Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905

by Charters Wynn

Overview

In this major reassessment of Russian labor history, Charters Wynn shows that in Imperial Russia's primary steel and mining region the same class that posed a powerful challenge to the tsarist government also undermined the revolutionary movement with its pogromist violence. From the last decades of the nineteenth century through Russia's First Revolution in 1905, the revolutionary parties succeeded in inciting the predominantly young, male "peasant-workers" of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend region to take part in general strikes, rallies, and armed confrontation with troops. However, the parties were never able to control the unrest their agitation helped unleash: Wynn provides evidence that the workers also committed devastating pogromist attacks on Jews, radical students, and artisans. Until now the prevailing image of the Russian working class has been largely based on the skilled and educated workers of St. Petersburg and Moscow. By focusing on the unskilled and semi-skilled laborers of the ethnically diverse Donbass-Dnepr Bend region, Wynn reveals the "low consciousness" that coexisted with radicalism within the Russian working class and traces its origins in the bleak and violent frontier culture of the pit villages and steel towns.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691600253
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #131
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms

The Donbassâ?"Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870â?"1905

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By Charters Wynn

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03152-1

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CHAPTER 1

The Industrial Boom: 1870–1900

I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by a Frenchman, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There fin the Donbass–Dnepr Bend] I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever their nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money.... So I became a Communist. (Nikita Khrushchev)

The rapid industrialization of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend occurred in what had been an economically undeveloped region, even by Russian standards. Before the last decades of the nineteenth century, the future home of Russia's most important mining and metallurgical region was of such little consequence economically that the sparsely populated agrarian area was still known by the epithet dikoe pole," or "wild field." By the turn of the century, the Donbass–Dnepr Bend had one of the greatest regional concentrations of workers and large enterprises in all of Russia.

The Donbass–Dnepr Bend was neither ideally suited for nor prepared to handle an economic boom in the late nineteenth century. Until relatively late in Russian history, when Catherine the Great colonized the region in the late eighteenth century, its vulnerability to invaders had kept it an untamed frontier. The Donbass–Dnepr Bend is located on the seemingly endless southern steppe, and unlike the steppe to its north, it lacked even the protection offered by forests. Easily penetrable from all directions and the headquarters of the Cossacks, the Donbass–Dnepr Bend steppe had long attracted only fugitive serfs fleeing the worsening plight of the Russian peasantry. It is not surprising, then, that the abundant raw materials with which the Donbass–Dnepr Bend was blessed were left untouched when Russia first attempted to industrialize.

Russia's first metallurgical boom occurred long before the boom in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend. Russia developed into the world's largest producer and exporter of iron in the late eighteenth century. It was the employment of cheap serf labor in the Urals, not advanced technology, that allowed Russia to attain and hold this position of international supremacy in metallurgy until the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the rapidly widening technological gap between Russia and the West, as well as the absence of coal in the Ural Mountains, took its toll. As John McKay summarized Russia's early industrial development: "A hearty newcomer under Peter and a lusty youngster under Catherine, eighteenth-century Russian metallurgy ... failed to come of age and adopt the methods of the industrial revolution." The Russian iron manufactories in the Urals failed to introduce the technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the industry in Western Europe and the United States: coke smelting, puddling and rolling, the hot blast, and later the converter and the open-hearth furnace. From its position as world leader, the Russian iron industry fell so precipitously that in the mid-nineteenth century it accounted for only 4 percent of world production. For an industrial renaissance to occur in Russia, resources outside the Urals, both natural and entrepreneurial, needed to be uncovered and exploited.

It was military humiliation in the Crimean War (1853–56) that finally pushed the tsarist state to start implementing policies designed to promote rapid industrial development. Russia had been unable to sustain a war with the more industrialized European powers; the defeat exposed the extent to which military success was coming to depend on industrial development. Many of the most powerful figures in this still premodern, autocratic state grudgingly realized that unless Russia took the politically risky steps necessary to facilitate the country's industrialization, the Russian empire's international position would continue to deteriorate. A succession of finance ministers adopted measures that in combination represented an unprecedented government attempt to stimulate industrialization. Some of these measures—emancipation of the serfs, fiscal reforms and protectionist tariffs, large-scale railroad construction, and the encouragement of foreign investment—were new to Russia, while other aspects of the government's financial policy, notably increased taxation of the peasantry, were all too familiar. In the short term, the government effort appeared to be a great success. As the Donbass–Dnepr Bend enjoyed "an influx of capital and initiative beyond anything experienced in Russia since the time of Peter the Great," the region grew quickly and emerged as an internationally prominent industrial heartland.

