Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century

The most salient characteristic of urbanization in Ukraine in the nineteenth century is that, on the whole, there was so little of it. Or, to be precise, urbanization occurred in Ukraine, but without substantial participation by Ukrainians.

While the process of nineteenth-century urbanization shows certain large uniformities across Ukraine, there are nonetheless substantial differences within this movement too. These are best revealed by considering the development of particular cities, set within varying geographic, economic and political surroundings. Some of the cities grew slowly but steadily; others experienced bursts of expansion (see Table 1). In some urban centres, concomitant industrialization was important, while in others political, agricultural and cultural functions seem to have acted as the principal stimuli. Here, we shall single out for particular scrutiny five Ukrainian towns in the nineteenth century: Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odessa and Luhanske. In sketching their histories, our strokes must be bold and broad; shadings will be added later.

TABLE 1.

source: The figures are taken from the entries of the towns in the appropriate volumes of Istoriia mist ³ sil Ukrainskoi RSR, 26 vols.

Kiev

Traditionally the “mother” of Ukrainian cities, probably the region’s most ancient and surely its most historic urban settlement, is Kiev. Despite its ancient origins, this “Ukrainian Jerusalem” supported in 1840 fewer than 45,000 inhabitants.³ Its location close to the confluence of the Pripet, upper Dnieper and Desna rivers made it a favourable market site, where forest products, brought largely from the north, could be exchanged for the produce of the southern steppe. From the end of the eighteenth century the great “Contracts” fairs were held in Podil, one of the city’s three quarters. Yet this lively commerce did not result in substantial urban growth during the first half of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, between the urban enumerations of 1840 and 1860, the population increased by little more than 10,000 persons.⁴ In the decades before the advent of the railroad, this small market town adequately served the needs of its predominantly agricultural region. After 1861 the pace of urban growth dramatically quickened. According to the census of 1874, the number of urban residents was nearly double that of 1861.⁵ The rate of growth remained high during the subsequent decades. The all-Russian census of 1897 reveals that the city’s population had once more nearly doubled, reaching 247,723 persons. Kiev was by then the second most populous city of Ukraine, surpassed only by Odessa.

What factors or functions supported this rapid expansion? An analysis of the census of 1874 shows that urban industries were still new and small, and that industrialization was not the major factor in this expansion, at least not in its early stages. The large preponderance of males over females within the urban population gives us some hints as to why Kiev was growing. In 1864 males outnumbered females by 41,000 to 29,000 within the city. In 1874 more than 72,000 males shared the city with 55,000 females.⁶ The population was composed chiefly of students, soldiers, monks and bureaucrats—nearly all of them males and most of them unmarried.

The government acted as prime mover in bringing males into the city. Kiev had been affected by the Polish uprising of 1831. Responding by increased centralization, the imperial government abolished the favourable regime of the Magdeburg Law, under which the citizens had hitherto lived. By 1840 Kiev had passed fully under the general laws of the empire, and this resulted in a considerable loss of municipal autonomy. In 1834 the government moved the university at Vilnius to Kiev. The act served to punish students who had taken part in the anti-Russian agitation; it also anchored a Russifying institution in a strategic area. With like intent, the government transferred the headquarters of the First Army from Mogilev to Kiev. Tsarist policy sought to attract Russian merchants to the city. An ukaz of 1835 extended to merchants who might emigrate from Russian guberniias to Kiev exemption from taxes for three years.⁷ The second Polish uprising of 1863 added vigour to the efforts of the Russian government to cultivate a strong Russian presence in this strategic town.

The censuses measure the results of these policies. In 1874 nearly 40 per cent of the population declared Russian to be their mother tongue. Only a little more than 32 per cent of the inhabitants reported Ukrainian as their first language. Jews were comparatively few in Kiev and constituted only 5 per cent of the total population in the late 1860s—but their numbers were growing, attaining 10 per cent by 1874 and 12 per cent in 1897.’ This delayed growth in the number of Jewish residents prob­ably reflects the lingering effects of the legal obstacles which the government had established against Jewish settlements within the city in 1835. The restrictions on Jewish settlement doubtlessly handicapped the growth of those light industries—chiefly clothing and metalwork—in which Jews were especially prominent. On the other hand, the substantial size of the Russian sector of the population (54.2 per cent in 1897: see Table 2) reflects the city’s established importance as a cultural, administrative and military centre.

