The Alexander Nevsky is a dingy time machine that bears 196 passengers – war veterans bound for the city formerly known as Stalingrad side by side with boozy weekenders – down the Volga river like a floating Soviet sanatorium.



It was built in East Germany in 1957 by the shipbuilders of Wismar, who sent 49 comfort-class riverboats to their new brothers across the Soviet bloc.

Not much on board has changed since.

Crooners belt out Soviet ballads and pensioners sun themselves on flimsy deckchairs. The cheaper cabins below deck show their years, smelling of musk and occasionally varnish, with chipped, frosted glass on the cabin doors. When the nights are cold, passengers wrapped in woollen blankets walk in circles from bow to stern to bow again, as barges with salt and timber pass in the dark.



Onboard the Alexander Nevsky riverboat as it makes its way along the Volga.



The Volga has always drawn artists, writers and explorers. Tolstoy wrote fairytales. Chekhov took a honeymoon cruise

“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.

Many of its sister ships have long since been retired, but each summer the Nevsky plies the 2,193 miles of the great river. Crooked like an elbow, the Volga passes from the Valdai hills near Moscow down to Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea.

Four of the 11 host cities for this summer’s World Cup sit on this river. 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.

Viktor Chekhovskikh, captain of the Alexander Nevsky, in his cabin.



Nizhny Novgorod, once called Gorky and closed to foreigners, and the second world war “hero city” of Volgograd – formerly Stalingrad – will host England matches. Games will also be played in the Tatar capital of Kazan and in Samara, the aeronautics hub that produced jet fighters and space rockets.

Russia’s answer to the Mississippi, the Volga ties them all together – a thread through the Povolzhye region that for decades has drawn artists and explorers in search of an authentic Russia among its farmers and barge-haulers. 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. Moscow and St Petersburg have embraced globalised tastes and careful urban planning, but what of Russia’s other cities – the heartland?

“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.



The Volga was old Rus’s frontier with the Tatar east. Centuries later, the Soviets harnessed the river for the country’s postwar industrialisation through a cascade of dams. Tolstoy wrote fairytales about the river, and Chekhov took a river cruise for his honeymoon.



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. In the end, Roth also jumped ship and joined barge haulers on a ferry instead.



I too was sailing in coach, on the lower deck, more or less the lowest class there is. The ship was due to arrive on Victory Day, which commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany.



Kazan: the view from Muslim Russia

We set sail from Kazan at dusk, the ship’s loudspeakers playing Farewell of Slavyanka, a military march. In the distance, the white and azure minarets of the Qol Sharif mosque jumped out of the gloom.

The tug-of-war over religious and ethnic identity continues in Kazan to this day

More than 500 years ago, Kazan was the capital of a Muslim khanate that rivalled Moscow for influence. Anthony Jenkinson, the explorer and first English envoy to Russia, arrived in the city just six years after it had been conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, bearing letters of introduction from the tsar.

“It hath been a city of great wealth and riches, and being in the hands of the Tartars it was a kingdom of itself, and did more vex the Russes in their wars, then any other nation,” he wrote to the Muscovy Company, “but [six] years past this Emperor of Russia conquered it, and took the king captive, who being but young is now baptised …”

The tug-of-war over religious and ethnic identity continues in Kazan to this day. The state promotes an official, loyalist Islam, watched over by a religious committee. Moscow has pushed Kazan to scale back Tatar-language classes in school, which causes the local activists to bristle, though they carefully avoid open conflict.

“It isn’t about plotting a course against Russia, but fighting against inertia, fighting for our culture as an equal,” said Rozalina Shageeva, an art historian and poet who writes in Russian and Tatar. “Without our language, who are we as a people?”

Rozalina Shageeva in front of the Qol Sharif mosque.



The neighbourhood of Old-Tatar Sloboda, where Tatars settled in the 16th century after being expelled from the inner city, is more museum than living city these days. At its centre is the Märcani mosque, which has benefited from the state’s largesse ever since Catherine the Great approved its construction in 1766, breaking two centuries of tradition. It was the city’s first stone mosque, and the only one to remain open under the Soviet Union.

