Boatmen on the Volga

Although its shores touch two oceans and twelve seas, the Soviet Union is practically a landlocked nation. It has too few ports, and those are too far from major population centers and too often on icebound waters. Peter the Great began building a network of canals to link the country's broad rivers, but so much of the network became obsolete that 80% of all the Soviet Union's freight is now carried by rail. The absence of suitable waterways has for centuries hampered Russia's struggle to increase its world trade.

This week Soviet shipping and trade enter what the Russians hope will be a new era. In the Iranian port of Naushahr, a 4,000-ton Soviet vessel will begin loading for a 4,300-mile voyage to Hamburg, Germany, over a new inland waterway that stretches from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic, ranks as one of the world's longest waterways. The route will cut the average shipping time from Iran to Germany from 50 to 25 days. It will slice 2,700 miles from the previous circuitous route, which took ships through the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

The Russians began improving their canal system before World War II, resumed work on it again in 1959. They have dredged rivers, built dozens of locks and reservoirs. The heart of the waterway is a 224-mile stretch in western Russia, where they replaced 39 antique locks with seven modern ones twice the size of those in the huge Volga-Don Canal, which hooks the whole system into the Black Sea. The system so far will take only shallow-draft ships, and the Russians insist that anyone who wants to ship over it do so in Russian or satellite ships. With powerful icebreakers they hope to keep traffic open even in winter.

Exuberant citizens of Moscow--which is 400 miles inland but tied into the waterway by a newly widened spur --are already touting their city as a major seaport. They have dubbed it "the Port of the Five Seas," because it is now tied up with the Baltic, the Black, White, Azov and Caspian.

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