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Iuzovka and Revolution
Volume I Life and Work in Russia's Donbass, 1869â"1924
By Theodore H. Friedgut PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05554-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Donbass before Iuzovka
"The rare villages scattered in the steppe are composed of huts, thatched cottages resembling nothing so much as piles of straw, cupped in a fold of land, usually where a stream is flowing." This was how the French engineer Monin, sent to survey economic activity in the Donbass, described it in the year 1882. It was a barren, uninviting area. Though Donbass land is fertile, precipitation is infrequent and irregular. Summers are hot and dry, with strong winds that raise an "unbelievable dust." There is virtually no plant growth whatsoever. The result is that it is sparsely populated, a fact of some significance to this volume, for it means that when the vast mineral riches of the Donbass were finally developed, there was no local labor surplus to be turned to their exploitation. A new, foreign work force had to be brought to this steppeland of the southeastern Ukraine, complicating the already difficult task of creating a modern industrial society.
The Donbass is geographically within the Ukraine, yet the Ukrainian population of the area plays only a marginal and largely reactive role in our history. For the Ukrainian peasant, industrial labor was a foreign way of life introduced by foreign intruders. As we shall see, Ukrainian peasants avoided entering the coal mines and steel mills as long as any other option was open to them. A survey published in 1886 — when the Donbass coal boom was well under way, and metallurgy was solidly established and nearing its takeoff point — showed that three-quarters of the indigenous farm families in Slavianoserbsk uezd in the northern Donbass, were supplementing their income by non-agricultural activity. Yet of 6,922 families surveyed, only 42 had a member permanently employed in mining and only 599 took temporary employment in the mines. An unspecified number of these were working in peasant mines located on the peasants' own land. In the Donbass, density of population was half of that in the central provinces of Russia, while individual landholdings were much larger. In the gubernii of Kursk, Orel, Tula, Riazan, and Tambov population density was 44.2 persons per square verst. The Donbass, with its fertile but unwatered black soil had only 21. 6 souls per square verst. The peasants of the Donbass had holdings ranging from one-and-a-half to two times as large as those of Bolkhov uezd in Orel guberniia. An article by I. M. Lukomskaia compares an area of Orel guberniia from which there was great emigration, to the two main industrial uezdy of Ekaterinoslav guberniia. She cites zemstvo statistics showing the following sizes of landholdings: Bolkhov uezd in Orel — 7.0 desiatin per household, 2. 3 per capita; Slavianoserbsk uezd in Ekaterinoslav — 9.8 desiatin per household, 3. 1 per capita; Bakhmut uezd in Ekaterinoslav — 13.8 desiatin per household, 4.2 per capita. 5 Even within the environs of Ekaterinoslav guberniia the difference in population density between the agricultural northwest and the Donbass in the southeast is striking. In 1869, the year that John Hughes began construction of his steel mill and coal mines, the pioneering Russian sociologist Flerovskii wrote that Ekaterinoslav averaged 983 persons per square mile, while the Don Cossack Territory had only 338. Those Russian peasants who had the strength and the initiative to seek a way to earn money for the purchase of additional land, as well as a sufficiently large family to permit some members to seek work far from home while still leaving enough members behind to work the family holding in the home village, poured into the Donbass in growing numbers. They were attracted by the high wages paid by the industrialists, many of them foreign, who were investing in the region. This frenzy of economic activity and rapid population growth created opportunity in the service sector and on the fringes of the coal and metallurgy industries for small crafts, merchant activities, and small businesses. Since the greater part of the Donbass lay within the Pale of Settlement, that area of the southwestern Russian Empire in which Jews were permitted to reside, a considerable Jewish population was soon attracted. Right through the 1917 revolutions, the tense interplay between English owners, Russian workers, a Jewish service community, and the surrounding Ukrainian peasantry, forms one of the central dramas of political and social life in Iuzovka.
These volumes will present an analysis of all aspects of this relationship. The change in modes of earning a living and in standards of living, the creation of new economic groups struggling for a place among the existing elites of imperial Russia, forms one plane of analysis in this first volume. The presence or absence of community, and the connections or disjunctions among various national, economic, and religious groups, form the focus of our social analysis. The political plane, developed in detail in the second volume will deal with social forces as they attempted to organize, or to prevent organization, for a restructuring of participation in decision-making on both local and national levels.
