Chapter 16 On the Move

In 1870, John James Hughes, a Welsh entrepreneur, sailed from Britain at the head of eight ships. The load consisted of metallurgical equipment, while the passengers included close to a hundred skilled miners and metalworkers.

Hughes’ arrival signaled the beginning of a new era in Ukrainian history. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw major shifts in the region’s economy, social structure, and population dynamics. These changes stemmed from rapid industrialization, as eastern and southern Ukraine became a major beneficiary of economic expansion and urbanization, and the influx of Russian peasants, who provided manual labor in the cities and become the backbone of the industrial proletariat. The same processes were taking place in Galicia, where the oil industry began its European career in the mid-nineteenth century. Rapid industrialization and urbanization were common features of European history in that period, and Ukraine was an important participant. Those processes changed its economic, social, and political landscape for generations to come.

In Russian-ruled Ukraine, first changes began in September 1854 with the landing of British and French expeditionary forces in the Crimea.

Russia’s loss of the Crimean War provoked extensive soul-searching in the imperial government and society. How could the Russian army, which had conquered Paris in 1814, suffer defeat forty years later on territory it considered its own? The death of Emperor Nicholas I, who, weakened by the stress of war, died in March 1855 after thirty years on the throne, made a change of government policy almost inevitable. The new emperor, Alexander II, launched an ambitious reform program to catch up with the West and modernize Russian society, economy, and military. During the war, Russia had nothing but sailing ships to confront the steamboats of the British and French. It sank the ships of its Black Sea Fleet in order to prevent enemy ships from entering Sevastopol’s harbor. Now Russia needed a new navy no matter what. It also needed railroads, lack of which had made it difficult to move troops, ammunition, and provisions to places as remote from the center of the empire as the Crimea. Embarrassingly for St. Petersburg, the British, not the Russians, built the first railroad in the Crimea to connect Balaklava with Sevastopol during the siege of the city.

If Russia wanted to keep the Crimea, it needed a railroad connection to the peninsula and its naval base. The government decided to sell Alaska — another remote part of the empire that was difficult to defend and, as officials believed, vulnerable to seizure by the British — to the United States. But Russia would keep the Crimea. The Crimean Tatars were migrating to the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian fleet and fortifications were gone, but Sevastopol became a site of popular veneration — a new holy place of the Russian Empire. The government approved a plan to connect Moscow and Sevastopol by rail via Kursk and Kharkiv. The problem was lack of money. The treasury did not have it, and the Russian crackdown on the Polish rebels in 1863 produced a reaction that would resemble international sanctions of a later era. The French government convinced James Mayer de Rothschild, a major financier of railroad construction in France, to stop lending money to Russia, while British companies that were prepared to build the railroad could not raise enough capital in the City. The construction of the Moscow-Sevastopol line was postponed until the 1870s, but the idea of building railroads in southern Ukraine firmly established itself in the minds of Russian government, military, and business elites.

The first railroad built there was much more modest than the line that would link Moscow and Sevastopol. It connected Odesa (Odessa) on the Black Sea coast, northwest of the Crimea, with the town of Balta in Podolia. The new railroad was constructed in 1865, four years after a railway line linking Lviv with Peremyshl (Przemyśl), Cracow, and Vienna. Unlike the Lviv line, the one beginning in Odesa had nothing to do with politics, strategy, or administration. Its raison d’être began and ended with economics. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ukraine accounted for 75 percent of all exports of the Russian Empire. The times of Siberian furs as a major imperial export were gone, while those of Siberian oil and gas had not yet arrived.

The cash-strapped empire wanted to increase its exports, which required a railroad, which in turn required money for construction. The governor of Odesa broke that vicious circle with the suggestion of using punitive battalions of the Russian army. Forced labor did the trick — neither for the first nor last time in the empire’s long history. Envisioned as the first section of a railroad linking Odesa with Moscow, the Odesa-Balta line was supposed to go through Kyiv, connecting the Right Bank, with its rebellious Polish nobility, with the imperial heartland and thereby reducing the influence of Warsaw. But the plan made little economic sense. There was little to export from the Kyiv region and the forest zone north of the city; hence imperial strategists dreaming of the political integration of the empire eventually lost the battle to the business lobby. The line from Balta went not to Kyiv but to Poltava and Kharkiv, where it would later connect to the Moscow-Sevastopol line. The latter was built in 1875 after long delays.

