we found out that there was a house here, and that the tree had managed to grow on its foundation. This was basically the center of the city. So now, we’re the ones who live here. We love this space and we want people to also fall in love with it, and to leave here with the understanding that so much can be transformed if you make the effort. It’s as if the space itself dictates everything here.”

In the evening, after a hard day’s work, the volunteers gather on the platform built around the church. Ilya turns on the light in the belltower. Volunteers Dunya and Yana, students at the Gnesin Music School, pull out a balalaika and a guitar and sing folk songs. 

I lie on a wooden platform and look up at the night sky. The river splashes beneath me. The boards retain the warmth of the day. The stars sway in the sky, and Dunya and Yana sing: “And brotherly blood will flow like a river. But do not grieve, beloved children, beyond this sadness awaits eternal joy.” 

I hear the water beneath me begin to noisily recede. This means a ship is approaching. It pulls the water toward itself, and the church foundation is exposed, revealing chunks of ancient red brick and rusty iron beams. Tired men on the passing ship smoke on the deck, staring indifferently at the church and the volunteers. Having traveled this route for many years, they have surely become accustomed to the eccentric folks who are working to save the ruins. The boat moves on, the noise of the engine fades away, and the water returns, once again hiding the relics of the past.

It’s all underwater

Over the years, the Krokhino Foundation has developed three areas of focus. The main and most labor-intensive one is the restoration and conservation of the church and the reconstruction of the old pumping station in Belozersk, where a museum will soon open dedicated to the preflood history of Beloye Lake. The museum will serve as a repository for the fruits of the foundation’s labors: memoirs of those forcibly resettled, artifacts, reproductions of tradition local clothing, and much more.

Work on the church and the museum is possible only during the navigation season, when the river is ice-free and boat traffic is safe – from April to November. The rest of the year Anor and her associates devote to preserving historical memory: combing through archives, recording interviews with those who lived in the flood zone, looking for historical artifacts. And they are also trying to draw attention to what they consider important – the history of the flooded lands of this region, which goes back many centuries.

“Here, everything seems to push its way to the surface,” Anor says. “When we were looking for a campsite, we went ashore and began to study the land, and we felt that the land was studying us. Here, the interaction is on a different level, not like in the city. And when we tuned into this place’s ‘channel,’ objects literally began to crawl up out from beneath the earth. For example, we walked through one place a hundred times, and on the hundred and first time, we found a blacksmith’s tongs, completely untouched by corrosion. The tongs were the start of our future museum collection. We constantly come across more and more new household items and tools from different times.”

Almost all the foundation’s projects started with unexpected discoveries like these. History seems to jump out at them, appearing from underground, from underwater, or even materializing from thin air. And their job is simply to listen, collect, and patiently disentangle one bit of local history after another.

The stories of some of these discoveries are told through the project “Tales from the Krokhino Marshes” – a series of postcards with stories based on real events. 

For a long time, the foundation’s archives contained the recollection of one local about fields of a special type of wheat that grew here. Wheat in Vologda Oblast is hardly headline news, but then, by chance, someone came across a booklet in the archives from 1939 about how Krokhino peasants went to Moscow, to VDNKh – the All-Union Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy – with samples of their local wheat. Step by step, the researchers pieced together the entire story.

It turns out that the local wheat truly was special. It had been bred by a self-taught plant geneticist, Nikolai Vladimirovich Totubalin, who devoted his entire life, starting in the late nineteenth century, to this project. The variety turned out to be so adaptable that, through a decision of the VDNKh Commission, samples were included in the Soviet Union’s seed bank. But the plant breeder himself never learned that his work had been recognized. When the flooding began, Totubalin was forcibly resettled in Vologda, where three years later he went mad and died of grief – over the loss of his land and the thought that his life’s work had literally been washed away. Yet it turned out that his wheat lived on. Experimental fields are still being sown with it.

“The story of Totubalin and the surviving wheat was the beginning of our storytelling project,” Anor says. “We collected 24 stories like this one and printed a series of postcards to tell them. This is a good example of working with difficult memories in an approachable format. It doesn’t usually work to stick sharp objects into open wounds — nobody wants that. But people can handle a story, even a tragic one, told in this form.”

Or take the projects to restore folk dress and songs. Volunteers discovered local Belozersk writer Ivan Poroshin and found out by working in the archives that his brother had recorded wedding folklore in Krokhino. Such folklore from the early twentieth century is a great rarity. The collection included the lyrics to eight songs. Another stroke of luck: researchers found an archive from a 1937 ethnographic expedition. Then, by studying audio recordings from a 1979 expedition stored in the St. Petersburg Conservatory, they were able to put the words to the right melodies. 

In their effort to recreate the region’s past fashions, the foundation had help from experts in traditional Russian dress from Moscow’s Russkie Nachala (Russian Origins) studio, which visited local museum collections with Anor and took measurements. Another helpful resource was the photographs taken by the early-twentieth-century photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, a forerunner in the field of color photography who documented life in Krokhino Posad in 1909.

“All of this is an outlet for us,” Anor says, “an attempt to convey the beauty of a place that does not exist, but which existed here for centuries. A person tends to perceive everything as it is. People see the river, the bank, the reeds. They don’t see the huts of the flooded town, its history, the fates of its inhabitants. It is all hidden beneath a thick layer of water. You just need to open your eyes and ears.”

