Volzhskaya Embankment by the Kremlin

Here, the Kremlin promontory rises above the Volga, while right by the water lay the working part of Uglich, with its piers. A heavy steel chain once stretched along the improved shore for nearly a kilometer, from Kamenny Stream to Selivanovsky Stream. When the embankment was reinforced, it was removed, and then individual links were returned beside the pier and the House of Friendship.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, tuyer crews passed below this bank, towing caravans carrying grain behind them. On the shallow Upper Volga, the first paddle tugs handled the swift current poorly. Carriers were paid to deliver cargo from Rybinsk to Tver and farther on to the capitals; stranded barges left both the owner of the goods and the ship's crew without earnings.

The merchant Evreinov and General Ivan Chernyaev conceived of moving the caravans upstream with the help of a steel chain. In eighteen sixty-eight, they founded the Volga-Tver Chain Steamship Company, and soon workers laid the chain along the riverbed for the entire route between Rybinsk and Tver—nearly four hundred kilometers.

The special flat-bottomed tug was called a tuyer. Sailors lifted the chain out of the water in front of the bow, guided it onto rollers, and the engineer turned the drum. The vessel pulled itself forward, after which the chain ran off behind the stern and settled back onto the bottom. One tuyer could tow up to seven loaded barges. Each tuyer had a crew of eighteen to twenty people.

The hardest stretches were bends and encounters between two caravans. The chain veered away from the fairway, stretched taut, and sometimes broke. To pass one another, one crew had to drop it from the drum, let the oncoming vessels through, and then search for it on the bottom and lift it again. Until the chain returned to the rollers, the whole caravan stood still, along with its cargo and the crew's earnings. Near the Uglich Kremlin, tuyers passed in just this way: the working part of the city lay below, by the piers, while the Kremlin promontory rose above the route of the grain barges.

By the end of the nineteenth century, more powerful tugs, self-propelled cargo vessels, and railways had appeared. In eighteen ninety-seven, the chain steamship service almost ceased. Crews lost this work, tuyers stopped running, and most of the expensive chain was sent for remelting.

Uglich residents preserved one section. In nineteen forty-five, workers at the mechanical plant made posts for it, and the chain was stretched along the improved shore—from Kamenny Stream to Selivanovsky Stream, nearly a kilometer. The links that sailors had struggled to lift from the bottom became a fence; adults and children sat on them.

During the reconstruction of the embankment in two thousand five, the chain was removed to reinforce the bank. Five years later, its fragments were returned beside the pier and the House of Friendship. These are links from that very underwater road along which tuyer crews led grain caravans past the Kremlin against the current.