The Moscow-Sevastopol line played an important role in the building of a new Russian navy in Sevastopol: in 1871, after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Russian Empire regained its right to a navy on the Black Sea. But the main significance of the line was economic and cultural. On the economic side, it contributed to regional trade and the development of eastern and southern Ukraine; in cultural terms, it linked the distant Crimea to the center of the empire in ways previously unimaginable, promoting Russian cultural colonization of the peninsula. By the end of the nineteenth century, Yalta, originally a small fishing village on the Black Sea coast, had become the summer capital of the empire.

In 1894, when Tsar Alexander III died in his Livadia mansion near Yalta, his body was taken by carriage to Yalta, then by boat to Sevastopol, and from there by railroad to St. Petersburg. By the time of his death, railways crisscrossed Ukraine, linking Odesa with Poltava, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg. From Odesa one could also take a train to Lviv, and Kyiv was linked to Lviv and Warsaw. The first Odesa-Balta line was a mere 137 miles long; by 1914, the overall length of railroads in Ukraine exceeded 10,000 miles. The railways promoted economic development, increased mobility, and broke down old political, economic, and cultural boundaries. Nowhere was that change more profound than in the empire’s newest possessions — the steppe regions of Ukraine.

The steppelands formerly claimed by the nomads had come under the control of the nobility and acquired the reputation of the breadbasket of Europe. The region seemed only to have a short supply of people able to cultivate the virgin land. Chichikov, the main character of Nikolai Gogol’s classic Dead Souls, tries to solve the problem by selling the souls of deceased peasants to the government and “moving” them to the region. But in practice, fewer “souls” and more land meant a better-off peasantry, and nowhere else in the empire were peasants doing as well as in southern Ukraine. At the turn of the twentieth century, the average peasant landholding in Tavrida gubernia, which included the Crimea and steppelands to the north of the peninsula, was forty acres per household, as compared to nine acres in Podolia and Volhynia.

The centuries-old difference between the settled forest-steppe regions and the nomadic south, highlighted by the Christian-Muslim divide and the Ottoman-Polish-Russian border, was slowly receding into the past. Railroads linked grain-producing areas to the north with Black Sea ports in the south, thereby connecting the Ukrainian hinterland to the Mediterranean Sea and rich European markets. The Dnieper, Dniester, and Don trade routes, threatened by nomadic attacks for most of Ukrainian history, were now safe and contributed to the economic revival of the region. The Dnieper–Black Sea trade route around which the Vikings had built the Kyivan state was now delivering on its promise, with the Dnieper rapids as the only remaining logistical impediment.

Railroad construction constituted to the rapid rate of urbanization, which once again benefited the south. The growth of cities was a general phenomenon in Ukraine: by the turn of the twentieth century, Kyiv was the Russian Empire’s seventh-largest city, its population having grown from 25,000 in the early 1830s to 250,000 in 1900. But even that spectacular growth paled in comparison to what was going on in the south. The population of Odesa grew from 25,000 inhabitants in 1814 to 450,000 in 1900. Much of the urban growth resulted from rapid industrialization, and there the south also led the way. The city of Yuzivka — whose population increased more than five times in the decade leading up to 1897, when it reached close to 30,000 inhabitants, and more than doubled in the next twenty years, attaining 70,000 by the revolutionary year 1917 — highlights the close link between industrialization and urbanization in southeastern Ukraine.

The story of Yuzivka began in London in 1868. That year, the successful fifty-three-year-old businessman, inventor, and manager of the Millwall Iron Works Company, John James Hughes, whose departure from Britain begins this chapter, decided to take a sharp turn in life. After the shock of the Crimean War, the Russian government was busy fortifying approaches to the empire on land and sea. During the war, the British and French fleet had bombarded Kronstadt, the island fortress protecting St. Petersburg from the Baltic Sea. To reinforce its fortifications against possible British attack, the Russian government turned, ironically enough, to the Millwall Iron Works. None other than General Eduard Totleben, a hero of the Russian defense of Sevastopol, conducted the negotiations. Hughes went to St. Petersburg to arrange the project. There the Russians offered him a concession to establish metal works in their empire. Hughes accepted the challenge.

