49 Fun Facts About Volga River

Which river is Europe's second longest, after the Volga?

The Danube: since a canal joined it to the Main in 1992, river traffic can cross Europe from the North Sea to the Black Sea.

Which revolutionary was born in the Volga city of Simbirsk, renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour in 1924?

Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ulyanov in Simbirsk in 1870, and by a twist of history so was Alexander Kerensky, the head of government he overthrew in 1917.

Which American river is slightly longer than the 3,500-km Volga?

Mississippi: unlike it, the Volga never reaches an ocean, so ships from its ports get to the open sea only through canals.

What affectionate name do Russian folklore and literature give the Volga?

Mother Volga: in a much-loved Russian song the Cossack rebel Stenka Razin calls the river his dear mother as he hurls his captive princess into it, a gift to end the grumbling among his men.

The name Volga is thought to derive from a Proto-Slavic word meaning what?

Wetness: Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary ties Volga to a Slavic root for damp that survives in Russian vlaga, 'moisture', and rejects an older idea that the name came from a Finnish word for 'white'.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, which people sailed down the Volga to sell furs and slaves for Arab silver?

The Vikings: an envoy sent from Baghdad in 921, Ibn Fadlan, met traders called Rus on the Volga, and his eyewitness account is usually read as a portrait of them.

Which great Russian novelist studied at Kazan University on the Volga in the 1840s but left without a degree?

Leo Tolstoy enrolled in 1844 to study Oriental languages, switched to law, then quit mid-course and went home to his estate, two decades before he wrote War and Peace.

Which steppe people, whose rulers reportedly adopted Judaism, held the lower Volga from a capital called Atil?

The Khazars held the Volga's mouth for some two centuries, until Svyatoslav of Kiev crushed their power in the 960s and their capital was destroyed.

In which upland area of north-western Russia does the Volga rise?

The Valdai Hills: the Western Dvina rises in the same hills, and in the Middle Ages boats were carried overland there from one river system to the next.

How does the water the Volga pours into the Caspian Sea mainly leave it?

By evaporating: the Caspian has no outlet, so evaporation is its only natural outflow, and its level rises and falls with what the Volga, about 80% of its inflow, brings down.

Kazan, where the Volga turns south, is the capital of which Russian republic?

Tatarstan: Kazan's kremlin holds the Kul Sharif mosque, opened in 2005 to replace one destroyed when Russian forces stormed the city in 1552.

Kalmykia, beside the lower Volga, is the only region in Europe where which religion predominates?

Buddhism: the Kalmyks' Mongol ancestors migrated west to the lower Volga in the 17th century and brought their Tibetan Buddhist faith with them.

What supplies about 60% of the Volga's annual flow?

Melting snow feeds about 60% of the Volga's flow, with groundwater adding 30% and rain 10%, which is why the untamed river rose in great spring floods.

The nature reserve protecting the Volga Delta is named after which nearby city?

Astrakhan: the old city was the capital of a khanate until Russia captured it in 1556, and two years later it was moved to its present site on islands in the river.

The Volga Delta is best known for which fish?

Sturgeon: their roe is sold as caviar, the costliest of it from the giant beluga, which is why the delta's main city grew into a caviar-packing centre.

At a monastery in the Volga city of Kostroma in 1613, Michael accepted the throne and founded which dynasty?

The Romanovs: envoys found 16-year-old Michael sheltering in Kostroma's Ipatiev Monastery, and he took the crown with great reluctance; his family then ruled until 1917.

Which of these cities lies off the Volga itself but inside its drainage basin?

Moscow: its own river drains through the Oka into the Volga, and since 1937 a canal dug by Gulag prisoners has linked the capital directly to the upper river.

Which reservoir on the middle Volga is Europe's largest by surface area?

Kuybyshev Reservoir: so wide that locals call it a sea, it still carries the Soviet-era name of the nearby city of Samara, which dropped the name in 1991.

Tolyatti, a Volga city rebuilt after a reservoir drowned old Stavropol, makes which car brand?

Lada: the plant went up in the late 1960s with Fiat's help, and the rebuilt city was renamed after the Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti.

Which historic town was completely submerged to create the Rybinsk Reservoir?

Mologa: the town was given up for hydroelectric power, and the lake that began to cover it in 1941 was at the time the largest man-made body of water on Earth.

At Kalyazin, what still rises from the Volga where a reservoir drowned the old town?

A bell tower: the cathedral beside it was flooded and taken down when the Uglich dam was built around 1940, but the 74-metre belfry was left standing and is now the town's main landmark.

The Volga–Don Canal lets Volga shipping reach the oceans by entering which sea first?

Sea of Azov: the Don empties into it, and from there ships pass through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, a southern outlet the landlocked Volga basin lacked until the canal opened in 1952.

Which empire tried, and failed, to dig a Volga–Don canal in 1569?

The Ottomans drew up the canal plan in Constantinople and sent a large army north in 1569, but the work was abandoned and the campaign ended in a costly retreat.

Which tsar ordered the first Russian attempts to dig a canal between the Volga and the Don?

Peter the Great put an English engineer, Captain Perry, in charge of a short cut between two tributaries, but the work was abandoned and the rivers were not joined until 1952.

Which people founded the medieval state that flourished where the Kama joins the Volga?

The Bulgars: this branch settled on the Volga and adopted Islam about 922, while their kin moved to the Balkans and gave Bulgaria its name.

