At the height of the Cold War, approximately five to ten nuclear submarines were being commissioned from each of the four Soviet submarine yards (Sevmash in Severodvinsk, Admiralteyskiye Verfi in St. Petersburg, Krasnoye Sormovo in Nizhny Novgorod, and Amurskiy Zavod in Komsomolsk-on-Amur).
During World War II, the canal was used to relocate unfinished submarines from Leningrad's Baltic Shipyard and Gorky' (Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard) to the new Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk.