Industrialization

With the liquidation of serfdom, the way was finally cleared for the modernization and industrialization of the empire. This process had already been embarked upon by many countries of Western Europe and America, but the experience of the Russian Empire was unique in a number of important respects.

As everywhere, one of the first harbingers of economic modernization was the railroad. For military reasons (a major cause of the Russian defeat in the Crimean War had been lack of adequate transport), as well as economic ones, the imperial government rushed to create a network of railroads. In Russian-ruled Ukraine the first railroad tracks were laid in 1866–71 between Odessa and Balta to expedite grain exports. By the 1870s – the high point of railroad construction in Ukraine – railroads connected all the major Ukrainian cities with each other. And, most important, they linked Ukraine with Moscow, the center of imperial markets.

Map 18 Industrial regions in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century

Between 1870 and 1900, and especially during the frenetic 1890s, two areas in southeastern Ukraine – the Donets basin and Kryvyi Rih – became the fastest growing industrial regions in the empire and, quite possibly, in the world. The combination of factors making this growth possible were the generous government support for industrial development (so that these undertakings were practically risk-free); the continued rise in domestic demand for coal and iron; and abundant Western capital (confronted with shrinking profits in highly developed Europe) that rushed to take advantage of the alluring opportunities in Ukraine.

Signs of the coming boom first appeared in the coal-mining industry of the Donets basin. Between 1870 and 1900, when coal production jumped by over 1000%, the region produced close to 70% of the empire’s coal. As the number of mines in the Donets basin increased, so too did the work force: in 1885, it numbered 32,000; in 1900, 82,000; and in 1913, 168,000. The industry was controlled by about twenty joint stock companies and by 1900 about 94% of their stock belonged to French and Belgian investors, who had poured millions of rubles into the development of the mines. These companies formed syndicates that gained a virtual monopoly on the production and sale of coal.

In the 1880s, about a decade after the coal boom, came the large-scale development of iron ore production. Concentrated in the Kryvyi Rih region, the growth of the metallurgical industry was even more spectacular than that of coal mining. The stage was set in 1885 when a railroad was built linking Kryvyi Rih with the coal mines of the Donets basin. The government offered entrepreneurs in the budding metallurgical industry an incentive that few could ignore, guaranteeing to buy many of their products at greatly inflated prices. Western investors, again led by the French, responded enthusiastically. By 1914 they had put up more than 180 million rubles for the construction of some of the largest, most technologically advanced foundries in the world. Some of these enterprises grew so fast that they became bustling cities. Iuzivka, for example, named after the Welshman John Hughes, who established a metallurgical plant at the site, became the important industrial city of Donetsk. As late as the 1870s, the Kryvyi Rih region had only 13,000 workers, but by 1917 the number had increased more than ten times to 137,000. Even more striking is the comparison of the growth rate of the metals industry in Ukraine with that of Russia’s old metal-producing centers in the Urals: while the antiquated plants of the Urals only managed to raise their production of iron ore fourfold between 1870 and 1900, those of Ukraine had increased by 158 times.

But while the basic, extractive (raw-material-producing) industries of Ukraine burgeoned, other types did not. This underdevelopment was especially evident in the production of finished goods. At the turn of the century, the only industries in Ukraine that showed a marked improvement in the production of finished products were, not surprisingly, factories specializing in farm machinery and, to a lesser degree, locomotive works. For the vast majority of its finished products, Ukraine depended on Russia.

The question often raised in the evaluation of the remarkable industrialization of southern Ukraine is the degree to which it benefited Ukraine as a whole. Contemporary Soviet scholars argue that, on balance, the impact was positive. As a result of the growth of transportation and the quantum leap in the transfer of goods and materials between north and south, the economies of Russia and Ukraine finally and irrevocably became integrated. This led to the creation of a larger, more productive and more efficient economic unit – a vast all-Russian market, as they call it – from which both lands benefited greatly. In fact, Soviet economic historians like Ivan Hurzhyi imply that, in the new economic context, Ukraine performed even better than Russia: not only did it gain access to a huge market but, because of its faster industrialization, it consistently enlarged its share of this market.² Any suggestion that the Russian heartland derived greater economic advantage from linkage with the Ukrainian periphery is angrily rejected by the Soviets. To buttress their argument, they point out that it was a Russian imperial government that stimulated the faster growth rate in Ukraine.