The imam, Mansur Hazrat Dzhalyaletdin, and I strolled through the cavernous mosque – the banquet halls, the kindergarten where children recite Qur’an verses from memory, the bridal shop with modest dresses decorated with lace flowers. A vacation brochure for nearby Kazan Halal City includes an Islamic college, a travel agency, a hotel complex, a souvenir shop and an apiary in the forest.

The Märcani mosque is at the heart of Old-Tatar Sloboda neighbourhoood in Kazan.



For Dzhalyaletdin, the link between religion and the state is innate – a partnership illustrated by the pictures of Vladimir Putin and other officials on his sitting room wall.

“Yes, the constitution says that religion is separate from the state, but our people are believers,” he said. During communism, he said, the people had faith in the party. When that disappeared, their faith brought them to the mosques. “How can you separate the people from their government? It’s forbidden.”

Across town, the Mirgaziyan mosque has a more bitter history: it was seized by police in 2013 after extremism charges were brought against a former imam.

The mosque was built from a Soviet boiler room and its minaret was fashioned from a 72ft brick chimney. Its founder, Mirgaziyan Salavatov, chose the site after his dead wife appeared to him in a dream and repeated “111” until he awoke. He interpreted that as the street address where he should establish the mosque, which he called Al-Ikhlas, or The Purity. It opened in 2004.

The Märcani was the city’s first stone mosque and the only one to remain open under the Soviet Union.



The current imam, Azgar Hazrat Valiullin, grew up poor in rural Tatarstan, and had always worked with his hands.

He was the one who repaired the minaret, climbing the 22 metres and cementing down the loose bricks in two rows. He was there one Friday in 2006 when Salavatov came to him and asked him to “safeguard the mosque”. The next day, he said, Salavatov died of a stroke.

In 2013, control of the mosque was transferred to the state. Law enforcement accused a dozen congregants of ties to Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a Sunni political movement that has called for an Islamic caliphate. The movement is banned in Russia. Its supporters say they are peaceful.

The mosque was condemned as unsafe and the brick minaret torn down. It was rebuilt under a different name.

Valiullin, who has a white tufted goatee and wears a velvet-blue taqiyah, shakes his head when he recalls the arrests. He denies links to the banned movement, and says he believes some of the young men were mistreated in prison.

As to the minaret, he sighed, “They tore it down for nothing.”

Samara: can a closed city open up?

The Alexander Nevsky sailed through the night and arrived at the dam by Zhiguli the next day. It is one of eight hydroelectric works in the Volga cascade systems, which stretch from the city of Dubna, north of Moscow, all the way down to Volgograd. For a few years after 1961, the Volga hydroelectric station was the largest in the world.

In Samara’s heyday, ​the city’s growth was compared to Chicago's

The journalist Bruce Chatwin, who sailed down the river with German veterans and war widows in 1982 for the Observer, wrote that the dams had “turned this Mother-of-all-the-Rivers into a chain of sluggish inland seas the colour of molasses”.

But inside the great locks, there is a majestic moment as the metal doors part to reveal hills dotted with fir and pine or a fading riverside village, like a snapshot framed in rust. On one of the lock walls someone has etched: “We won’t forget you. Petya Savkin ...” There’s more written but it has been erased by the daily rise and fall of the waters.

Yelena Sedykh, 62, pointed toward the dacha in a sunlit valley just across the Volga from Samara. It brought up memories of her son, she said, who died a decade earlier of cancer. She prefers to spend weekends at the dacha with her husband and daughter now, but decided on a weekend trip just to “get away from everything”.

Yelena Sedykh was taking a trip alone on the Alexander Nevsky “to get away from everything”.



In Samara’s heyday, which passed a century ago, local merchants made it rich on the city’s grain commodity exchange and the city’s growth rate was compared to Chicago’s. The newly rich built themselves ornate wooden houses and art nouveau mansions with asymmetrical facades and butterfly ornaments, a break from the concrete monotony in most post-Soviet cities. During the second world war, Samara – then known as Kuybishev after a Soviet revolutionary – briefly hosted the Soviet government and foreign embassies as the alternate capital to Moscow. After the war, the city closed itself off to foreigners as a base for aerospace production.

