If Leningrad is the cradle of the revolution, then what is Moscow? Those who lived in the USSR for a substantial part of their lives will not find the question hard: Moscow is the port of the five seas. Geography experts will list them all: the White, the Baltic, the Caspian, the Azov and the Black. The path leading to all the five is the same – the Moscow–Volga Canal. Canal army prisoners, abbreviated as zek, built 128 kilometers of the canal in less than five years. But the Soviet propaganda machine worked even faster: long before the opening of the canal, on January 6, 1935, Pravda published the article The Port of the Five Seas. The propagandists clearly had problems with arithmetic: even with the beginning of navigation in 1937, when the Moscow–Volga Canal entered service, Moscow became a port of only three seas – in 1933, the Mariinskaya water system, which connected the Volga (which flows into the Caspian Sea) and the Baltic Sea, was supplemented with the White Sea –Baltic Canal, which connected Lake Onega with the White Sea. And only in 1952, with the construction of the Volga – Don Canal, reality finally caught up with the Kremlin dreamers.