Volga–Don Canal

An Iranian Qadir light submarine and a hovercraft in Persian Gulf waters in late November, 2012.

Azerbaijan wants to buy a submarine or two. Azerbaijan? Isn't that one of those land locked countries over in Stan-land in Central Asia? Well, yes and no. It does have some water front property, but it's on the Caspian Sea, which everyone knows is just a big lake. Okay, it's a really big lake: 700 miles North to South, 200 miles East to West. It is five times as big (in area) as Lake Superior. Since they do have some waterfront, I can see them wanting to have some kind of Navy, but supposing they did buy a sub, how the devil would you get it delivered? The Caspian Sea is a closed system, it doesn't connect to any oceans. Well, yes and no. Paraphrasing Wikipedia:

Lenin Volga–Don Shipping Canal is a  canal which connects the Volga River and the Don River at their closest points. Opened in 1952, the length of the waterway is 63 miles.
The canal forms a part of the Unified Deep Water System of European Russia. Together with the lower Volga and the lower Don, the Volga–Don Canal provides the most direct navigable connection between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Azov, and thus the world's oceans.
...
The actual construction of today's Volga–Don Canal began prior to WW2, which would interrupt the process. From 1948 to 1952, construction was completed; navigation was opened 1 June 1952. The canal and its facilities were predominantly built by prisoners detained in several specially organized  corrective labor camps. In 1952 the number of convicts employed in construction topped 100,000.

I sometimes forget the scale of the map I see using Google Maps. The section of the Volga River below Volgograd looks like a thin little line when in fact it is a half mile wide channel.
    As long as you are on good terms with Turkey and Russia, you can get big ships, including submarines, from the world's oceans into the Caspian Sea.
    This is the same part of the world where Peter the Great was fighting the Turks.

Kompozitor Rakhmaninov

Kompozitor Rakhmaninov at the Port Olya in Astrakhan Oblast, Russia

Came across this image and wondered if Google could place it, and you can see that it did. Port Olya is at the head of Reka Bakhtemir, a long channel that extends a long way into the Caspian Sea, kind of like the way the Mississippi River delta extends in the Gulf of Mexico, er, America.

Reka Bakhtemir is the westernmost primary distributary of the Volga River delta in the Astrakhan Oblast of Russia. Spanning a length of about 47 miles, it funnels the majority of commercial shipping traffic from the Volga into the Caspian Sea.

Volga River is the principal waterway of western Russia and the historic cradle of the Russian state. Its basin contains almost half of the entire population of the Russian Republic. Starting northwest of Moscow, the Volga discharges into the Caspian Sea, some 2,000 miles to the south. It drops from its source at 750 feet above sea level to its mouth at 90 feet below sea level.

Port Olya Reka Bakhtemir
Map is about 50 miles top to bottom

Information collected from Google, Brittanica & Wikipedia

Cruise Missile Fly-by

Fishman Captures 2 Cruise Missles while in Caspian Sea
JustSayYourLines

Good day to be out on the water.

Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea is about 700 miles north to south and roughly 200 miles across. This image is in the normal orientation, that is north is at the top and south is at the bottom. Going clockwise from the bottom it is bordered by Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhastan and Turkmenistan. I don't know who's shooting at who, but I'll bet Azerbaijan is involved. That's where Baku, the oil town, is.

Commies

Oil derricks in the Baku oil field in Azerbaijan in 1912. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich

Reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice DeKobra. It's 1927 and our man, Prince Séliman, has gone to meet with the Soviet leader in Berlin, one Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine, in an attempt to rescue Lady Diana's fortune in the form of 15,000 acres of oil fields from the Bosheviks. These two are in conversation and Varichkine lets loose with this:

"Really and truly, my friend, you are naive. Living is high since the War - but human life is cheap. When 20 million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, an abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our Revolution with a shepherd's staff in our hand and Pan's pipes to our lips? Believe me the world is always kind to successful tyrants and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the White Hope of the Western Liberals - he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us - Lenin and his following. With about 50 pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest Statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social Revolution conducted along legal lines is a toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic socialists nourished on noodles and black bread."