The city has about 140 blocks downtown with historical wooden or wood-and-brick buildings, said Andrey Kotchetkov, a local journalist and activist. As interest from developers for valuable downtown real estate has increased, so have grassroots attempts to stop the wooden houses from being condemned or burned to the ground in arson attacks.

Children made the most of a chance to examine military tanks in Samara ahead of the annual Victory Day parade.



“People don’t understand what a valuable thing it is,” Kotchetkov said during a tour through the city. “They talk about Europe but don’t realize what they have around them.”

Kotchetkov founded the Tom Sawyer Fest, a yearly volunteer festival to restore blighted houses. It’s only in its fourth year, but the movement has snowballed into prominence. One rule? Politicians can’t use it as a photo op.

That evening the sun set over the Volga and turned the sky a shimmering purple. Kuybishev Street, the city’s main avenue, has been touched up, while the roads through the less scenic manufacturing zone will be closed for the World Cup.

Samara is unusual for a Volga city for not having a bridge to the other side, and the island across the river is mostly pristine.

It takes three hours to reach the other side by car. At the Holy Mother of God of Kazan monastery, just across the river, we were met by a surly monk. “I’m waiting for the pindosy [an unkind term for Americans],” he said.

The Holy Mother of God of Kazan monastery was founded in 2006 near a waterfront village.



Each monk is assigned work duties. Dmitry Voskresensky, dour but with a good sense of humour, was assigned to breed sturgeon.

“When the father blessed me he said: ‘Dmitry, your job is the fish,’” Voskresensky recalled. “I had no idea what he was talking about.”

Born in the Urals, Voskresensky served his military service in missile silos north of the Arctic Circle before entering the monkhood. Asked why he’d come, he said: “That’s between me and the father.”

The monastery, founded in 2006 near a waterfront village, has a lax atmosphere, he said, and should be walled off from the outside world.

Villagers can appear uninvited. “Sometimes without clothes on,” he added.

Monks inspecting water reservoirs where sturgeon, beluga and starlet are being bred.



In a storeroom, Voskresensky keep tubs full of Russian sturgeon, beluga and starlet. It’s still a small operation, but he has built it from scratch, learning through trial and error to engineer pumping systems and the basics of marine biology with the goal of farming meat and roe. The fish farm is just starting to become self-sufficient and yield caviar, he said. The next step is to scale it up exponentially.

The Volga once teemed with sturgeon, but the cascade of dams built by the Soviets blocked off their traditional spawning grounds. The World Wildlife Federation estimated that 85% of their spawning grounds had “completely lost their value”. Pollution and poaching have also depleted stocks.

The famous fish market at Mezhdurechensk.



Voskresensky said his ultimate goal is to repopulate the Volga. With reasonable yearly growth, he estimates, that will take something like 500 years.

On the road back we drop into Mezhdurechensk, a roadside town on an isthmus between the Volga and Usa rivers that hosts a well-known fish market, where women hawk dried perch, grayling, bream and burbot. The fattier fish come from the slow-moving Usa, they say, the ones with more muscle from the Volga.

A fisherman’s daughter in her 20s named Lena, her black hair combed forward in a fringe, said the fishermen pay in product for the fishmongers to sell their goods. They would be down in the waterfront dugouts, she said, but it was spring and they are banned from fishing during the spawning period. Only commercial boats like the Nevsky can sail the Volga at this time of year.



Volgograd: nostalgia for Stalin grows

The streets were empty in Volgograd the morning of the Victory Day parade.

It had been warmer on board the previous night as the ship made its final leg down to Volgograd. The bar was doing brisk business. Two teenage boys struck up a Stevie Wonder tune on guitar and a drunk businessman from Moscow sauntered up. “I want to give you money,” he said, holding out £25 in rubles. The singer, the slighter of the two boys, accepted it. The other looked on in horror.

