One of the projects carried out during the period of famous Stalin’s five-year plans was a massive reconstruction of the waterways of the Soviet Union. The growing production, expanding and construction of the new and already existing cities required great quantities of water which the existing rivers couldn’t supply. Except for that the new waterways were supposed to unite the northern and the southern seas with inland waters. In such a way the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Volga-Don Canal, and the Moscow Canal were completed in record-breaking time.

The last one was supposed to fill Moscow with waters and turn it, according to Joseph Stalin, into the port of the five seas. In order to build the Moscow Canal, the special DmitLag, or Dmitrovsky Forced Labor Camp was organized. One of the areas, namely flood-gate № 3, was passing next to Dmitrov. The artist Yevgeniy Yegovov used to live there back then with his wife.

Yegorov studied at the Saratov Art and Pedagogical Institute in 1920-1923. He was influenced by German Expressionism and Van Gogh and worked a lot in graphic art, while most of his works were landscapes and genre paintings. The artist’s works constitute the individual and avant-garde approach to art. Yegorov created many satirical works in caricature genre, worked in expressionist manner.

His work ‘The Moscow Canal. Columbus’s Caravels’ is completely different in its manner. Yevgeny Yegorov was appointed as a main painter of Dmitrov and was supposed to decorate the celebrations of the canal opening. At the day of the event on July 15, 1937 he presented the city with the painting Canal Opening, and completed a number of drawings, engravings, and paintings. The artist had to work in a manner of Social realism, which was an antithetical style for him, that’s why we have a very curious example here revealing the new side of Yegorov’s art.

However, even in this commissioned work the artist managed to capture not just the triumph of the construction and power of the Soviet Union, but drama and inner reflection on the price of such construction. During his trips around the canal under construction Yevgeniy Yegorov saw the scenes of hard, backbreaking labour of the workers. He saw all the unbelievable suffers the prisoners were going through. It looks like the painting is made of the brush strokes electrified with the lightning, which is just about to happen. The general palette tends to grey and blue-grey tones. They neither have a “flight of a brush” typical for the artist, nor light colours.

Yegorov died in evacuation in 1942 of tuberculosis. The painting given to the Kurgan museum by his widow Muza Aleksandrovna for a number of years has been in the museum’s main exposition as an outstanding example of the 1930s art.