Add in the political infighting, treachery and murder going on in House of the Dragon and it is no wonder I am of a cynical frame of mind. 

Notes:

• Kerensky has a page in Wikipedia.
• Jelesniakof is mentioned in the book Lenin by Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov.
• Nikolay Krestinsky was the Soviet Ambassador to Germany from 1923 to 1930.
• Prince Séliman and Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine both seem to be entirely fictitious.

The oil fields in question are near Tbilisi, Georgia:

Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea

P. S. Totally unrelated to this post, but I just came across a story about a priest murdered in Derbent which is on the above map, in Russia, on the Caspian Sea just above the border with Azerbaijan.

Deserts

Dune | Official Main Trailer
Warner Bros. Pictures

I watched the movie Dune this week. This is the first of the pair of recent movies. I've read the book and I've seen an earlier movie version, but I'm watching this movie and it's nothing like I remember. Oh, I remember some of the characters, but I remember this story being a science fiction thriller, and this movie wasn't that at all. This time the thing that struck me is that the Atreides family packs up their entire company, including their army and their families and all their associated baggage and moves to the most hostile planet in the universe. Okay, on an absolute scale it's not all that hostile, it's got gravity similar to Earth and breathable air, but when you look at it using a human scale, the place is inimical to human life. It's covered with sand. The sun will fry you, the sandstorms will strip the flesh from your bones, and if that's not enough there are giant worms that will swallow you whole. Hell might be a better name for this planet than Arrakis. You would have to be a very loyal follower of the Emperor to accept an appointment to Dune.

But you think about it for a minute and Dune really sounds a whole lot Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Very hot, unpleasant places covered with sand, governed by tyrants, but we still have people willing to pack up everything and move there, and the reason is the same: money. On Dune, it's the spice. In the Mideast, it's oil.

Baiken Uranium Mine in Kazakhstan

Today I came across a story about how Kazakstan is a world leader in the uranium mining business. Above we have a picture of one of their uranium mines. Looks like a nice place with lots of green. On the edge of a desert, but still pretty nice. Then I look on the map:

Baiken Uranium Mine in Kazakhstan

and I see it's surrounded by a desert. Just how big is that desert? Big:

Baiken Uranium Mine in Kazakhstan

The area shown is about 900 miles across, so the mine is at the edge of the desert. The Caspian Sea is at the left hand side of the map and what used to be the Aral Sea is the greenish-white blob near the top center. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is about half way between the mine and the Aral Sea.

What I didn't find is whether the Kazatomprom (the Kazakhstan uranimum mining operation) is enriching uranium, which is what you need to do if you want to use the uranium for anything besides being dense. This led me to Wikipedia's page about Enriched uranium, which was a real eye-opener. Seems the whiz kids have busy cooking up any number of techniques for enriching uranium. There is gaseous diffusion that was used at Oak Ridge during WW2. Then we have second generation gaseous diffusion that uses high speed centrifuges that is many times more efficient. This is the one Iran was using when somebody (Israel?) hacked their centrifuges and caused them to speed up to the point where they destroyed themselves. And that's just the start. People are working on plethora of techniques involving chemistry, lasers and microstructures.

I've written several other posts about Dune over the years.

Roman Shumov

Roman is a historian who sometimes writes for RT. I read a couple of his stories today. I think they are well done. Now I'm wondering if there is American news site that is produced in Russian, and if there is, what does it sound like? Does it sound reasonable like RT does to me, or is it like the Washington Post and The New York Times, full of bullshit and lies? I suppose it matters which stories you choose to read. I don't read anything about Ukraine or Gaza because everyone writing about those two war zones has an ax to grind. Yes, wars are horrible, but that's the way of the world these days, there is always a war going on somewhere. I think it's because people just like to fight and there are 'leaders' who are willing to take advantage of this natural inclination and are able to organize those people into a coherent force.