Important too in supporting the city’s early growth were its ancient churches and holy places—notably the famous “Monastery of the Caves,” one of the greatest shrines in all Orthodox Christendom. By the end of the century nearly a quarter of a million devotees, by contemporary estimate, descended annually on Kiev to gain spiritual benefit from these sacred places? The annual influx of pilgrims stimulated the growth of hotels, restaurants and shops within the city. Foreigners, too, regularly came to visit this beautiful town on the Dnieper. The census of 1874 even counts among the resident population two Africans, five Americans and one Dutchman.¹⁰ We would like to know what brought these persons to Kiev, and what retained them, but here our sources fail us.

At Kiev, industry made only a belated contribution to urbanization. In 1845 there were in the city only seventy-nine enterprises, which employed 820 workers, chiefly artisans and craftsmen. They produced bells, books and candles, as well as leather, tin, bricks, glass, flour and spirits. The total product from these small manufactures amounted to 737,600 silver rubles annually. Sixteen years later, in 1861, industrial production had tripled, reaching 2.3 million rubles per year." Growth had been impressive, but still Kiev’s industries would have to be judged modest in size and out­put.

However, foundations were being laid for much more substantial advances. The government promoted the construction of good roads leading to this garrison town. In 1853 an engineering marvel, a bridge of unprecedented size, was completed over the Dnieper river. In the words of an admiring Englishman, the bridge was “considered unequalled for length and width of span by any other bridge in Europe.”¹²

The centre of a large and fertile agricultural region, Kiev had long engaged in the processing and marketing of farm products. The adoption of steam power, although slow, nevertheless allowed the construction of ever more numerous and ever larger grain mills and especially sugar-beet refineries.

At Kiev the relationship of urbanization and industrialization was com­plex and subtle. Industrial growth, it appears, did not so much stimulate immigration, as did immigration promote industrial growth. In other words, the presence of an already large population and a sizable labour force, as well as active markets, created favourable conditions for the growth of industries. Critical, then, for the expansion of the city and the establishment of a strong industrial base was the improvement in sanitary conditions, in public health and hygiene.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, natural disasters had severely limited the growth of population. The great fire of July 1811, for example, raged for several days and destroyed 1,176 houses, 19 churches and 3 monasteries.¹⁷ Smallpox, typhus, scarlatina, scrofula, dysentry and cholera repeatedly flayed the urban population. As late as 1874, only 28.3 per cent of the city’s population had been born in Kiev and its environs—a figure which reflects not only substantial immigration but the huge losses, which a persistently high urban death rate continuously claimed. Unable to maintain its own numbers through natural reproduction, the city was forced to recruit rural immigrants in substantial numbers."

In nineteenth*century Kiev it was vital to provide the urban population with adequate quantities of pure water. By 1872 the city daily pumped some 500,000 vedros (about 1.3 million gallons) of sand-filtered water from the Dnieper river. Still, the good water benefited largely the wealthy. Most of the population drank the suspect water from the city’s 1,300 wells. Over the next two decades the urban government undertook the construc­tion of a sewage system, and progress was more rapid at Kiev than at Moscow.¹’ By 1894 several sections of the city enjoyed both good water and efficient sewage disposal. To be sure, in the impoverished Podil quarter, open sewers still gave off a horrible stench, which the wastes from soap factories rendered even more pungent. Still, the city was by then well on its way toward achieving acceptable conditions of public hygiene. Basking in the government’s favour, Kiev confronted and overcame these acute problems of growth sooner and more efficiently than most Ukrainian or Russian towns.

Between 1863 and 1897 the population of Kiev grew more rapidly than that of the empire as a whole. Substantial industries were supporting old residents and attracting new. Already by 1884 the sex ratio had swung into near balance, with 79,000 men and 76,000 women.²⁰ The city glowed with an unmistakable aura of prosperity. In 1892 it constructed an electric tramway—the first city in the Russian empire to be served by electric streetcars. By 1890 over six thousand factory workers found employment in the railroad repair shops, the refineries, tobacco firms, the arsenal and other enterprises.

This brief glance at Kiev’s development can perhaps support the follow­ing conclusions. The initial stimuli to urban expansion derived from governmental policies, which aimed at establishing a strong Russian presence in a strategic and long contested area. For this reason, the government brought Russian students and teachers to Kiev’s new university, stationed Russian troops in the city’s garrison, and invited Russian merchants and artisans to ply their trades in the town. The policy was on the whole a success, and Kiev in the late nineteenth century was an enclave of largely Russian settlement within the Ukrainian countryside.

Kharkiv

Founded about 1650, set within the Donets valley at the border of forest zone and steppe, Kharkiv was in origin a frontier fortress, designed to defend Muscovite tsardom from Tatar incursions and to serve as a staging point for further Russian expansion to the south and east. The tsars actively encouraged Ukrainian, especially Cossack, settlement within the new town and its thinly settled environs. The chief advantage of the new city was perhaps its distance from other cities. Without a rival, it soon became the military, economic, religious and intellectual capital of northeastern Ukraine. The open land was ideally suited for hunting and bee-keeping. Given the abundance of grasses, the raising of horses and cattle took early root, to be followed by cereal cultivation on the fertile soil. By the early nineteenth century Kharkiv possessed a population of about 12,600. It was the see of an archbishop and a university founded in 1805; and it retained its large garrison. Its inhabitants were chiefly small tradesmen and artisans, who tanned leather, made boots, washed wool and baked bricks. When the town was made the capital of the Kharkiv general-gubernatorstvo in 1835, the attendant bureaucrats further swelled the city and enriched its economy.

Kharkiv’s lonely place on the urban map of the Russian empire lent it great strategic importance. It gathered and knotted the principal routes connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg with the Crimea and Caucasus. Moreover, the produce from vast areas of steppe and forest regions flowed through it, on its way to its ultimate consumers. The city annually hosted four fairs, each lasting approximately one month. According to a resident English engineer named GeoVge Hume, the commerce of the city was second only to that of Nizhnii-Novgorod, tlie∕ liveliest of the fair towns of central Russia. He described the active wool fair held in June, when thousands of bales of wool, of every sort and qhality, lined the streets.²¹

The earliest small industries of the town used local agricultural products. In comparable fashion⅛ the discovery and exploitation after the Crimean War of the rich mineral deposits of the Donbas and the Kryvyi Rih regions added vitality to Kharkiv’s economy. In 1867 the English engineer George Hume, cited earlier, arrived in Kharkiv to manufacture steam threshing machines. Versatile in his skills and insatiable in his ambitions, he also built a steam flour mill, equipped a sugar refinery with machinery, and provided the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, aunt of the emperor, with vats for her distillery. His industrial empire, built over thirty-five years, had its headquarters in a large building on the principal street of Kharkiv, with branch offices in Kiev (300 miles to the west), Taganrog (427 miles to the south) and Baku (1300 miles to the southeast). He himself described Kharkiv as a city of “the greatest strategic and commercial importance.”²² He and similar entrepreneurs gave Kharkiv stature and renown in the manufacture of light machinery and tools. The city’s largest industry was a machine manufacturing plant, constructed in 1879.²³ Again, Kharkiv’s isolation as an urban centre buttressed the town’s importance.

In 1869 railroads linked the city with Kursk and Azov. By the end of the century it was a major station on the trunk lines joining Moscow and Sevastopil, and Moscow and Mykolaiv. By 1861 it was one of the few cities in the empire with a population of over 50,000. Between 1801 and 1901 its population grew by twenty times, making it one of the most rapidly expanding cities in the empire.²⁴

Location, even more than trade and industry, best accounts for this rapid population increase. In 1839 Kharkiv acquired a sch∞l of veterinary science, which gave substantial support to animal husbandry in the region. The guberniia and its neighbours furnished the Russian army with large numbers of its mounts. With the growing mineral output from mines in the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih came a demand for engineers. In 1885 there opened in the city a new technological institute. Middle schools, trade schools, technological schools and railroad schools of all kinds were established. Art was not sacrificed for science. Kharkiv, prosperous and b∞ming, was noted also for its painting, music, theatre and for public interest in its short but colourful history.

Rapid growth gave the town a chaotic appearance; no architectural unity could be found in its irregular streets and haphazardly constructed buildings. Like most nineteenth-century cities, Kharkiv suffered from the absence of paving, from the ubiquity of mud in autumn and spring and of dust in summer.²⁵ Water too remained in short supply until 1879, when the city at last began to pump pure water from distant sources. But not until 1904 were the first dozen water hydrants placed at the service of the citizenry.