But Soviet scholars did not always view the issue in this manner. In the 1920s, before the imposition of Stalinist orthodoxy, the leading Soviet historians, such as Mikhail Pokrovsky in Russia and Matvii Iavorsky in Ukraine, unequivocally reiterated that despite industrialization, Ukraine was exploited by Russia.³ Lenin himself declared in a speech in Switzerland in 1914 (which is not included in the Soviet editions of his works) that “it [Ukraine] has become for Russia what Ireland was for England: exploited in the extreme and receiving nothing in return.”⁴

How was the alleged exploitation of Ukraine to be reconciled with its industrial growth? In 1928, Mykhailo Volobuev, a Russian Communist economist in Ukraine, provided an explanation.

The 19th century also brought major changes to the cities and towns of Ukraine. However, the tempo and focus of these transformations varied considerably. Prior to 1861, except for the rapidly growing Black Sea ports like Odessa, urban growth was sluggish. In the small- to medium-sized towns of the Left Bank, like Poltava, Romny, Sumy, and Kharkiv, numerous trade fairs (iarmarky) – which the region hosted and for which it was famous – slightly increased the population. On the Right Bank, urban growth was somewhat greater because of the influx of Jews to such centers of trade and handicrafts as Bila Tserkva, Berdychiv, and Zhytomyr. The vast majority of Ukraine’s urban population (which accounted for 10% of the total) lived in towns with less than 20,000 inhabitants. Only Odessa had a population higher than 100,000.

Radical changes occurred in the latter part of the century, especially between 1870 and 1900, when the rate of urban growth jumped sharply, particularly in the large cities.

The greater mobility of the peasants after 1861, the expansion of industry and trade, and especially the construction of railroads, which allowed the concentration of economic activity in a few strategically located centers, accounted for much of this growth. As the big cities grew, the towns began to stagnate and by the turn of the century most urban dwellers lived in large cities. Yet these developments did not mean that Ukraine was rapidly urbanizing. Far from it. While the population of the cities multiplied, so did that of the countryside. In 1900 only 13% of Ukraine’s total population was urban – less than Russia’s 15% and nowhere near West European countries like England, for example, where 72% of the population lived in towns and cities. The emergence of the proletariat

With accelerated economic development came equally rapid social changes. Of these, the most important was the appearance of a new and as yet relatively small class – the proletariat. Unlike peasants, the proletarians (or industrial workers) did not own the means of production. They sold their labor rather than their produce. And they worked with machines. Because they worked in large, complex enterprises, industrial workers tended to be more knowledgeable and sophisticated than peasants. Because they labored in huge factories with thousands of their fellows, they were quicker to develop a sense of group consciousness and solidarity. And, most important, the highly structured and interdependent nature of their work meant that they were more amenable to organization than were peasants.

Unlike Russia, where enserfed peasants had been assigned to work in factories since the 18th century, industrial workers appeared in appreciable numbers in Ukraine only in the mid 19th century. Initially, most of them were engaged in food production, specifically in the huge sugar refineries of the Right Bank. But the vast majority of the sugar workers were not proletarians in the true sense because their work was seasonal and in the off-season they returned to their villages to work their plots. The half-peasant, half-proletarian character of these workers was typical for most of the empire, but it was especially so among Ukraine’s sugar workers.

It was the workers in heavy industry – the coal miners of the Donbas and the iron-ore producers of Kryvyi Rih – who were true proletarians. One could find among them the largest percentage of full-time workers whose fathers and grandfathers had also worked in industry. Yet even among them, there were many who still maintained ties to their villages. In 1897 the total number of industrial workers in Ukraine was about 425,000, with close to half concentrated in the heavy industries of Katerynoslav province. Since 1863 their number had increased by 400%. Yet industrial workers still constituted only 7% of the labor force, and the proletariat remained a small minority in the sea of peasants.