Anyway, here's a couple of stories by Roman:

• Russian officer, Finnish hero, Hitler’s ally: The fascinating story of Carl Mannerheim - 80 years ago Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim became President of Finland. An extraordinary person, he was a military commander and statesman in both Russia and Finland, and left behind a controversial legacy in each country.
• Beyond their 790-mile shared border and 108 years of being part of the same state, Moscow and Helsinki have other things in common: their complicated attitudes toward Carl Gustav Mannerheim. Once hailed as a hero in both countries, Mannerheim was a Russian army officer who became Finland’s president during the Second World War. His legacy is fraught with ambiguity and marked by countless lost lives, both Russian and Finnish. This article explores who Mannerheim was and why monuments dedicated to him are frequently splashed with red paint on both sides of the Finland-Russia border.
• The mother of Rus towns: How a legendary Russian city ended up in Ukraine - Once the heart of the ancient kingdom of Rus, it was made capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1934.
• This paragraph rang a bell: "In the 9th century, a country emerged which would come to be known as Kievan Rus, the homeland of the ancestors of modern-day Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. The backbone of this state was a network of river trade routes. These routes began in Scandinavia, traversed the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Finland (near present-day St. Petersburg), and split in two. One route headed east to the Volga River and then to the Caspian Sea, skirting Iran and Azerbaijan before reaching the Arab lands. The other route went south through Novgorod and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea, leading to Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. Iron, wax, furs, linen, weapons, and slaves were sent south; north came intricate metalwork, books, and, most crucially, silver." - Reminds of Vikings: Valhalla
• Ruins of Yugoslavia: How Russia learned that NATO poses a threat - The US-led military bloc’s illegal strikes on Belgrade in the spring of 1999 forever changed relations between the West and Moscow

New-to-me words:

hecatomb

• (in ancient Greece or Rome) a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen." After Pythagoras discovered his fundamental theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb of oxen"
• an extensive loss of life.

P. S. Map of places mentioned in the story about Carl Mannerheim:

Finland

Ukraine

Russian military engineers install a pontoon bridge over the Oka River

This photo is from a Russian military exercise on the Oka River. The closest it comes to Ukraine is about 200 miles when it goes through Volgograd on the way south to the Caspian sea. It looks cold. The photo accompanied a Defense Blog post about a similar bridge being setup on the the Pripyat river in Belarus. That river runs by the Chernobyl disaster zone which is only about 70 miles north of Kiev. Belarus and Russia are allies, so if you were a paranoid conspiracy theorist (or even just an amateur war gamer) you might take this as evidence that the Russians are indeed preparing to invade Ukraine.

For a while I was taking Putin at his word that he had no intention of invading Ukraine, but then I heard from California Bob who studied Russian in college and worked in Eastern Europe for a year or two. He says Russians are liars. Duh (smacks forhead). Of course they are. The ones we are hearing from are politicians and diplomats and you know the old saw about how to tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. Why should we expect eastern politicians to be any different than western ones? Of course he is lying.

This morning it finally struck me why Russia would want to invade Ukraine. Up till now it made no sense to me. Why would he want to start a war over this place? But now I realize that it is the continuous provocation by the USA that has prompted this response. They asked us to leave the Ukraine alone, but we keep pushing to align Ukraine with the west. You keep poking the bear and eventually the bear is going to come out of his cave swinging his big bear paws.

I don't quite understand why we (the USA) are pushing NATO on Ukraine, other that we want to pick a fight with Russia. It's kind of weird. Maybe somebody is thinking long-term strategic planning for world domination, but then I read other reports that say Russia is on the ropes with a falling population and GDP. I suspect there are some people who just can't bear the thought of having a competitor. Kind of reminds me of the mean old son-of-a-bitch from There Will Be Blood - "I have a competition in me. I want no-one else to succeed." It's not enough to just beat them, you have to stomp them into the ground.