Which tsar captured Kazan in 1552, bringing the middle Volga under Russian rule?

Ivan the Terrible took the city after a long siege and marked the victory by building St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square.

The Chuvash of the middle Volga speak the last surviving language of an early branch of which family?

Turkic: Chuvash split away so early that speakers of Turkish or Kazakh cannot follow it, and it is the only living member of the family's Oghur branch.

The Mongols founded which state in the lower reaches of the Volga?

The Golden Horde: when it broke up in the 15th century, khanates based on Volga cities such as Kazan took its place, and Russia conquered them a century later.

The Volga saloon car came from a Nizhny Novgorod plant set up around 1930 with help from which American carmaker?

Ford: under a 1929 deal it sent engineers to help set up the plant, and the factory's first passenger car was a near-copy of the Model A.

Which empress issued the 1763 manifesto that brought German settlers to the Volga?

Catherine the Great promised the settlers free land, freedom of worship, thirty years without taxes and exemption from military service, privileges that later tsars took away.

Volga Germans were deported east in 1941, weeks after which event?

Operation Barbarossa: Germany invaded in June 1941, a decree of 28 August ordered the Volga Germans sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan, and their autonomous republic was abolished.

Many Volga Germans emigrated to the US, Canada and which two South American countries?

Brazil and Argentina: the emigration began after 1874, when the last of the privileges promised to the colonists, including exemption from military service, were withdrawn.

The city on the Volga's great bend was known by what name from 1925 to 1961?

Stalingrad: the old Tsaritsyn was renamed in 1925 because Stalin had helped organise its defence in the Civil War, and it became Volgograd in 1961, eight years after his death.

The Motherland Calls, the 85-metre statue above the Volga, raises what in her right hand?

A sword: the first blade, faced with titanium, swayed so much in the wind that in 1972 it was replaced with a steel one pierced with openings to let the gusts through.

Germany's 1942 offensive toward the Volga was ultimately aimed at the oil fields of which Soviet city?

Baku: the German armies never reached it, and the force sent to the Volga to guard their flank was cut off and destroyed that winter.

The Song of the Volga Boatmen was sung by which workers?

Barge-haulers, called burlaks in Russian, dragged cargo boats upstream from the bank, a trade that dwindled in the late 1800s as steam took the freight, on the river and on the new railways.

Which future cosmonaut learned to fly at a club in the Volga city of Saratov while studying at its technical school?

Yuri Gagarin joined the flying club while at Saratov's industrial college, and in 1961 his single orbit ended with a parachute landing back in the Saratov region, near Engels.

Whose jazz arrangement of the Song of the Volga Boatmen hit No. 1 in the US in 1941?

Glenn Miller's wordless swing version reached No. 1 in March 1941, helped by a radio boycott of ASCAP's catalogue that sent stations looking for old tunes nobody owned.

Nizhny Novgorod, on the Volga, was renamed from 1932 to 1990 after which writer born there?

Maxim Gorky: the city that carried his pen name was closed to foreigners, which is why the physicist Andrei Sakharov was exiled there in 1980.

Which Russian painter made his name in 1873 with a canvas of labourers toiling on the bank of the Volga?

Ilya Repin based it on scenes he saw while touring the river in 1870, and the picture that launched his career went to one of the tsar's own sons, a grand duke.

Stravinsky orchestrated the Song of the Volga Boatmen in 1917 to replace which piece at a Diaghilev concert?

God Save the Tsar: Nicholas II had abdicated weeks earlier, so the imperial anthem could no longer open the Ballets Russes evening in Rome, and the folk song took its place.

The waterway north from the Volga through Lakes Onega and Ladoga reaches the sea at which city?

Saint Petersburg: the then capital needed river transport from the Russian interior, so a canal route opened in 1810; rebuilt by 1964, it now takes 5,000-ton ships where boats of 600 tons once passed.

Which 2001 war film begins with Soviet recruits being ferried across the Volga under German fire?

Enemy at the Gates: Jude Law plays Vasily Zaitsev, a real Red Army sniper, and the film builds his story into a duel with a German marksman sent to hunt him.

Which 2019 video game features the Volga as one of its main levels?

Metro Exodus: the survivors escape aboard a steam locomotive, the Aurora, and an early stop is a Volga controlled by a cult that has turned against all technology.

The Soviet Raketa, launched on the Volga in 1957, was which fast type of passenger boat?

A hydrofoil: lifted on underwater wings, it cruised at about 60 km/h, and the Soviet Union went on to export the type across Europe, to both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Which bombed English city formed a wartime bond with Volgograd that became a model for twin towns?

Coventry: blitzed in 1940, the city sent a telegram of solidarity to the Volga's defenders in 1942, and the link that followed helped set the pattern for twinning after the war.

Which team knocked the holders, Germany, out of the 2018 World Cup in the Volga city of Kazan?

South Korea won 2–0 with two goals in stoppage time, and Germany went out in the first round for the first time since 1938.

Afanasy Nikitin, a 15th-century merchant from the Volga city of Tver, wrote an early European account of which country?

India: he set off down the Volga meaning to trade around the Caspian, was robbed on the way, and pressed on through Persia to India, where he stayed almost three years.

Which Bolshevik leader rushed to the Volga front in his armoured train in 1918 as the Reds fought to retake Kazan?

Leon Trotsky had deserters shot at Sviyazhsk after a regiment fled its post, by his own account its commander and commissar among them, and within weeks the Reds had retaken Kazan.