Upon arriving in the Azov steppes, the Welshman and his party established themselves in the homestead of Ovechii, a small settlement founded by Zaporozhian Cossacks back in the seventeenth century. But Hughes was hardly interested in the Cossack past of the region. He had bought the land and come to Ovechii for one simple reason — four years earlier, Russian engineers had designated that area as an ideal site for a future metal works, with iron ore, coal, and water all in close proximity. The government had tried to build a plant in that area but failed, lacking expertise in constructing and running metal works. Hughes provided proficiency in both. In January 1872, his newly built iron works produced its first pig iron. In the course of the 1870s, he added more blast furnaces. The works employed close to 1,800 people, becoming the largest metal producer in the empire. The place where the workers lived became known as Yuzivka after the founder’s surname (“Hughesivka”). The steel and mining town would be renamed Staline in 1924 and Donetsk in 1961.

Hughes was one of a very few Western entrepreneurs who actually moved to Ukraine himself, but hundreds of skilled laborers came to the Ukrainian steppes from Britain, France, and Belgium. They were chasing millions of francs and pounds transferred to that region from their home countries. Mainly French, British, and Belgian bankers provided the financial capital that transformed the Ukrainian south. In the early decades of the twentieth century, foreign companies produced more than 50 percent of all Ukrainian steel, over 60 percent of its pig iron, 70 percent of its coal, and 100 percent of its machinery. Russian companies had limited capital and know-how, which they devoted mostly to developing the industrial potential of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The empire could supply one resource in almost unlimited quantities: unskilled labor. Improved sanitary conditions and technological advances meant that more infants survived, and those who survived lived longer. More people in a village meant smaller plots of land per household. Relative overpopulation became a major issue in the villages of Ukraine and Russia in the decades following the emancipation of the serfs. The Industrial Revolution, which arrived in the empire after a significant delay, meant that “surplus” population could now funnel into the growing cities. Since the 1870s, the booming company towns of southern Ukraine had become magnets for hundreds of thousands of peasants leaving their impoverished villages. Most came to the region from the southern provinces of Russia, where the soil was much less productive than in Ukraine and land hunger more pronounced.

Among the Russian peasants attracted by the jobs available in Yuzivka, which were dangerous but well paid by the standards of the time, was the young Nikita Khrushchev. He was fourteen years old in 1908, when he moved from the Russian village of Kalinovka, approximately forty miles northeast of the Cossack capital of Hlukhiv, to Yuzivka to join his family. His father, Sergei, a seasonal worker on a railroad in the Yuzivka region before he moved his family there and became a full-time miner, never abandoned his dream of saving enough money to buy a horse and move back to Kalinovka. His son, who had no such dream, embraced city life and became a mining mechanic before joining the Bolshevik Party in the midst of the Revolution of 1917 and embarking on a stunning political career. He would be the leader of the Soviet Union during the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Nikita Khrushchev was not the only future Soviet leader whose family left a village in Russia to benefit from the industrial boom in southern Ukraine. A few years earlier than the Khrushchevs, Ilia Brezhnev, the father of Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s onetime protégé and successor at the helm of the Soviet Union, moved to the Ukrainian industrial town of Kamenske (present-day Dniprodzerzhynsk). Leonid was born in that steel town in 1906. The Khrushchevs and the Brezhnevs took part in a major Russian peasant migration into southern Ukraine that contributed to the underrepresentation of ethnic Ukrainians in the cities. In 1897, the year of the first and only imperial Russian census, approximately 17 million Ukrainians and 3 million Russians resided in the Ukrainian gubernias of the empire — a ratio of almost six to one. But in the cities, they were on a par, with slightly more than 1 million Russians and slightly fewer than 1 million Ukrainians. In the major cities and industrial centers, Russians constituted a majority. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the population of Kharkiv, more than 50 percent in Kyiv, and almost 50 percent in Odesa.

