Cynthia A. Ruder, University of Kentucky

Abstract

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the Moscow Canal and the Stalin Waterworks. Together they supply between sixty and eighty percent of all potable water to metropolitan Moscow. Critical to this new direction was the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Moscow Canal, an event that revealed the tensions that still exist vis-�-vis the very meaning of the Canal itself: the continuing struggle between those who would rather ignore the past for the sake of the future and those who believe that forgetting the past will doom Russia to repeat it. This, then, is an account of how Russia feted the Moscow Canal and how that celebration attempted to reconcile these opposing tendencies.