linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:scholar_edition
Military use

Soviet (and later Russian) naval strategists long believed that a well-designed canal system could help establish contact among the separate fleets based on Russia's Black Sea, Baltic, Arctic, Pacific, and Caspian coasts. The White Sea Canal was also constructed with this military use in mind, and early in its history the Northern Fleet 's first warships sailed along the canal to the White Sea from the Baltic, Before World War II, the canal was used for the transfer of military vessels between the two seas on 17 occasions.

During World War II, in August–September 1941, the canal was used to move a number of submarines from the Baltic Fleet to the White Sea, including submarines K-3, S-101 and S-102, L-22. Some unfinished submarines from Leningrad's Baltic Shipyard and Gorky's Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard sailed to the new Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk.

Since then, the canal has been regularly used for delivering submarines by transporter dock from the Baltic Shipyard and Krasnoye Sormovo to Sevmash for completion.