Over a dozen new iron and steel plants, which were for the most part as technologically sophisticated as any in the world, produced a growth rate with few parallels in the Western world. Donbass–Dnepr Bend industry grew with "American speed" to become the main Russian producer of iron and steel. Output statistics graphically demonstrate how suddenly heavy industry rose and flourished. After providing 0.3 percent of Russia's pig iron in 1867, the Donbass–Dnepr Bend in 1885 produced 2 million puds of pig iron, still only 6.2 percent of the empire's total production. In 1900, just fifteen years later, workers poured 91.8 million puds of metal out of Donbass–Dnepr Bend furnaces, over half (51.3 percent) of the Russian total. Russian output of pig iron increased 178 percent from 1885 to 1900, an increase due largely to the plants in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend; and Russia rose from eighth to fifth place among the largest producers in the world. By 1900, Donbass–Dnepr Bend workers on average were almost six times more productive than workers in the technologically backward factories in the Urals.

Mining also achieved a remarkable growth rate during the late nineteenth century. Coal mining began earlier than the metallurgical industry in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend, but it is only in comparison with metallurgy that the coal industry's growth could be considered anything less than meteoric. The mining of the Donets coalfield's rich veins, which began in the late eighteenth centurv, progressed slowly until the region's late-nineteenth-centurv takeoff. Table 1 illustrates how rapidly coal mining grew in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend, especially between 1895 and 1900. With coal mines in the Donets Basin extracting 68 percent of the Russian total in 1900, the region's share of national output became even more dominant in coal mining than in metallurgy'.

Similarly spectacular growth occurred in the Krivoi Rog iron fields, located in the western part of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend. The Krivoi Rog held Russia's largest and richest iron deposits, although for all practical purposes no iron mining took place there before 1885. Just how little was known of the Krivoi Reg's rich deposits prior to the late nineteenth century is conveyed by a German traveler, who could write in 1841 that "in all of the South of Russia there is not one place where one could find any metal. This huge area of Europe is deprived of metals; not enough iron can be found to make a single nail." By 1900, Krivoi Rog iron-mine production accounted for over 56 percent of the Russian total.

The economic boom in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend was the greatest success story in Russia's late-nineteenth-century industrialization drive. The government deserves a large part of the credit. Construction of the Ekaterinin railroad line brought together the necessary ingredients for a modern metallurgical industry. Although the roughly two hundred miles separating the coal of the Donets Basin and the iron ore of the Krivoi Rog is not a great distance, the cost of transporting these bulky raw materials by oxcart or horse and wagon on dirt or, often, mud roads had been prohibitive. Construction of the Ekaterinin railroad began in 1879 and was completed in 1886. During the 1890s, railroad construction expanded so rapidly in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend that the region became interconnected by a railroad network denser than anywhere else in the empire.

Providing a cheap transportation link between the region's iron and coal deposits and between the Donbass–Dnepr Bend and other regions of Russia, while crucial, was not the only way government-sponsored railroad construction stimulated industrial investment in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend. Russia's railroad-building boom during the late nineteenth century created an enormous demand for coal, iron, and steel. This demand, coupled with guaranteed government contracts (at generously inflated prices) for the large quantities of rails and for the steel needed to manufacture locomotives and railroad cars—as well as concessions, low-cost state loans, direct subsidies, protectionist tariffs for coal, iron, and steel, and a government campaign to publicize the high profits being made—attracted a flood of foreign investment into the Donbass–Dnepr Bend.

Foreigners played the central role in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend's rapid industrial development; industrial workers employed there were far more likely to work for foreign bosses than not. A few Russian joint-stock companies operated in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend, but French and Belgian corporations built almost all the modern steel mills and the bulk of the large mines in the southern industrial region. Western European capital and technology also helped build the railways.

The foreign contribution to the industrial development of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend began even before the opening of the Ekaterinin railway. A single foreign industrialist, the celebrated Welshman John Hughes, showed the way by building a modern ironworks in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend in the early 1870s. With the backing of financial circles in England and leading governmental figures in St. Petersburg, Hughes put into operation in Iuzovka (Hughes-ovka) the first of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend's large, modern ironworks, and he opened coal mines just outside the city. The factory and mines together employed almost thirteen thousand workers by the late 1890s. The Russian government had encouraged Hughes to invest by granting him free rights to the coal and iron on the rich crown lands there, a thirty-seven-year loan of half a million rubles, and a premium on the pig iron and rails he produced. Even with all this support, the difficulties of manufacturing on the steppe proved enormous. Despite producing more pig iron than any other company in Russia, Hughes's firm, the New Russia Coal, Iron, and Railmaking Company, "almost closed for good" in 1885, according to one contemporary study. The potential profitability of Hughes's venture was realized only after the completion of the Ekaterinin railway and the introduction of additional protectionist measures in the following year. The New Russia Company's profits began to soar, and foreign investment poured into Donbass–Dnepr Bend industry.