For six days ​a year it is legally permissible ​​to call Volgograd by its wartime name, Stalingrad

Volgograd itself is a dusty city in the great steppe. It stretches for miles like a banana around the bended Volga. At nearly any point in the city, it is difficult to forget its wartime legacy: 1.9 million were killed, wounded or captured in the bloodiest battle of all time.

At a walkthrough of the city’s new stadium for next month’s World Cup, construction director Sergei Kamin said builders had found the remains of 386 shells and two Soviet soldiers on the building site.

The Volgograd Arena was built for next month’s football World Cup.



The parade in Volgograd turned out to be more reserved than Moscow’s. No intercontinental ballistic missiles made an appearance on the square, and the only relish came from an announcer rolling his r’s endlessly as he introduced the Tornado multiple rocket launcher, which passed the Intourist Hotel on to the Square of the Fallen Fighters.

The real display came later, as tens of thousands of people made the pilgrimage up the Mamayev Kurgan hill to the Motherland Calls statue, which stands monumental at 280ft tall. The hill’s steepness gave the impression that the procession was balanced on a ridge-top. Ushers kept errant children off the grass, part of a mass grave of soldiers who died on the hill.

The ‘Immortal Regiment’ march up Mamayev Kurgan hill to a Victory Day ceremony at the Motherland Calls statue.



“The atmosphere was eerie, and religious: all too easy to scoff at; but the crowds, with their rapt and reverential expressions, were no scoffing matter,” Chatwin wrote of the climb in 1982.

Little has changed today.

Valeria Petrovna, 68, who did not give a last name, climbs the hill each year with a religious procession to honour her father. He survived the battle but was never quite himself again, and withdrew in his final years. “My mother says he died here,” she said. “But I know that he was alive … with the understanding of the cruelty a people can inflict on another.”

To reach Vladimir Kharchenko’s experimental motorbike workshop, meanwhile, you have to drive north past the old T-34 factory and across the great Volgograd dam into a quiet neighbourhood of factories.

There, if you’re lucky, he’ll bring out his prized motorcycle and even take a spin around the block, weaving in and out of traffic over potholed roads. It’s the same one he custom-made for the Surgeon, a celebrity motorcycle-gang leader who has pledged fealty to Vladimir Putin and rode the motorcycle in the annexed city of Sevastopol in 2015.

The bike’s name? The Stalinist. It’s written right on the engine.

Vladimir Kharchenko named his prized motorcycle The Stalinist.



In his office, Kharchenko sat under a portrait of Stalin that he was told is an original. “This country was self-sufficient under Stalin, we were independent,” he said. Asked about those killed and repressed, he said western countries are no better. “What did Stalin want for his country? The rise of the country. Who ended up in the gulag? People who opposed that.”

For six days a year it is legally permissible to call Volgograd by its wartime name, Stalingrad. Nostalgia for Stalin’s name is also growing. The Pew Research Center found last year that 58% of Russian adults see Stalin’s role in history as positive.

“These days you need to write bad things about Stalin, you need to write bad things about Putin, and show that in Europe,” he told a reporter. “But I think as long as things get worse with the United States, you’re going to see Stalin become more popular.”

Valeria Petrovna, the woman on the hill, had a different opinion. “I think we’ve had enough of that time in general, and I don’t see much reason to go back,” she said, and excused herself to walk further up the hill.

The Nevsky will take nearly three days straight back upstream to Kazan, with just five hours stop in Samara for passengers to stretch their legs. Chekhovskikh, the captain, says the longest journeys down the Volga can take three weeks, with some passengers opting to stay on the boat the whole time rather than tour the cities they pass.

On the back deck one evening, two middle-aged couples were deep in their cups discussing the intricacies of Islam – and particularly circumcision. Mikhail, 47, owns a handful of garages in Samara and has taken a half-dozen Volga cruises, both toward Moscow and Astrakhan. “I never travel to Europe, barely to Moscow if I can avoid it,” he declared proudly.

Then he swept his hand across the water and praised the Volga, and the city of Kazan.

“There’s really nowhere else in Russia like it. Of course we’re different from them in some ways, this whole thing with religion – but can you really visit that city and not be proud of the history and of the fate that brought you together?”



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