Major Russian Gas Pipelines to Europe

Then there's the whole natural gas pipeline thing. Ukraine is getting roughly $3 billion in tariffs on the natural gas being piped from Russia, across Ukraine to Europe. Rumor has it that the younger Biden had something to do with that and that's why Ukraine paid him so much money. This is just nit compared to the $200 billion* that Europe pays for Russian natural gas. 

Ukraine, Chernobyl (red marker) and Volgograd (far right)
Black line shows 820 mile east-west distance across Ukraine
Click to embigenate

Russia built a new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to supply western Europe with natural gas. The pipeline is complete but has not been 'certified', which, near as I can tell, is political doublespeak for Biden doesn't want his commissions from Ukraine impacted. Okay, the slightly better reason is that Ukraine depends on that gas tariff revenue and any reduction is going to have a negative effect on their economy which could lead to political instability. Maybe they ought to figure out how to do something useful besides sucking up Champagne, caviar and cocaine. Meanwhile winters in Europe are cold and natural gas prices are soaring, which, I dunno, might lead to political instability in western Europe. Nord Stream 2 might alleviate that, but hey, let's poke the bear with another stick. Maybe we can get him to come out of his cave and take a swipe at us. Frigging morons.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has squashed an Israeli proposal to build a natural gas pipeline across the Mediterranean Sea to supply Europe with natural gas. There is an existing natural gas pipeline from the Middle East to Europe that goes through Turkey. The proposed pipeline would probably have a negative impact on the tariffs Turkey is collecting. 

If Ukraine and Turkey could put their people to work in productive employment maybe they wouldn't be so desperate for these tariff revenues. But that's not how politicians work, especially pack animals. All they are looking for is a way to squeeze more money out of the masses. If the masses get squashed, well who cares? They were just peasants anyway.

If this goes the way it looks like it is going, Ukraine is liable to become another Syria. Won't that be just wonderful.

* that's my best guess. I did some calculations, but putting them into a coherent format would take time and I have other things I need to do. That's also why there is a shortage of links in the last half of this post.

Update January 2024 add distance caption to last map.

Ekranoplan

James May, that old commie, goes to Russia to test drive (fly?) the new, smaller version of the old Caspian Sea Monster. From Jack.

Casey Jones Goes to War

Veresk Bridge

Mazandaran Savadkooh: View from the Veresk Bridge.

I don't remember what exactly got me started on this, possibly one of Comrade Misfit's posts about steam locomotives. Anyway, I got started rummaging around and discovered this little bit on Schenectady History dot org. Alco is the compact version of "American Locomotive Company".

Alco was also on time in the kind of war story most satisfying to railroad men. The story was told in "Casey Jones Goes to War," by Amy Porter, in Collier's magazine, May 20, 1944:

The Trans-Iranian railroad gave America's soldier railroaders one of the hottest, coldest, toughest jobs they ever had to do. In the critical days of late 1942, Russia called for more supplies. Nazi submarines were crippling the Murmansk convoy route. The Mediterranean was closed to Allied shipping, and although generous supplies were being brought around the tip of Africa and landed at Persian Gulf ports, only a feeble trickle got through to Russia. The inadequately powered Trans-Iranian Railway was the bottleneck.This 650-mile road bisects a 150-mile stretch of desert before it struggles to heights of more than 7,000 feet in the Elburz Mountains. Temperatures range from 170 degrees Fahrenheit in the desert to 40 below in the mountains... There are 225 tunnels, thousands of bridges.
British steam locomotives and even America's 2-8-0's were not powerful enough to negotiate this tortuous road and haul much freight. It took most of their power to carry the coal and water on which they ran. Something had to be done.
At this point American Locomotive Company representatives were called to Washington... Could P. T. Egbert of Alco, Washington wanted to know, get some diesel-electrics over to Iran quick? Mr. Egbert could. And could Alco, by the way, convert the diesel axle arrangement somehow so the Iran road could bear their 120-ton weight? They could.
In the first week of December, twenty-nine diesels with six axles instead of the standard four were delivered at the Persian Gulf-along with a newly recruited American Locomotive shop battalion, eight hundred strong, to play nursemaid to the thousand-horsepower giants. The M.R.S. (Military Railway Service) took over operation of the road, and shipments increased until in May, 1943, Russian requirements in munitions and supplies were exceeded by 18 per cent...
Now a great fleet of diesels and a grand division of M.R.S. troops have the Iran situation well in hand.

