Sunken towns of the Volga revive memories of Stalinist-era Russia

Vassily Kovalkov returns from the balcony to his cluttered sitting room clutching a heavy, round object. “This is the brick of my birth,” he says triumphantly. The lump of eroded earth, which still bears the trademark of its manufacturer, is no ordinary breeze block but a piece of Mologa, engulfed by the rising waters. This treasure was rescued from the icy depths of the reservoir overlooked by Rybinsk, one of the oldest towns built by the Slavs on the banks of the Volga, some 300km north-east of Moscow, in Yaroslavl oblast or region.

Flooded in 1940 on Stalin’s orders to make way for a hydroelectric dam, Mologa has become the focus of a cult, as the water level has gradually dropped in recent years revealing various remains. Last summer a prankster posted a retouched photograph on Facebook showing the gilded onion dome of a church poking its head above the waterline, prompting new excitement. “Forty journalists came to see, and before them the Washington Post! Usually we only get the folk from Rybinsk and Yaroslav,” says Valentin Blatov, 76, the head of a small club representing former Mologa residents.

In fact, very little is left of the small town that once stood at the point where the eponymous river joined the Volga. It is now covered by three metres of water, in the company of 700 nearby hamlets. The last remaining structure collapsed in 1997. Most of the others, seen on snaps wrongly attributed to Mologa, actually feature parts of Kalyazin, near Tver. But its former inhabitants are campaigning to resurrect at least the memory of this Russian Atlantis, obliterated by the weight of Stalinist terror and the cover-ups of the Soviet era. Only a handful of people remain, some extremely old, to give a firsthand account of their personal tragedy. “When we left, me and my friend, people would keep asking where we came from. We had a lovely tan because of all the swimming we did. Yes, we actually knew how to swim,” Maria Ivanova says with incredible energy. Born on 1 January 1921, she was 18 when the 150,000 people living in the area due to be flooded were forcibly evacuated. Her identity papers cite a birthplace, “Mologa district”, which no longer exists.

Thanks to these survivors and their descendants, just typing Mologa into a search engine prompts Google Maps to display a little orange beacon ... in the middle of an expanse of open water, 22km from the shore at Rybinsk. The massive dam, entirely built of stone, is still there, between the reservoir and the Volga, which it overlooks. “Before 2000 I knew nothing at all about this story; my father never mentioned it to me, in either negative or positive terms. It would have cast a shadow on the Communist party,” Blatov admits. He himself seems like a throwback to another era, with his gold-capped teeth and his habit of gaily making toasts, alternating brandy and tea. “The aim at that time was electricity and transport, which is understandable, but it could have been done in a way that was less harsh for local people.” The stone-walled homes were demolished, the Epiphany cathedral, similar to the one in Moscow dedicated to Christ the Saviour, was blown up using explosives, prior to the final evacuation, on 14 April 1941, when the water started swallowing everything up. The wooden houses, at least the ones that could be transported, were dismantled and shipped down the Volga, then rebuilt at Rybinsk with help from gulag inmates working on the dam.

Nikolai Novotelnov, 90, still lives in one of them, perched at an odd angle on the north bank of Rybinsk. Inside, the numbers cut into each log to assist reconstruction are still visible. The roof was redone. Most of the former Mologa residents settled on a strip of land about 15km long. Then no more was said. “There wasn’t much we could say at that time about a decision taken by central government,” Novotelnov says with a sigh, sifting through faded snapshots in a battered cardboard box, which shows its age. “Look, that was the headquarters of the NKVD [the secret police, forerunner of the KGB], and here is the monastery, which had already lost its crosses, taken down by the Soviets. And here is the big square where I used to play the balalaika with my brother.” He remembers everything, staying in shape by getting up at 5am to tend his vegetable garden, as was customary in Mologa. “Those days were the happiest time of my life,” he recalls. “It was never the same after that.”

The remaining survivors all have their memories and treasures. In addition to his “brick”, Kovalkov, 80, collects rusty nails and tiny objects picked up when the water level drops a little. With some of his fellows he takes part in a commemoration ceremony every summer, when they all pile into a boat and sail out towards Mologa. Orphaned when he was very young, Kovalkov assures us that he knows the exact position of his mother’s grave in the flooded cemetery. He once probed the whole area with a boat hook.

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The area was rich farmland and its sudden disappearance adds to the aura surrounding the town. But the good times soon turned sour, even before the flood. “In 1936 my father wanted to report financial misdealings at his workplace,” Kovalkov explains. “He was accused of trying to harm the Stakhanovites [champion workers] and sentenced to six years at Magadan, a terrible work camp in the [Soviet] far east, where thousands of deportees lost their lives. He died before his release.” Ivanova was 10 when her father, categorised as a kulak, or land-owning peasant, was sent to Arkhangelsk in the far north. The other families did not fare much better. In 1941, when the flooding started, the men left to fight in the war and the women remained behind, on their own with the children, in damp, badly rebuilt homes. Some say, citing a report by an NKVD officer, that 290 people refused to leave and were drowned by the rising tide. The surviving residents dismiss this tale. “The water did not rise that suddenly,” they say.

The memory of being uprooted still haunts these people 70 years after the event, but Mologa is also emblematic of the complex relation Russians have with their history. Not one of the survivors – who have since become parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents – feels able to criticise the regime that crushed them. “Most of them accept this event, with the loss of their land, as a necessary sacrifice to save their country, supply Moscow with electricity and win the war,” says Anatoli Klopov, the youthful curator of the Mologa museum. It was founded, in a bell tower, by Nikolai Alexeev, whose family came from Mologa, to show off his personal records. Some say that flooding the area was a necessary evil because in those days the Volga was the main means of transport and there were times, in the summer, when the water level fell too low for barges to get through.

Constantly revisited, reframed by propaganda, dismissed as a source of shame or partly rehabilitated, the past is like some black hole. “It was decided that everything that existed before the 1917 revolution was bad. It was the same in 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared, the same blank sheet of paper: everything that came before was bad. We are the only country in the world to refute our very painful history in this way,” Novotelnov says. Nor is the present any easier. “Nothing surprises me any longer,” he grumbles. “We don’t even know how to grow our own food and we reject foreign goods.”

Ivanova and her daughter, aged 62, do their best to cling to a particular period. “The best time was certainly under Brezhnev,” her daughter suddenly says. “The state took care of everything: healthcare, schooling, flats, summer holiday camps. The only drawback was there wasn’t much in the shops ...” There is overall agreement that the worst part was in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR. “We’re not ashamed of Putin, but Yeltsin was a different matter.”

In an attempt to keep track of the past the people of Mologa have all drawn up their family tree. Having lost his parents at an early age and lacking the narrative they might have provided, Kovalkov spends his time reading about reservoirs and flooded towns. One of them is an account by a former resident, Guennadi Kersakov, of the disappearance of Mologa and the flight of its inhabitants. “Nowadays we would call it a humanitarian disaster,” the author wrote. As we are leaving, a dewy-eyed Kovalkov repeats several times: “I apologise if I’ve said anything negative.” In Russia the past may surface but revealing it is a painful process.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde