Neva

• 1. Introduction

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  The Neva is a river in northwestern Russia that flows for only 74 km, yet ranks as the fourth-largest river in Europe by average discharge, behind only the Volga, the Danube, and the Rhine. That contradiction sits at the heart of everything remarkable about this waterway. How does a river barely longer than a city highway move as much water as some of the continent's great giants? And why has this short stretch of water been fought over, built upon, and poisoned, for thousands of years? Those questions run through the Neva from its birth near Shlisselburg all the way to the Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finland, through the heart of one of Russia's greatest cities.

• 2. A River That Should Not Exist

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  Between 2000 BC and 1250 BC, according to the most recent research, the Neva came into existence through what can only be described as a geological accident. Before that moment, the land where the river now flows was a patchwork of separate drainage systems. The Tosna River occupied the lower valley, while the Mga flowed eastward into Lake Ladoga. Glacial rebound caused the land near Lake Ladoga to rise faster than surrounding areas, briefly trapping water in an enclosed lake. When that lake overspilled, it broke into the Tosna's western valley, carving the Ivanovo rapids in the process and linking the two separate basins into one continuous river. The result, technically speaking, is a pseudodelta at the Neva's mouth: not formed by accumulation of material washed down from upstream, but by the scouring of sediments that were already there from glacial times.

  The Neva basin holds 26,300 lakes and a hydrological network of more than 48,300 rivers, but only 26 of those rivers flow directly into the Neva itself. Its relationship with Lake Ladoga is unique: the Neva is the only river that drains the lake. That single fact explains the deceptive power of such a short channel. Lake Ladoga concentrates the runoff of an enormous catchment and releases it all through this one exit. The flow is so steady and uniform across the seasons that spring floods, common on most European rivers, are almost unknown on the Neva. The ice that forms from early December to early April is 0.3 to 0.6 m thick, depending on location, and each year less than five percent of Lake Ladoga's total ice volume of 10.6 km3 actually enters the river.

• 3. The Water Itself

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  At its narrowest point, within the Ivanovskye rapids, the Neva measures just 210 m across. Along most of its length, the river runs 400 to 600 m wide, with the widest stretches of 1,000 to 1,250 m found in the delta near the marine trading port. The banks stand low and steep, averaging 3 to 6 m high along the channel and just 2 to 3 m at the mouth. The river drops only 4.27 m in elevation from source to mouth, which helps explain the absence of dramatic seasonal variation in water level.

  Since records began in 1859, the Neva has swung between extremes. Its largest annual volume was 116 km3, recorded in 1924. Its smallest was 40.2 km3, measured in 1900. On average the river discharges 78.9 km3 per year, or around 2,500 m3 per second. Rainfall in the Neva basin greatly exceeds evaporation: evaporation accounts for only 37.7 percent of water consumed from the river, while 62.3 percent becomes runoff. The water is fresh and lightly turbid, with an average salinity of 61.3 mg/L and a calcium bicarbonate content of 7 mg/L. The summer water temperature averages 17 to 20 degrees Celsius, and the swimming season lasts roughly one and a half months, though by 2008 the Federal Service of St. Petersburg had declared no beach on the Neva fit for swimming.

• 4. The Name and Its People

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  The earliest people in recorded history known to have lived in the Neva basin were Finnic. Their linguistic fingerprint survives in the river's name. In Finnish, the word neva means poor fen. In Karelian it means watercourse, and in Estonian the cognate form nõva means waterway. Some scholars have proposed an alternative origin in the Indo-European adjective newā, meaning new, which would suit a river that only came into being a few thousand years ago. But the earliest place names in the region that show this Indo-European influence coincide with the arrival of Scandinavian traders and Slavic settlers in the 8th century AD.

  By the 8th and 9th centuries, East Slavs had settled the Neva lowlands, practicing slash and burn agriculture alongside hunting and fishing. The region belonged to Veliky Novgorod in the 9th century, and from the 8th through the 13th centuries the Neva served as the critical link in a trade corridor stretching from Scandinavia to the Byzantine Empire. The Neva's strategic value drew military attention. A major battle unfolded on the 15th of July 1240 at the point where the Izhora River meets the Neva. The Russian army was led by the 20-year-old Prince Alexander Yaroslavich. His forces defeated the Swedish invasion, and for his personal courage in the fighting, the prince received the honorary title "Nevsky", a name inseparable from the river ever after.

• 5. Floods, Ice Trams, and the City Built on Water

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  On the 16th of May 1703, Peter the Great founded the city of St. Petersburg at the Neva's mouth, and the river immediately shaped the city's character and its dangers. The area was low and swampy at the time of founding. Canals and ponds had to be dug for drainage, and the earth excavated in that process was used to raise the ground beneath the new capital. By the end of the 19th century, the Neva delta contained 48 rivers and canals spread across 101 islands. By 1972, canal-filling had reduced the island count to 42.