Few ethnic Ukrainians joined the entrepreneurial class, and those who did so lived mainly in central Ukraine, where in the second half of the nineteenth century development of the sugar industry, dependent on local beet production, made the fortunes of a number of Ukrainian entrepreneurs, most notably the Symyrenko family. One of its members, Platon Symyrenko, supported Taras Shevchenko after his return from exile and sponsored an edition of his Kobzar. (Today, the family is known mainly for the Renet Semerenko apple, named in honor of Platon by his son Lev, who developed the fruit.) The Symyrenkos were more the exception than the rule. Russian, Polish, and Jewish entrepreneurs outnumbered Ukrainians by significant margins.

With the start of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the same ethnic ratio applied to the industrial working class, which was largely Russian. Jewish artisans dominated the trades as they moved from the small towns of formerly Polish-ruled Ukraine to the large centers in the east and south. Kharkiv, in the east, was beyond the Pale of Settlement — the area where Jews were allowed to settle — but the rest of Ukraine, including the cities of Odesa and Katerynoslav (today Dnipropetrovsk), was open to Jewish settlement. Jews constituted between 12 and 14 percent of the overall population of Volhynia, Podolia, and southern Ukraine but comprised the majority in the small towns and made up significant minorities in the cities. They accounted for 37 percent of the citizens of Odesa and were the third-largest ethnic group in Katerynoslav.

Why were most Ukrainians uninvolved in the processes of industrialization and urbanization, although they made up the country’s ethnic majority? Here again, the stories of the Khrushchevs and Brezhnevs are useful for understanding the situation. Both families came to southeastern Ukraine from the Russian gubernia of Kursk, where in the second half of the nineteenth century the size of an average peasant landholding did not exceed seven acres. They came to the Katerynoslav gubernia, where that figure was twenty-five acres, and the land, the so-called black earth, was much more fertile than in the Kursk region. As noted earlier, the local peasants were doing better than their counterparts anywhere else in the Russian Empire. They preferred and often could afford to stay home. If pressed, many preferred to resettle as farmers in the distant steppes of the imperial east than to move to a nearby steel or mining town and work in the grinding conditions of early-twentieth-century industry.

This applied particularly to peasants from the central and northern provinces of Ukraine, such as the Chernihiv gubernia, where the average household landholding did not exceed seventeen acres of rather poor land. The family story of another Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, offers a glimpse into that part of the history of Ukrainian migrations. In the early twentieth century, Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather, Panteleimon Hopkalo, moved from the Chernihiv gubernia to the steppes of the Stavropol region, where Gorbachev was born in 1934. Conditions in Stavropol and the North Caucasus were as close to those in Ukraine as one could imagine under the circumstances. Many Ukrainian peasants unwilling to move to the city and searching for free land migrated much farther, all the way to the Russian Far East. In the two decades before the start of World War I, more than 1.5 million Ukrainians settled on the southern and eastern frontiers of the Russian Empire, where land was available.

The peasant migration driven by land hunger was truly an all-Ukrainian story, even more significant in Austrian Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia than in the Russian Empire. The average size of a landholding in eastern Galicia in the early twentieth century was six acres — three acres less than in the most overpopulated Ukrainian province of Volhynia on the Russian side of the border. Besides, land in the Carpathian Mountains was usually much less productive than in Volhynia and Podolia. Peasants were leaving the region en masse. “This land cannot hold so many people and endure so much poverty,” says a character in Galician Ukrainian writer Vasyl Stefanyk’s short story “The Stone Cross,” written in 1899 and inspired by the mass exodus of Galician peasants to North America. In Stefanyk’s native village alone, five hundred peasants left their homes in search of a better life.

Approximately 600,000 Ukrainians bade farewell to Austria-Hungary before 1914. They made their way to Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the United States, where Ukrainian migrants worked in the mines and mills, and to the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta in Canada, where peasants received land and settled the prairies. Ukrainians were not the only group seeking a better life in North America. Jews from the small towns of Galicia and Bukovyna often preceded them. Approximately 350,000 Jews left Galicia for the United States in the decades leading up to World War I. The reason was simple: like peasants, impoverished townsfolk had little economic future in the eastern provinces of Austria-Hungary. Emigrants of all ethnicities and religious affiliations contributed handsomely to the economies and cultures of their new homelands. Among the Galician émigrés to the United States were ancestors of many Hollywood stars and entertainment celebrities, including the Ukrainian parents of Jack Palance (Palahniuk) and the Jewish grandparents of Barbara Streisand. The parents of Ramon (Roman) Hnatyshyn, the governor-general of Canada from 1990 to 1995, came from Bukovyna; those of Andy Warhol, from the Lemko region.

Galicia was the poorest province of the empire — a situation decried by Polish businessman and member of the imperial and provincial parliaments Stanisław Szczepanowski in his book Galician Misery (1888). Comparing labor productivity and consumption with the rest of Europe, he wrote, “Every resident of Galicia does one-quarter of a man’s work and eats one-half of a man’s food.” Industrialization did not bypass Galicia entirely, but it did not markedly improve the economic fortunes of the region or the well-being of its population. The petroleum that bubbled to the surface around the towns of Drohobych and Boryslav had caused nothing but trouble for local residents since time immemorial, and only in the mid-nineteenth century was the malodorous black substance first put to use by local pharmacists, who learned how to extract kerosene. Among the first beneficiaries of the new discovery were the doctors and patients of the Lviv General Hospital. In 1853, it became the first public building in the world to use only petroleum lamps for lightning.

Szczepanowski was one of the first entrepreneurs to make a fortune out of Galician oil by introducing steam drills. An idealist and a Polish nation builder by persuasion, he provided health care for his workers, many of whom were Polish migrants to the region, and tried to improve their plight but eventually went bankrupt. Business and nation building did not necessarily go hand in hand in Austrian Galicia. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, British, Belgian, and German companies moved into the region, employing deep-drilling methods first introduced by Canadian engineer and entrepreneur William Henry McGarvey. New management replaced small entrepreneurs, many of them Jewish. Nor was the unskilled labor of Ukrainian and Polish peasants (the former constituted up to half the workforce, the latter about a third) in demand any longer. By 1910, oil production had increased to 2 million tons, accounting for about 4 percent of world output, the greatest producers at the time being the United States and the Russian Empire.

Oil brought more money and educational opportunities to the region. A mining school opened in Boryslav. A number of city buildings constructed in that era still stand, reminding visitors of the “good old days.” But overall, the oil boom had a limited impact on the economic situation in the region. The population of Boryslav, the town at the center of the action, tripled in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and reached 12,500 inhabitants. So did the population of the entire oilfield district, which grew to 42,000 in the last decade of the century. But that was a drop in the bucket if one takes Galicia as a whole. The population of the capital city of Lviv increased from roughly 50,000 to more than 200,000 between 1870 and 1910. This looks impressive, but only if one does not compare it with the impact of economic development in the same period in the cities of Dnieper Ukraine. The population of Katerynoslav, at the center of the metallurgical boom, increased eleven times in slightly more than fifty years, reaching 220,000 by 1914. The largest city in Ukraine was Odesa, with 670,000 citizens, closely followed by Kyiv, with its 630,000 inhabitants. That represented almost a tenfold increase of Kyiv’s population since the mid-nineteenth century.

Despite difference in levels of industrialization and urbanization in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian provinces of Ukraine, both parts of the country underwent major economic and social transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The increasingly rapid movement of capital, goods, and people, as well as ideas and information, marked the birth of modern society. The new division of labor changed the relative importance of traditional social groups and helped create new ones, especially the industrial working class, leading to the economic rise of some regions and the decline of others. Among the beneficiaries of the change was the Ukrainian south, with its burgeoning international trade channeled through the Black Sea ports and its rapidly growing industrial base.

A new economic and cultural boundary replaced the old one that had distinguished Ukraine’s agricultural north and center from its nomadic south. The south now became the country’s industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Its rural population remembered the times of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, had hardly experienced serfdom, and was better-off than the rest of the country. The discovery of iron ore and coal deposits turned the region into an industrial boom area. Coming of age under the control of the Russian imperial administration, with a population more ethnically and religiously diverse than in the areas further north and with the highest urbanization rate in Ukraine, this region would lead the country into the political, social, and cultural turmoil of the twentieth century.