One Worker on the Danube-Black Sea Canal

Nearly 200 years have passed since Romania—with some prodding by the Ottomans, the Russians, the Austrians, the British and the French—first discussed building a canal to link the Danube with the Black Sea. Its main portion of the river ran north and south, and construction of a 40-mile east-west waterway would hopefully boost international trade. The Danube delta was just not conducive to navigation and shipping.

Even after Romania secured its independence in 1878, progress was sluggish on what looked to be a large and difficult civil engineering project. In 1948, however, with World War II over and the Iron Curtain having been dropped, Romanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej visited his counterpart Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. Uncle Joe instructed him to build the canal, without regard to cost or obstacles. (He did not bother to inform Gheorgiu-Dej of secret plans for a Soviet submarine base nearby.) Romania, one of the USSR’s most tractable satellite states, obeyed.

Foreign minister Anna Pauker boasted that “we are building the canal without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie,” and banners displaying that Marxist slogan were set up all along the construction site (there were two branches, north and south, bifurcating at Poarta Alta) in northern Dobruja. True enough; the Danube-Black Sea Canal was not the place for those of bourgeois refinement. Prison camps and forced labor camps dotted the area. Political prisoners—many of them farmers who had resisted collectivization efforts—were taken from jails throughout the country, handed picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, and put to work.

Between 60,000 and 100,000 Romanians toiled under hellish conditions. With the country’s economic resources strained to the limit, the project came to a merciful halt after Stalin died in 1953.

In the face of this humiliating national failure, someone had to pay the price. A show trial was held in which several men faced trumped-up charges of espionage, fraud and sabotage. Three were executed and several others got long prison terms.

There the would-be canal sat for 20 years, moldering and deteriorating, although some of its water was diverted to irrigate nearby farms. But Nicolae Ceaușescu, the successor of Gheorgiu-Dej, started it up again in June 1973. Dubbing it the Blue Highway (Magistrala Albastră), he sought to wrest control of the lower Danube from the Soviets. A Bucharest firm, the Design Institute of Road, Water and Air Transport, redesigned the canal with two locks on each branch. New and large Romanian-made machinery was employed. The southern branch was completed in May 1984 and the northern branch in October 1987, at a reported cost of $2 billion.

The first part of the project was airbrushed out of Romanian history until the fall of communism in December 1989, but even the second part constituted a huge mobilization of equipment and labor. The conditions were better but just marginally so as the Romanian army did much of the work. The final phase lasted 14 years, and 381,000,000 cubic meters of soil were excavated (more than in building the Panama and Suez canals), and 5,000,000 cubic meters of concrete were poured for the locks and support walls.

I was previously unaware of the Danube-Black Sea Canal until my Romanian friend Elly Rus told me that she had worked there from 1986 to 1991. She did not do it by choice, as no sane person would have. With an alcoholic husband and two small children, Elly worked near the Agigea lock on the lower branch, close to Constanta. Home was a rustic place on the coast, 40 kilometers south. Massive trucks were loaded with stone quarried nearby before being taken to barges and shipped to who knows where. She and her friend Lili—among the few women who worked at the canal—checked to see that the trucks were full. They occasionally drove them to Constanta and back.

“It was a very difficult time for me, in the cold, the rain, the strong sun and the dust so bad I could hardly see,” she informed me via e-mail. “In the winter, it was the hardest as my toes and hands were frozen. That still causes me trouble.

“The most dangerous thing was when I came on the night shift. I worked 12 hours a day. I had to walk many miles on foot in the dark, and anyone could show up to rape or kill me at any time. There were hundreds of workers, including soldiers, prisoners and men with no jobs. This was the time of communism, and everybody had to work. We had the chaff of society.

“Although I did not see any deaths, I heard about them. If a man died, he was just buried with the excavator and nobody heard about him anymore. I lived with this fear all the time and often cried about the life I had to bear. It was traumatic, and I still suffer from those days. My salary was 1,786 lei per month, which comes to about 50 Euros. To be honest, it was the worst period of my life. I finally quit and moved with my kids and husband to Arad [315 kilometers northwest] and started all over. I got a nursing certificate and changed my life, although it was still a big struggle to survive.”

The Danube-Black Sea Canal, now a recognized part of the European network of class 6 waterways, has a twisted and tortured history. It was not as immediately profitable as Stalin, Gheorgiu-Dej, Pauker and Ceaușescu predicted. But was it destined for white-elephant status? No. Since its four locks were almost completely revamped a few years ago and Constanta’s port facilities were modernized—although they are still far inferior, for example, to those of Korea—it has become a gateway for eastern Europe. Romania and its neighbors Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia use it to send agricultural products to the Black Sea. The people have learned to be capitalists—not just producers in a command economy but sellers. This canal, or I should say these two canals, are symbolic of how Romania is today plugged into the world market. The Danube-Black Sea Canal, the one-time “canal of death,” to which Elly Rus gave six years of her life, may be a legacy of the communist era but it is today bringing Romania significant benefits.

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