Industrial working conditions in Ukraine, as in the rest of the Russian Empire, were deplorable by European standards. Even after the government legislated improvements in the 1890s, shifts of ten, twelve, or fifteen hours were common. Safety precautions and medical care were practically nonexistent. And the pay (almost all of which went for food and squalid quarters) of the average worker in Ukraine was only a fraction of that earned by his European counterpart. Little wonder that strikes and other confrontations between workers and employers became increasingly frequent. Other social changes

Major modifications also occurred in the intelligentsia, the other newly formed class. Industrial development, social change, modernization of legal institutions, and the growth of the zemstva created an increased demand for educated people. The government responded by establishing more professional and technical schools. In Ukraine the number of students rose from 1200 in 1865 to over 4000 in the mid 1890s. By 1897 there were about 24,000 individuals with some form of higher education. The social origins of the intelligentsia also changed. At the beginning of the century, the vast majority of its members were of gentry origin. But by 1900 only 20–25% came from the nobility and the very rich; the remainder were mostly sons of burghers, clerics, and professionals. Peasants and workers, however, were still rare in the universities, mainly because of the lack of adequate academic preparation. With the establishment of higher schools for women, these too began to enter the intelligentsia in increasing numbers. New occupational groups such as engineers, physicians, lawyers, and teachers grew rapidly. No longer composed primarily of socially isolated and alienated sons of the nobility, the more broadly based intelligentsia now moved to the forefront of modernization.

Compared to the societies of Western Europe, the Russian Empire in general, and Ukraine in particular, was marked by a sociological anomaly: its bourgeoisie was so small and underdeveloped as to be insignificant. In Ukraine there was simply too little money to give rise to a bourgeoisie. Government policies drained away capital to the north; domestic trade (especially the fairs) was largely in the hands of Russian merchants; and industry, as we have seen, was owned almost totally by foreigners. Naturally, there were extremely wealthy people in Ukraine, over 100,000 by some estimates. But most of them derived their income not from factories and commercial enterprises but from their estates. Ukrainians even lacked a petite bourgeoisie, that is, artisans and shopkeepers. Business, both large and small, was in the hands of Russians and Jews. Modernization and the missing Ukrainians

Modernization in Ukraine created several paradoxes. As Ukraine’s importance as the granary of Europe grew, poverty increased in its countryside. And although its industrial boom was one of the largest in Europe, Ukraine still remained basically an agrarian society. Perhaps most striking was the fact that although Ukrainians constituted the vast majority of the population, they hardly participated in these transformations. Statistics best underscore this point. Among the most experienced workers in the heavy industry of the south, only 25% of coal miners and 30% of metallurgical workers were Ukrainians. It was Russians who constituted the majority in these occupations. Even in the sugar refineries of the Right Bank there were almost as many Russian as Ukrainian workers.

Turning to the intelligentsia, one encounters a similar phenomenon. In 1897, Ukrainians made up only 16% of lawyers, 25% of teachers, and less than 10% of writers and artists in Ukraine. Of 127,000 individuals involved in “mental work” only one-third were Ukrainian. And in 1917 only 11% of the students in Kiev University were of Ukrainian origin. The lack of Ukrainians in the cities was striking. At the turn of the century, they made up less than one-third of all urban dwellers; Russians and Jews accounted for the remainder. As a rule, the bigger the city, the smaller was the number of Ukrainians living in it. In 1897, only 5.6% of Odessa’s population was Ukrainian and in 1920 the percentage sank to 2.9%. In Kiev in 1874, those who considered Ukrainian to be their native language constituted 60% of the population; by 1897 the percentage had sunk to 22% and in 1917 to 16%. Clearly, modernization was bypassing the Ukrainians.