The developmental process that Russia went through in the fifty years spanning the turn of the century took place in many parts of the western world at much the same time. Occasionally we will have cause to compare it with developments in the United States or in countries of western Europe. Yet Russia had a different historical background and a different political structure, and these play a major role in the direction taken by events and in the choice of solutions to the problems that arose. In similar fashion, the Donbass had its own unique features that made its development differ from that of Russia's central industrial areas. Much of our discussion will be devoted to weighing the importance of these features.
The Donbass — the Donetsk Basin — is today Donetsk Oblast' in the Ukrainian SSR. In the mid-nineteenth-century it lay mainly within Ekaterinoslav guberniia, particularly the eastern portion, composed of Slavianoserbsk, Bakhmut, and Mariupol uezdy, as well as a portion of Kharkov guberniia and the western edge of the Don Cossack Territory (Oblast' voiska Donskogo). The term "Donbass," an acronym for Donetskii Bassein — the watershed of the Donets River, is said to have been used first in the 1820s by the geologist E. P. Kovalevskii, the first person ever to make a detailed geological map of the region. The northern border of the Donbass was formed by the course of the Donets River; the basin stretched 150 kilometers from north to south, encompassing an area of 23,500 square kilometers.
Coal was first discovered in the Donbass in 1724, when an English surveyor named Nixon came with four assistants to look for coal in the Donetsk range. As was the case in other European countries (England, for instance), little significance was attached to the discovery at the time, for lack of an appropriate social and economic framework. In a peasant economy blessed with abundant wood there was no market for coal. It was only towards the end of the century that the English engineer Charles Gascoyne, invited by the Russian government to help develop its metallurgical industry, submitted a plan for the use of Donbass coal and local iron ore. In November 1795, an imperial decree ordered the construction of an iron smelter and foundry on the Lugani River — the beginnings of the town of Lugansk — and the establishment of a "quarry" (lomka) to dig the coal found in the area. Not only was the technical know-how provided by foreigners, but the factory as well drew from its beginning on nonlocal workers, setting the pattern for later developments: metal workers were brought from the crown factories of the Urals; peasants were brought from Lipetsk and Tambov regions. As these proved insufficient, army recruits and criminals sentenced to hard labor were sent in as reinforcements, setting precedents for possible solutions to a chronic labor problem which was to plague the Donbass through most of its history. The factory was never a success: it suffered from the poor quality of its coking coal and from insufficient transportation both for bringing iron ore from a distance of sixty kilometers and for marketing its production. The isolated nature of this enterprise is indicated by the fact that during the first ten years of its existence, the two coal mines that supplied it produced ninety percent of the coal mined in the entire Donbass region. These two mines, the Dagmar and the Capital, produced 200,000 pud a year to meet the factory's modest needs; had there been transport and a market, they could have produced seven million pud a year. In 1845, the smelting operations of this factory were closed down and it began using pig iron hauled in from the Urals for its production of iron goods. Subsequently a new smelter was set up in Kerch, in the Crimea, where it was hoped that the proximity to iron ore, and to the sea as an avenue of transport, would contribute to the plant's success. The capture of this plant by Anglo-French forces during the Crimean War gave the Russian authorities pause to consider the strategic problems of siting what was even then seen to be one of the cornerstones of national power for the coming years. Later attempts to build the Petrovskii smelter near Poliakov's South Russian Coal Co. mines on the Korsun River and a smelter at Lisichansk were quickly abandoned at the end of the 1860s. The Lisichansk smelter, equipped under the supervision of Professor Ivan Time, succeeded in producing the first pig iron in Russia smelted in a coal-fired blast furnace. Because of economic problems — chiefly a lack of capital and of appropriate infrastructure — the smelter never went beyond experimental production.
Despite renewed efforts to activate the Lugansk smelter in its old location, it never reached fifty thousand tonnes of pig iron production per year and was finally closed down in 1872 when John Hughes' New Russia Coal, Iron, and Rail Producing Co. began pouring a steady stream of pig iron from its first blast furnace. It took nearby iron ore and limestone, mixed and melted them in blast furnaces fired by Iuzovka coal, and poured ingots of pig iron that were later worked into beams and rails. A few years later the pig iron was processed into steel, and this steel was rolled, cast, and forged into a variety of forms, but always with railway rails as a main end product. Because it began with ore, limestone, and coal, and ended with a finished product, the New Russia factory was known as a "full-cycle" enterprise.
This marked the birth of the modern Donbass. Cutting back the Lugansk factory's activity meant that only 231 families with a total of 361 souls remained employed there, while 710 families totaling 1,207 souls lost their livelihood. Most of these returned to their villages or sought to settle in new areas, but some were hired at Hughes' factory and were to provide an experienced, if sometimes problematic element of the Iuzovka labor force. As will be shown later, others of the technical personnel of the Lugansk and Lisichansk factories played various roles in the Donbass.