Wikipedia has a story article about the Trans-Iranian Railway.
Odd old film, in French, no subtitles: Reza Shah of Iran inaugurates the Trans Iranian Railroad

Costain built 11 miles of the Trans-Iranian Railway, seven tunnels and two viaducts in isolated mountainous terrain - for £1 million.

The Veresk Bridge is right in the center of this map. You will notice how the rail line doubles back, loops around and even crosses itself here. This explains how we can see the viaduct in the second picture from the bridge in the first picture.
    The map is about 9 miles top to bottom. Iran has a green fringe along the shore of the Caspian Sea. This area is right at the southern edge of this green fringe which makes it about 50 miles from the coast.
    I made this map by tracing the railway line in the map version and then changing the base map to the satellite view. The little white blobs are tunnel entrances. There are more tunnels but Google Maps ran out of ink, or memory, or something.

Kazakhstan's Kashagan Oil Field

 

When I first saw this, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. It's in Kazakhstan, which is over there on the other side of world along with Afghanistan and Pakistan and all the other 'stans. I mean it kind of looks like a desert, which wouldn't be out of place in that neighborhood.

Then I saw this picture and I realized that what I thought was desert sand in the first picture is actually ice. The first picture was taken in the winter and this one was taken in the summer.

This is an artificial island constructed in the Caspian sea as part of a project to exploit the Kashagan oil field that lies there. Posthip Scott send me a link to a good, concise video (that is not embeddable) that gives an good overview of this project, along with a link to a well written story about this project. The Wall Street Journal also has a short video about the problems this project is having.

Seems a consortium of oil companies has sunk $50 Billion into this project over the last 20 years. It is a challenging project even by oil company standards. I mean they are regularly drilling for oil in water that is a mile deep. A comment in one of videos mentions that the $50 billion that has been spent would be more than enough to send a man to the moon. It's also about half what the USA spends every year on our "war" in Afghanistan.

The world runs on oil, so I can understand why these guys would be willing to sink that much money into this project. After all, this is the biggest find since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska was discovered 40 years ago. The part that gets me is that all the oil they expect to reclaim from this field will only satisfy our civilization's thirst for oil for one steenking year. Oh, it will take much longer than that is suck it dry, but if you add it all up, it is just a drop in the metaphorical bucket. We need a new oil field discovery comparable to this one every year. We don't get them, of course, so we have guys scouring the world for whatever they can find. Makes me wonder why everyone doesn't have a job prospecting for oil, but let's try and stay on topic, shall we?