Although Ukrainians predominated among the earliest settlers of Kharkiv, the development and diversification of the economy attracted a variegated lot of inhabitants, including foreigners such as Hume. Belgians, employed by the mining and metallurgical firms, gladly chose to reside in Kharkiv, a town of some amenities. Although Russians were numerous, Ukrainians figured prominently in university life; some of them, such as Dmytro Bahalii, achieved distinction both as university rectors and city mayors. Kharkiv’s was in fact the first modern secular university in Ukraine (apart from Lviv), and gave major impetus to the development of the Ukrainian national consciousness. Ukrainians predominated in the countryside, and also gathered into the small towns which dotted the guberniia. By the first decade of the twentieth century, within the guberniia as a whole, about 15 per cent of Ukrainians lived in some sort of urban centre. Here the percentage of urbanized Ukrainians roughly corresponds with the percentage of urban dwellers in the population as a whole—14 per cent. Still, Kharkiv claimed few of them. Writing about 1912, Steven Rudnitsky, author of a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian cities, remarked: “But we note for the first time here the remarkable fact that in all the district cities, the Ukrainians are much more numerous than the Russians. Only in the capital city, Kharkiv, are they in the minority, and comprise little more than one-fourth the population.”²⁶

In summary then, Kharkiv, much like Kiev, drew initial life from local agricultural production, especially the breeding of horses, cattle and sheep, and the raising of wheat. Agricultural surpluses in turn attracted traders and fed the region’s vigorous fairs. Commercial traffic also brought about improved communications. The subsequent exploitation of the mineral wealth of the Don basin gave an added stimulus to the town’s economy. Metallurgical factories and machine works s∞n formed an important part of Kharkiv’s economic life. Beyond these primary industries, the growth of manufactures such as textiles may have been retarded, as the imperial government deliberately sought to protect the cloth industry in the central Russian provinces. As a military post and an administrative and educational centre, Kharkiv absorbed a large Russian population, despite the fact that Ukrainians in the district favoured urban settlement in uniquely large proportions. At all events, Kharkiv grew because it was a new town, and appropriated from its origins the functions of a military, administrative, commercial and cultural centre with a vast region. It served its region in multiple ways, and this in large part explains its fortunes and its history.

Lviv

Lviv, in contrast, is a much more ancient city. Founded in the thirteenth century on an important trade route, it developed as a major commercial and cultural centre. Unlike Kiev and Kharkiv, Lviv in the nineteenth century was under Austrian rather than Russian rule. It was the capital of the province of Galicia from 1772 to 1918 and thus the principal urban centre in Eastern Galicia, a region largely populated by Ukrainians. (According to the census of 1900, out of 4.8 million inhabitants of Eastern Galicia, 3 million, or 62.5 per cent, were Ukrainians.)²⁷ Lemberg, as the Austrians called the town, already possessed in 1857 a population of 70,384 inhabitants.²⁸ It has always ranked among the five largest cities of both Russian and Austrian Ukraine.

Galicia was not a rich province, either in agriculture or in minerals, and the commercial and industrial development of Lviv progressed only slowly. In 1850 the city contained only nine industries, engaged in the manufacture of matches, textiles and beer.²’ Later, the production of construction materials—bricks, tiles, lime and cement—gained some im­portance. The city concentrated its efforts on light industries: shoemaking, tailoring, and food processing, especially the milling of flour. Metallurgy and machine making, on the other hand, were marked by lethargic growth. The coming of the railroad gave the chief and virtually the only stimulus to such employment, as the city became an important railroad centre with its own repair shop. By 1871 Galicia was linked by rail with the Ukrainian lands under Russian rule. Still, by the end of the century, only about a thousand workers were engaged in machine making or in repair. In the opinion of most Ukrainian economists, the imperial Austrian government did not favour industrial development in Eastern Galicia.³⁰ Rather, it sought to preserve the region as a supplier of raw materials to, and a purchaser of finished products from, the central Austrian provinces. It did not want to foster competition within the empire to Viennese and Bohemian industries.

Lviv first served the Austrians as an administrative centre, but it also functioned after 1848 as a kind of cultural capital for the subject nationalities (Poles and Ukrainians) of Galicia. In 1900, Poles, who made up only 23 per cent of Eastern Galicia’s population, formed a majority (51.6 per cent) of the inhabitants of Lviv. Although the Ukrainians at this time made up only 18.3 per cent of the city’s population, they also took advantage of the relative leniency of the Austrian government to launch a highly influential political and cultural movement. From the 1870s Galicia served the Ukrainian people as a kind of Piedmont, where cultural and political activities banned in Russian-ruled Ukraine could find an outlet. The Ukrainians, for example, founded the Prosvita, or Enlightenment, Society, in 1868, which provided a focal point for Ukrainian cultural and educational activities until 1939.³¹ By 1912 it claimed a membership of 35,000, with branches scattered over some seventy-four towns and cities. It maintained its own library and reading rooms, and sponsored a press, which published both books and periodicals. In 1912 it even founded at Lviv a two-year commercial high school, for both boys and girls. Moreover, at the University of Lviv, Ukrainian was one of three official languages, and, significantly, from 1849 Ukrainian professors held chairs throughout the faculties and not only in languages.

