Dwina
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the name of two important rivers of Europe. (1) The Northern Dwina has its origin in the confluence of the Suchona and the Jug, two streams rising in the S. of the gov- , and uniting in 60° ernment of Vologda The 46' N. lat., 46° 20′ E. lon. Dwina flows generally N. W. through a flat country to the Gulf of Archangel, which it enters by three principal mouths, of which only the easternmost is useful for is navigation. The length of the Dwina about 450 miles (with the Suchona, 760); its basin embraces over 140,000 square miles. Its chief tributaries are, on the left, the Vaga and Emza, and on the right the Pinega and the Vytchegda, the last having a course of some 625 miles, 500 being navigable. The volume of water poured down by this main tributary increases the breadth of the Dwina from about one-third to nearly two-thirds of a mile; near Archangel it widens to over four miles. The river is free from ice from May to October, and is a valuable channel of inland trade. Its waters also are rich in fish. (2) The Western Dwina rises in the government of Tver, not far from the sources of the Volga and the Dnieper, and flows at first W. S. W. in a course almost parallel to the latter stream. From Vitebsk it flows W. N. W. to the Gulf of Riga, which it enters after a course of about 580 miles, navigable from the confluence of the Mezha downward, though the numerous shallows and rapids greatly impede traffic. Its basin is estimated at 32,850 square miles; its average depth of 26 feet at Riga is increased to about 40, and its breadth of 1,400-2,400 feet is extended in some places to a mile during the heavy spring floods which overflow wide tracts of the low-lying lands on either bank. The Western Dwina is connected with the Dnieper, and so with the Black Sea by the Beresina canal, and by other canal systems with the e Caspian Sea, and with the Neva and Gulf of Finland, etc. The territory bordering on the Dwinan was almost incessant fighting during the World Wor. In 1920 the and Russian Soviet armies carried on operations here, and the river became a part of the boundary between Poland and the Russian republic. See POLAND.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The rivers run where Collier's put them in 1921, but nearly everything political and engineered around them has altered. The Western Dwina is now known for most of its length as the Daugava, and instead of forming a Polish-Soviet frontier it crosses Russia, Belarus and Latvia, all separate states since 1991; the "shallows and rapids" that impeded traffic were largely drowned by a chain of Latvian hydroelectric dams, the Pļaviņas station of the mid-1960s submerging the Staburags cliff that Latvians had treated as a national landmark. The Northern Dwina's mouth gained a wholly new city in 1936, Severodvinsk (first called Molotovsk), which became the Soviet Union's main nuclear submarine yard and remains Russia's. Archangel is still a timber port and the river still freezes for much of the year, but the governments of Vologda and Tver named here have long been oblasts.
Written for this edition, 2026.