We set sail from Kazan at dusk, the ship’s loudspeakers playing Farewell of Slavyanka, a military march. The ship was due to arrive on Victory Day, which commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany. I too was sailing in coach, on the lower deck, more or less the lowest class there is. In the end, Roth also jumped ship and joined barge haulers on a ferry instead. Joseph Roth, the Austrian-Jewish novelist and journalist, observed in 1926 how the farmers who stormed first class after the Bolshevik revolution found it awkward and eventually returned to steerage by choice.
Tolstoy wrote fairytales about the river, and Chekhov took a river cruise for his honeymoon. Centuries later, the Soviets harnessed the river for the country’s postwar industrialisation through a cascade of dams. The Volga was old Rus’s frontier with the Tatar east. “Every Russian man should sail the Volga at least once in his life,” Margarita Petrovna, a prim blockade survivor in a cardigan, said over a dinner of spaghetti and stewed beef in the Nevsky’s dining hall. Moscow and St Petersburg have embraced globalised tastes and careful urban planning, but what of Russia’s other cities – the heartland? Last month it drew myself and the photographer Dmitri Beliakov, who joined me on a boat down the river, in pursuit of a similar goal. Russia’s answer to the Mississippi, the Volga ties them all together – a thread through the P ovolzhye region that for decades has drawn artists and explorers in search of an authentic Russia among its farmers and barge-haulers. For many foreigners, the world’s biggest football event will also mark their first interaction with these diverse Volga cities, far from the touristy streets of Moscow and St Petersburg. Crooked like an elbow, the Volga passes from the Valdai hills near Moscow down to Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea.įour of the 11 host cities for this summer’s World Cup sit on this river. Many of its sister ships have long since been retired, but each summer the Nevsky plies the 2,193 miles of the great river. “Not everyone can handle travel like this in a closed space,” said the ship’s captain Viktor Chekhovskikh, who has helmed Volga riverboats for 25 years, and who passes spare hours in his private cabin building custom model ships – of Imperial Russian Navy vessels, or the tankers he sailed on in the Black Sea in his youth. The Volga has always drawn artists, writers and explorers. Onboard the Alexander Nevsky riverboat as it makes its way along the Volga.
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