Poor river and road conditions made transportation into and out of the Pechora basin very expensive, and various improvement projects, including a narrow-gauge portage railroad were proposed.

A canal between the Pechora and the Kama was part of a plan for a "reconstruction of Volga and its basin", approved in November 1933 by a special conference of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Research in that direction was conducted by Hydroproject, the dam and canal institute led by Sergey Yakovlevich Zhuk (Russian: Сергей Яковлевич Жук).

It saw actual on-the-ground work done of the most unusual kind: on March 23, 1971, three 15-kiloton underground nuclear charges were exploded near the village of Vasyukovo in Cherdynsky District of Perm Oblast, some 100 km (62 mi) north of the town of Krasnovishersk.

The fences surrounding the crater had rusted away and fallen down, and the "Atomic Lake" is now a popular fishing place for the residents of the other nearby villages, while its shores are known for the abundance of edible mushrooms.

[7] The triple "taiga" nuclear salvo test, part of the preliminary March 1971 Pechora–Kama Canal project, produced substantial amounts of relatively short-lived cobalt-60 from steel tubes and soil ("Origin of Co-60.