Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin held a meeting in the Nizhny Novgorod region on the development of passenger transportation by water transport.
Photo: Edward CHESNOKOV
Classical Russian culture cannot be imagined without rivers. And also – without passenger ships, on which, imitating life, our literary characters moved. The merchants of Ostrovsky’s play organized a “steamboat race” along the Volga, and were looking for the coveted chair of Bender and Vorobyaninov on the ship of the Colon Theater.
But, like so many good things in the past, after 1991 river passenger traffic in Russia collapsed. Now the wear of some marinas reaches 70%, and in most Volga regions cruise ships and pleasure boats are regularly used at best.
This topic was devoted to the visiting meeting of the Duma Council, which was held under the chairmanship of Vyacheslav Volodin in the Nizhny Novgorod region on August 21, 2023. It continued the agenda set by the recent meeting chaired by President Vladimir Putin on a similar topic.
“We are the second state in the world in terms of the number of rivers connecting settlements,” Volodin said. — We need to revive intraregional and interregional river passenger communication not only in the Volga basin, but also on other rivers.
Vyacheslav Viktorovich also recalled that now there is no river passenger communication “between Astrakhan and Volgograd, Volgograd and Saratov, Saratov and Samara.” (That is, of course, sometimes cruise ships with tourists go, but this is not at all – ed.)
Whereas the potential is huge. “Passenger transport by inland waterways in 2022 amounted to more than 9 million people,” said one of the meeting participants, Deputy. Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation Alexander Poshivay. Carriers are already successfully developing highly profitable routes with a large flow, for example, hydrofoil flights from the center of St. Petersburg to Peterhof. However, we must not forget about social transport between small towns by water.
According to another participant in the meeting, the governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, “the development of such transport among the constituent entities of the Russian Federation needs additional support measures”, which can repeat the model of air transport subsidy. interregional.
In response to this, the head of the parliamentary transport committee, Yevgeny Moskvichev, proposed to exempt such regional transport from VAT collection: “the cost price will immediately become cheaper.”
The meeting was summed up by the chairman of the Duma:
— Not enough attention is paid to the problem of the development of interregional river passenger transport. This issue will be taken under parliamentary control,” Volodin promised.