In its coal production, the Donbass was divided into a southeastern portion, lying mainly within the Don Cossack Territory, and a western portion, lying in Ekaterinoslav guberniia. The former produced anthracite, while the latter, a larger area producing the bulk of Donbass coal, was almost exclusively bituminous. The beginnings of anthracite production in the Grushevsk region of the Donbass can be traced back to 1817; this production grew comparatively rapidly, largely due to the proximity of the port cities along the shore of the Sea of Azov.
The first "model" mines, in the area were designed to introduce the latest techniques of mechanized coal extraction to this comparatively new, but prospectively rich, region. They were established by ROPIT — the Russian Steamship and Trading Company. In 1865 an engineer named Wagner, the mines' director and one of the pioneers in development of the Donbass coal industry, imported the first steam engines for coal raising and water pumping. It is typical of Russia's situation at the time (and even much later) that this valuable equipment sat for six months until a crew capable of installing and maintaining it could be assembled. 22 The mine was not only highly mechanized for its time, but was intended to provide a social model as well. A large infirmary was built, pay was distributed to the workers on a monthly basis (rather than semi-annually as was the custom at the time), and two-storey stone houses were constructed to house the workers. In its scale and in its production and living arrangements the ROPIT mine stood in bold contrast to virtually all the other mines of the Don Cossack Region, which were at that time almost exclusively family enterprises worked by hand or by draught animals and lacking all investment or technological improvement.
Peasants often mined outcroppings of coal on the lands of their own village association, or rented portions of a landlord's coal-holdings and mined them on a sharecropping basis. Such mines never went deep and rarely used any mechanical power. A human-powered or horsedrawn winch was used for raising coal to the surface, and a pit one meter square and ten meters deep was considered an achievement. Even as late as 1884, when there were numerous examples of modern mines to be seen in the Donbass, only 17 of the 57 coal shafts in the Slavianoserbsk district had steam-powered equipment, while the remaining 40 were worked by horsepower.
An artel' consisting of five or six people at least would work such a mine. The cost of opening such a mine was estimated at the end of the 1880s to be about 175 rubles. Such a sum was beyond the means of almost any group of peasants and required loans at interest or credit against a contract to sell coal at a pre-set, usually low, price. In this way, peasants were drawn out of their parochial subsistence economy, and connected to the first of society by a commercial nexus. In the regions of Ekaterinoslav guberniia in which peasants worked their own mines and average land holdings were somewhat smaller than in other regions of the province, there were a higher incidence of working of rented land and larger holdings of working livestock. The coal income allowed peasants to expand their economy, as well as giving them an economic alternative to having to work on the landlord's holdings in order to pay the high rents or redemption payments with which their own land might be burdened. 25 This seasonal coal mining could yield a cash income of seventy to one hundred rubles, far more money than peasants had had at their disposal previously, and sufficient to support a family of four to five people through much of the year.
In similar fashion, individuals or small partnerships with an initial capital of only a horse and wagon and a few rubles became substantial merchants and coal producers in their own right through dealing with these peasant miners. As may be seen in Malkin's career, many of these small-scale entrepreneurs were active in the Donbass for considerable periods; they often shifted from mine to mine, opening and abandoning pits as short-term opportunity presented itself. Ludwig Erhardt, an otherwise unidentified personage, pointed out this phenomenon to the Minister of State Domains in a note that sums up all the evils of this practice. He states that the peasants often rented out their lands for a pittance in cash and a few buckets of vodka, that wages paid at such mines were low and living conditions poor, and that the short-term outlook and lack of investment were destroying the coal seams. Erhardt recommended that short-term rental of coal lands be prohibited. The fact that Erhardt placed all blame for such practices on the Jews does not invalidate his other observations: we will see in the course of our discussion that the problem raised here was central in the economic development of the Donbass coal industry.
The peasant-owned mines were never an economic factor in the production of Donbass coal — even as early as 1884 they accounted for only about 2½ percent of all coal mined in the region. The "capitalist" mines of the greater and lesser merchants and coal producers were rather different. As we shall see, their owners played the most active role in the workings of their professional association, the Congress of Mining Industrialists of South Russia, setting the tone of its policies far more than the foreign giants who dominated the production side of the industry in both coal and metallurgy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Iuzovka and Revolution by Theodore H. Friedgut. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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