One of the biggest problems with the Kasagan (cash again) oil field is the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas, and it's not here in just the trace quantities that are enough to produce that familiar "rotten eggs smell" that comes with many oil wells. Here it is a sizeable fraction of what comes out of the well, and it's under high pressure: 12,000 PSI (pounds per square inch). That's a bunch. There are plenty of everyday industrial techniques that deal with high pressures, like Natural Gas pipelines, Oxy-Aceteline gas welding tanks, and the hydraulic systems you find on everything from garbage trucks to the power steering on your car. But all those everyday systems only operate on two or three thousand PSI, not twelve freaking thousand. I am not sure anyone even makes any kind of hose that will handle that pressure, which means that all the plumbing has to be done with pipe, and not just ordinary, extra-strength, high pressure, steel pipe. Oh, no, that would be too easy. Seems hydrogen sulfide gas is not just poisonous, but it is also corrosive, and at high pressures it is extremely corrosive. So you need special non-corrosive lining in your high-strength, extra high pressure capacity pipe.
     So they have spent all this money, built all this drilling and processing equipment, hauled it to the far side of world through the Don-Volga Canal, drilled the wells and laid the pipelines. But now we have another problem. I expect this is just the zillionth one this project has run into, but it's something that even non-engineers can understand, so let's make the most of it.
    The pipeline started leaking. It's bad enough that it's full of oil and it runs through an environmentally sensitive area (has anyone ever run a pipeline through an area that isn't "environmentally sensitive"?), but it's also full of this deadly poisonous, nasty, corrosive hydrogen sulfide gas. Surprisingly, they shut it down. From the way the oil industry is portrayed in the press, I would have expected them to charge on full steam ahead until the piles of dead Kazakhstani's were visible on Google Earth. But they didn't.
    One guy mentions the pipes were fine when they were delivered, but then they sat out in the desert for several years, unprotected, before they were finally connected up into the pipeline. Hard to imagine that a little ordinary weather could affect an anti-corrosion coating that is supposed to resist the devil incarnate (hydrogen sulfide), but maybe it's a matter of chemistry.
   Anyway, I'm kind of wondering how they protected the joints between two sections of pipe. Pipelines are normally welded, and the heat from welding is going to destroy any kind of coating on the inside of the pipe, so how are you going to reapply the protection to the inside of the joint after you are done welding? I suppose you could use something like a paintbrush on a 40 foot pole, and a video camera to check your work, but boy, would that be tedious. I can see how somebody might slip up occasionally, and that's all it would take.
    It looks like it will probably be cheaper to build a new pipeline than to try and reclaim the old one. Whoops, there goes another billion dollars.

Who's Your Daddy? Part 2

Vladimir Putin & Qassam Soleimani

From a story on IHS Jane's 360:

However, Moscow currently appears to be bolstering - rather than downgrading - its defence ties with Tehran. It has already agreed to supply S-300 long-range air defence systems, although the deal has yet to be finalised. In another sign of improving relations, two Russian Buyan-class patrol boats arrived at the Iranian Caspian Sea port of Bandar Anzali on 10 August.
Iran's General Qassem Soleimani reportedly visited Russia in July to meet Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. The Kremlin has denied the visit took place: an unsurprising move given that it would have violated the UN travel ban imposed on Gen Soleimani.
Gen Soleimani commands the Qods Force, which supports Iranian-allied groups across the region, so might be interested in acquiring more Russian guided anti-tank missiles that can be transferred to Iraqi Shia militias to be used against Islamic State vehicle suicide bombs and to Yemen's Ansar Allah group so it can knock out more Saudi armoured vehicles on the border.

General Soleimani is a VIP in realpolitik terms, not in your celebrity media sense. From a 2013 story in The New Yorker:

“The battlefield is mankind’s lost paradise—the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest,” he says. “One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise—the battlefield.”

Who's Your Daddy? Part 1.

Sochi

Bomb explodes at train station in Volgograd, Russia yesterday afternoon.  More than a dozen people were killed. I'm flipping channels on the TV and I come across a blind skier. I enjoy skiing, but I also like to see where I'm going, and here this woman is charging down this hill and she can't see shit. Okay, it's a groomed slope, and she has a guide, but still. I don't know how she does it. Anyway, she competes in the paralympics, and she is going to Sochi, because the paralympics are also going to be run there. So now I'm wondering just where is this place called Sochi? I'd never heard of it before they started talking about holding the Olympics there, so I go look it up and find it's on the Black Sea and about as far South as if is possible to get in Mother Russia (which I think says something about Russia's climate, like maybe it's really cold there, like in that movie Dr. Zhivago). Sochi is right near the border with Georgia and a couple hundred miles West of Chechnya where they have been fighting the Russians for the last twenty (or 500) years.


The Black Sea is on the left. The Caspian is on the right. View full size map.
And look what else is here: Volgograd, where the bomb went off yesterday afternoon. On the map it looks close, but it's actually over 400 miles from Sochi.

Update October 2021 replaced missing map.