Why People Stayed Silent

When Anor first started collecting the stories of the displaced, she encountered a wall of silence. People refused to speak with her. All attempts ended with nothing to show for them. “I don’t know anything, I’m not interested in this,” people would answer.

“Well, people can’t help but be interested in the fact that their centuries-old village has disappeared,” Anor says. “People can’t help but pay attention to the huge church that was the center of the village, but became an uninhabited island in the middle of an expanse of water. People simply preferred to repress painful memories.”

Then Anor visited the archives. She studied local newspapers from 1953 to 1963 to understand why people kept silent. She did not find a single mention of the flooding of Krokhino Posad. Obviously, people were taught to keep quiet.

“What is difficult memory?” Anor asks. “These are people who were dragging huge, handle-less suitcases along a dirt road. They were having a really hard time with these suitcases. But they weren’t going to abandon them: they contained their past lives. At the same time, people think that their memories are of no value. But that is not true. Our heritage consists entirely of the memories of individuals. And when people are deprived of the right to memory, the right to grieve, their lives are devalued. Heritage and memory are directly related to the value of life. Heritage means treasuring memory, treasuring the places people lived. I was convinced of this by people’s reaction to our film, Unflooded Stories of Beloye Lake, which we shot in 2019 about the people who had lived in the flooded villages. It is entirely based on the living voices of the displaced. After the screenings, we were inundated with a flood of gratitude. People finally saw themselves and their neighbors from the outside. They heard the polyphony of memory and realized its significance.”“What is difficult memory?” Anor asks. “These are people who were dragging huge, handle-less suitcases along a dirt road. They were having a really hard time with these suitcases. But they weren’t going to abandon them: they contained their past lives. At the same time, people think that their memories are of no value. But that is not true. Our heritage consists entirely of the memories of individuals. And when people are deprived of the right to memory, the right to grieve, their lives are devalued. Heritage and memory are directly related to the value of life. Heritage means treasuring memory, treasuring the places people lived. I was convinced of this by people’s reaction to our film, Unflooded Stories of Beloye Lake,”[3]

The film features the voice of Tatyana Petrova, whose story about the beacon atop the belltower of the flooded church began this story. Tatyana is now 69. She knows Krokhino only through her parents’ stories. 

“There was a mill in our town,” she recalls. “People teased my father by calling him Panya the Miller. My mom worked at the post office, then at the club. There was also an amateur theater, where they staged ‘serious’ plays, like [Alexander] Ostrovsky’s ‘It’s Not All Shrovetide for the Cat.’ My father was alive, so there was someone to move the house. It was bad for those who didn’t have men. 

“Until we finished putting the house back together again on its new plot, we lived in an apartment with relatives. Later, other relatives moved and lived with us. People were always moving in with one another. [In the new place] there were no mushrooms, no berries, no water. And back in Krokhino there was a river nearby, fish. We always remembered Krokhino, we were sad [about leaving], but I never heard anyone badmouth the authorities. People just didn’t do that back then. Russians generally put up with things. The last time I was in the church was in 1961. I was six or seven years old. It was dark there, we crawled up to the belltower. The staircase was a spiral, it rattled. It was probably made of iron.”

In July 2024, Tatyana, who still lives in Glushkovo, came to the Krokhino boat launch to watch volunteers turn on the light atop the belltower. 

“Anor is great. It’s just a shame that she noticed us so late,” Tatyana sighs.

* * *

Over time, the displaced themselves began seeking out Anor and sharing their memories, passing on artifacts, and visiting the site where Krokhino had once stood. 

“I think they feel relieved,” Anor says. “This used to be a dead space. Now they know that they can come here, talk to people. They know that history is coming to life — and that someone needs it.”

I ask Anor what has given her the strength to keep going all these years.

“Of course, the church,” she replies. “At one time, I even had nightmares where I saw it sinking irretrievably beneath the water. Second, I find it interesting. I like learning new things and I am surprised by how much you can find and understand even while sitting in one place. It’s enchanting. Often in the fall, after the end of another season of work, my husband and I sit on the shore and watch the ships sail by. We are very tired, but very happy. Yes, by ordinary standards, we are not the most successful people – our work does not bring in much money. But still, this is our way of surviving. Right now there’s something I’m excited about: we’re going to put up a shelf to display an actual towel from a flooded village. This makes me happy.”

* * *

The evening before my departure, I set up the projector I brought with me, and Anor and I project old photographs of the residents of Krokhino Posad onto the walls of the dilapidated church. I want these people to be back home, even if only for a short time. A bat flies by in the darkness. In one image after another, men, women, the young, the old, look back at us from the peeling walls and seem to ask questions that we cannot answer.  

 Anor narrates: “Here are some of the displaced. And this is a spot in the park behind the church. There’s a tree stump there still. And there’s Galina Sergeyevna’s mother in Krokhino, with a yoke. She gave us this yoke.”

The next image is an inscription on the back of a photograph of Krokhino Posad, scrawled in ink by one of the settlers: “Anya, do you remember your home or not? I found a photo of it and cried. I feel sorry for my homeland.”

Anor and I are silent. In the silence, you can hear the waves beating against the reinforcement wall. Anor repeats: “Yes, it’s sad for our homeland. Especially now. Although no. It’s always sad for our homeland.”