  The first permanent bridge across the Neva, the Blagoveshchensky Bridge, did not open until 1850, nearly a century and a half after the city's founding. In the interim, winters offered their own solution. Every year from 1895 to 1910, electric tramways were laid directly on the frozen river, connecting the Senate Square, Vasilievsky Island, the Palace Embankment, and other parts of the city. The carriages, converted from horsecars, ran at 20 km/h and carried 20 passengers each. Power ran through the rails and a top cable held by wooden piles frozen into the ice. About 900,000 passengers made the crossing each regular season, which ran from the 20th of January to the 21st of March. The sparking of contacts on the top wires drew spectators at night.

  Floods were a persistent counterweight to the city's ambitions. More than 300 have occurred since 1703. Three stand as catastrophic: on the 7th of November 1824, water rose to 421 cm above the gauge at the Mining Institute; on the 23rd of September 1924 it reached 369 cm; and on the 10th of September 1777 it climbed to 321 cm. A still larger flood of 760 cm was recorded in 1691, before the city existed. These floods are caused by storm surges in the eastern part of Neva Bay rather than by the river's own flow. The construction of the South-West Wastewater Treatment Plant, completed in 2003-05, was one of the later infrastructure responses to managing the river's relationship with the city.

• 6. Siege and Recovery

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  On the 30th of August 1941, German forces captured the town of Mga, bringing them to the Neva's bank. Nine days later, on the 8th of September 1941, they took Shlisselburg at the river's source and severed all land communications and waterways to Leningrad. What followed was nearly 900 days of siege, lasting from the 8th of September 1941 to the 27th of January 1944. The forests along the Neva were stripped completely within Leningrad itself, and reduced to 40-50 percent of their prewar cover in the upper reaches. The Neva itself became a military boundary.

  After the war, a comprehensive replanting program introduced spruce, pine, cedar, Siberian larch, oak, Norway maple, elm, ash, apple, and mountain ash throughout the Neva lowlands. A river station built above the Volodarsky Bridge in 1970 could receive 10 large ships at a time. Wastewater treatment plants went up in Krasnoselsk in 1978, on Belyi Island across 1979-83, and in Olgino between 1987 and 1994. Wastewater cleaning in St. Petersburg had begun in 1979, but by 1997 only 74 percent of the city's sewage was purified. That figure rose to 85 percent by 2005 and to 91.7 percent by 2008. Feliks Karamzinov, the official credited with driving these works, expected the figure to approach 100 percent by 2011 with the completion of the expanded main sewerage plant.

• 7. Commerce, Oil, and Pollution

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  The Neva's depth and its near-absence of shoals make it well suited to shipping, though the bridges limit vessels to those below 5,000 tonnes in capacity. The river forms a segment of both the Volga-Baltic Waterway and the White Sea-Baltic Canal, carrying timber from Arkhangelsk and Vologda, granite and diabase from the Kola Peninsula, cast iron and steel from Cherepovets, coal from Donetsk and Kuznetsk, pyrite from the Urals, potassium chloride from Solikamsk, and oil from the Volga region. Passenger routes connect St. Petersburg to Moscow, Astrakhan, Rostov, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod, Valaam, and other destinations. Navigation runs from late April to November.

  Beneath the river runs infrastructure of a different scale. To the west of Shlisselburg, an oil pipeline lies 7 to 9 m below the river bottom, stretching 774 m across. It delivers roughly 42 million tonnes of oil per year as part of the Baltic Pipeline System, drawing from fields in Timan-Pechora, West Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan. A separate tunnel near the Ladozhsky Bridge, 750 m long and 2 m in diameter, carries the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline at a maximum depth of 25 m.

  The Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring classifies the Neva as a heavily polluted river. The annual influx of pollutants reaches 80,000 tonnes. The heaviest contributors include Power-and-heating Plant 2, the firm Plastpolymer, and the Obukhov State Plant. More than 40 oil spills are registered on the river each year. From the 26th of June 2009, St. Petersburg switched from chlorine to ultraviolet light for disinfecting drinking water drawn from the Neva, which supplies 96 percent of the city's water needs.

• 8. An Emergency Landing and a Living Record

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  On the 21st of August 1963, a Soviet Tu-124 twinjet airliner took off from Tallinn-Ulemiste Airport at 08:55 with 45 passengers and seven crew, bound for Moscow-Vnukovo. After liftoff, the nose gear failed to retract. Ground control diverted the flight to Leningrad because of fog at Tallinn. While circling St. Petersburg at 1,650 feet, both engines stalled under circumstances that included a lack of fuel. The crew brought the aircraft down on the Neva River, threading past the city's bridges and narrowly missing a steam tugboat built in 1898. That tugboat rushed to the downed plane and towed it to shore. All aboard survived. The pilot was initially dismissed, then reinstated and awarded the Order of the Red Star.

  The river that absorbed that landing still carries the weight of everything layered onto it: the name given to a prince who fought on its bank in 1240, the tram lines that ran across its frozen surface each winter between 1895 and 1910, the fortress of Oreshek built on its island source in 1323, and the Church of the Intercession raised on its bank in 2007 as a wooden replica of a structure first built in 1708 and believed to be the forerunner of the celebrated Kizhi Pogost. The fortress Oreshek, standing at the source of the Neva near Shlisselburg, was the point the German army aimed for and captured in September 1941, shutting the river's corridor and beginning the siege. Its survival as a visible landmark above the river ties the earliest layers of the Neva's recorded history to the most recent.