Russians and Ukrainians displayed little interest in investing in Donbass–Dnepr Bend industry. Following the opening in 1887 of the sole Russian-built metallurgical factory—the enormous Briansk Ironworks in Ekaterinoslav, which employed more than seven thousand workers during the 1890s—fifteen large foreign-owned steel mills opened in rapid succession in southern Russia. By the first years of the twentieth century, foreign-controlled companies produced about 90 percent of the iron and steel in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend. In some respects, the economy there was tied more closely to Europe than to central Russia. In addition to the capital invested in Donbass–Dnepr Bend industry, almost all the technology and know-how—including, initially, the most highly skilled laborers, foremen, technicians, engineers, and directors—were European in origin. Their particular nationality depended on the origins of a firm's capital. At the New Russia Company's ironworks in Iuzovka, for example, Englishmen initially filled almost every responsible position, from director down to highly skilled worker. By the end of the century, however, plants reduced somewhat their reliance on foreign administrators and skilled workers, supplementing them with personnel educated and trained in Russia.

The Donbass–Dnepr Bend's modern steel mills exemplified what Alexander Gerschenkron meant when he attributed Russia's rapid economic growth to the advantages of industrializing late. Foreign investors thought the positive aspects of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend's clean slate outweighed the negative aspects of investing in an economically backward and undeveloped region. Foreign steel producers in already-developed countries considered the Donbass–Dnepr Bend a perfect place to implement recent scientific discoveries and technological innovations in metallurgy. The costliness of reequipping outdated steel factories in developed Western regions was a disincentive that did not exist in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend. In the late nineteenth century, the annual output of an average blast furnace in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend exceeded that of one in Great Britain, Germany, France, or Belgium. Only the furnaces in the United States produced more.

Russian operations functioned alongside foreign-owned enterprises to a greater extent in the coal industry than in metallurgy. But even in mining, domestic ownership dramatically declined in the late nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Donbass–Dnepr Bend coal industry consisted almost entirely of extremely small, Russian-owned mines. These simple operations were referred to as peasant mines, and they could extract coal only from seams close to the surface. "Whether on gentry or communal lands, they were actually little more than small vertical holes a few meters deep. A hand-operated windlass raising and lowering a bucket of coal, just as in a well, was the most sophisticated device." It is not surprising, then, that by 1890 peasant mines were responsible for only around 3 percent of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend coal industry's production. While there was more than enough shallow coal to keep such peasant operations busy, most Donbass–Dnepr Bend coal was located in seams over one hundred meters below the surface. The construction of deep shaft mines required capital and expertise far beyond peasant capabilities.

Members of the local nobility opened most of the first large coal mines in the Donets Basin. A few of these landowners, such as the Rutchenko family, invested thousands of rubles in the mines constructed on their land. Generally, though, local industrialists were reluctant to invest in laborsaving machinery and equipment. Noble mines were often just larger versions of the peasants' primitive operations. Even when blessed with rich coal deposits on their land, noblemen in the Donets Basin were no more motivated to become serious businessmen than were the majority of their peers elsewhere in Russia. For most, coal mining was merely a sideline, a supplement to their agricultural earnings. The emancipation of the serfs deprived these coal operators of their cheap labor force, and during the course of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend's industrialization drive, the role of such local industrialists rapidly decreased until it was negligible.

With the winnowing out of the smaller, domestic coal operators, it was not just the steelworkers who worked in large, foreign-owned enterprises. Miners employed at the sixteen largest mines extracted over 73 percent of the Donbass–Dnepr Bend's total coal output in 1900, while miners at just the seven largest extracted 44 percent. But even in the large, relatively modern mines that foreign firms built, mechanization was limited to bringing coal above ground. Down in the dark shaft, a miner cut the coal "sitting, kneeling, lying on his side, his back, or his belly," usually equipped with nothing more sophisticated than a pick, hammer, and shovel. The foreign-owned coal industry in the Donets Basin chose not to invest in drills, preferring to rely on Russia's cheap labor despite the difficulties in recruiting a stable, hardworking labor force.

The growth of the mining and steel industries also stimulated the growth of metalworking, machine building, chemicals, engineering, and other support industries, which employed large numbers of workers in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend. Fourteen finishing steel plants, fifteen machine-construction and mechanical factories, and seventeen other factories were constructed in the Donbass–Dnepr Bend between 1887 and 1897 to manufacture tools and some of the machines needed in the steelworks and mines.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms by Charters Wynn. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction 3

Pt. 1 The Working-Class Milieu 13

1 The Industrial Boom: 1870-1900 15

2 The Labor Force 37

3 Working-Class Daily Life 67

Pt. 2 The Labor and Revolutionary Movements 95

4 Late-Nineteenth-Century Unrest 97

5 The Rise of Political Radicalism 131

6 The Revolutionary Surge: 1903 to October 1905 165

7 The Reactionary Backlash: 1903 to October 1905 198

8 The Bid for Power: December 1905 227

Conclusion 255

Selected Bibliography 269

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 1993 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, American Historical Association

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