Why was the number of non-Ukrainians so great in those areas that were modernizing? In explaining the heavy preponderance of Russians in the proletariat, of utmost importance was the fact that, unlike in Ukraine, industry had existed in Russia since the 18th century. When the sudden boom occurred in the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih, creating an urgent demand for experienced workers, Russians were welcomed with open arms. A contributing reason for this massive influx of workers from the north was the fact that Russian industries were stagnating at the time whereas wages in the booming Ukrainian mines and foundries averaged about 50% more than in Russia.

In the cities, the Russian presence had been growing since Ukrainian lands had been incorporated into the empire. Because many of the towns and cities functioned as administrative and military centers, they attracted Russian bureaucrats and soldiers. As trade and industry grew, so too did the number of non-Ukrainians in the urban centers. Thus, as early as 1832, about 50% of the merchants and 45% of the factory owners in Ukraine were Russians. For reasons mentioned earlier, they had more capital to invest than Ukrainians. As well, many Russian peasants were forced by the infertility of their soil to seek alternate ways of making a living in the cities. Peasant newcomers from the north often became successful merchants in Ukraine, especially on the Left Bank and in the south, where they found numerous opportunities and little competition from the native populace.

The other major non-Ukrainian element in the cities and towns of Ukraine was the Jews. As the focus of economic activity shifted from country estates to cities, and as emancipation loosened the regulations that restricted Jewish mobility, great numbers of Jews moved into urban centers. As a result, the towns of the Right Bank, where most of the Jews in the Russian Empire lived, became preponderantly Jewish. By the late 19th century, the Jewish presence in the large cities also expanded rapidly. In Odessa more than half the population was Jewish, and the city was one of the largest Jewish centers in the world. In 1863 Kiev had 3000 Jewish inhabitants; by 1910 the number had risen to 50,000. Because most of the educated Jews tended to speak Russian, they added to the Russian character of Ukraine’s cities.

Cities were also centers of education and culture, and so were home to the majority of the intelligentsia. Non-Ukrainian urban dwellers had easiest access to education and occupational opportunities and, therefore, predominated among the intelligentsia of Ukraine. For the most part, Ukrainian members of the intelligentsia were located in the countryside and small towns where many worked in the zemstva as physicians, agronomists, statisticians, and village teachers. Few Ukrainians belonged to the intellectual elite that dominated the universities and press in the large cities.

But why were the Ukrainians so reluctant to enter the urban environment and participate in the modernizing process? Most students of the problem have concentrated on its psychological dimensions. Those with Ukrainophile tendencies argued that the Ukrainian peasant’s deeply rooted love for the soil prevented him from giving up agriculture; those less sympathetic to Ukrainians emphasized their alleged sluggishness and conservatism. But historical antecedents lend little support for these arguments. In Kievan times, an inordinately large part of the population of Ukraine lived in cities and engaged in trade. Even as late as the 17th century, as much as 20% of the Ukrainian population lived in an urban environment. And in the early 18th century, it was Ukrainians (not Russians) who predominated among the intellectual elite of the empire.

The political and socioeconomic conditions that obtained in Ukraine in the 18th-19th centuries help explain the relative absence of Ukrainians in the process of urbanization and modernization there. Because the cities and towns were the centers of imperial administration, Russians and their language and culture tended to dominate in them. Meanwhile, the original Ukrainian inhabitants either became assimilated or, in some cases, were forced out. As has been pointed out by Bohdan Krawchenko, the reason for the absence of a Ukrainian peasant migration to the cities was the prevalence of the panshchyna (corvee) in the preemancipation era.⁶ Unlike Russian peasants, who were encouraged by their masters to seek additional employment and income in the cities, Ukrainian peasants were forced to continue working on the land so as to take advantage of its fertility. This not only made them less mobile but also left them with little opportunity to develop the skills and crafts that allowed Russians and Jews to make the easy transition to an urban environment. Therefore, when the industrial boom and urbanization began, Ukrainians were not prepared to participate in it. Hence, while Russians moved hundreds of miles to the factories of the south, Ukrainian peasants, even those living within sight of a factory, preferred to migrate thousands of miles to the east in search of land. It would not be long before the weighty social, cultural, and political consequences of this phenomenon would make their impact felt on the course of events in Ukraine.