Lviv was, moreover, the headquarters of a Ukrainian retail co-operative—the Narodna torhivlia society, founded in 1883—of a federation of credit unions—the Kraievyi soiuz kredytovyi, founded in 1898—and of a Ukrainian insurance company, the Dnister Mutual Fire Insurance Company, founded in 1892. Toward the end of the century, a pedagogical institute and two schools for girls opened their doors. On the eve of the First World War there were fourteen private and state Ukrainian schools at Lviv. In the words of one historian, “at the time of the outbreak of World War I, Ukrainian cultural life in Lviv had already attained a high level of development.”³² Apart from schools and credit institutions, Ukrainians in Lviv could take advantage of an agricultural society and the Shevchenko Society (1873), which twenty years later became the Shevchenko Scientific Society and was tantamount to a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Nowhere was national consciousness and cultural activity so lively as in Lviv.

Lviv was a stately city adorned by large buildings: hospitals, schools, government structures, palaces, churches and monasteries. Gas lights illuminated its streets as early as 1858 and by 1880 they had been re­placed by electric lamps. In 1894 electric trams served the public, replac­ing the horse-drawn cars installed by the Societa Triestina in 1880. Bicycles from 1879, and automobiles from 1890, accelerated urban transport. Telephones first began to ring in 1884; fourteen years later, 659 subscribers had joined the system. A modern sand filtering water system was installed fairly late—in 1901—and a modern sewage system was completed only in 1914. By then, the processes of modernization had run to term.

In summary, Lviv’s growth in the nineteenth century was slow but steady. Industry played a restricted role in luring immigrants to the city. Administration, education, finance and culture sustained Lviv’s population, but could not generate a true urban boom. And yet, in spite of its small industrial base and limited wealth, the city assumed a major role in the history of its region, and of the Poles and Ukrainians, as well as the numerous Jews, Armenians and Germans settled within it. Although the Ukrainians themselves were a small component of the urban population, their intellectual leaders established a network of national institutions which improved their standards of living and enriched their cultural endowment. Given a certain latitude not allowed within the Russian empire, Ukrainians in Lviv were able openly, even brilliantly, to nurture their national culture and spirit.

Odessa

In 1794 Empress Catherine II ordered the building of a new city on the northwest shore of the Black Sea, on the site of a former Turkish fortress. Odessa, as she called the new foundation, was to serve both as a military outpost and a commercial port. Catherine and her successors encouraged Bulgarians, Greeks and Germans to settle in the new city and its environs, and other foreigners—Italians, French, Armenians, Tatars—soon joined them. New arrivals flocked in from the hinterland; Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews and Poles.”

The rate of growth of Odessa’s population in the nineteenth century was the most dramatic in the Russian empire, and can be matched only in the history of such great western American cities as Chicago. As early as 1856 it surpassed 100,000 persons, and achieved the status of the third city (after Moscow and St. Petersburg) in the empire. By 1878 the city had a radius of about seven miles and contained more than 200,000 people. It en­tered the twentieth century with 400,000 inhabitants; it had long been the largest city in Ukraine.

From the beginning, foreign trade built Odessa’s fortunes. Following the Napoleonic wars, an enormous demand for wheat was developing in Western Europe. Industrialization in the West, the abolition of the corn laws and the triumph of free trade opened up vast new markets. The emancipation of the serfs in the Russian empire (1861) and the liberal reforms of Alexander II stimulated the production of wheat for market, most notably on the Ukrainian steppes. Odessa served the steppes as the most convenient port of export. In 1860 cereal exports through Odessa were about 7 million quintals; they soared to more than 28 million in 1878.³⁴

Industry too made a belated but growing contribution to the support of this huge urban population. At Odessa, as at Kharkiv, industries initially exploited the agricultural produce of the surrounding region. The manufacture of tallow, soap, candles and rope were among the first industries to take root in the city. Factories making vodka, macaroni, bricks and tiles—all destined for local consumption—followed soon after.

Several obstacles obstructed and delayed the foundation at Odessa of large-scale manufactures. Perennial shortages of capital, labour, water and fuel handicapped the entrepreneur. Capital, which abounded in foreign commerce, was largely controlled by foreigners and rarely diverted to local, inland enterprises. In the opinion of Soviet historians, the presence of the port even obstructed industrial development.” The wealthy residents of the city spent their money on luxury goods available in the free port, or satis­fied their expensive tastes with smuggled commodities; at all events their money flowed abroad and gave no stimulus to local enterprises. Only late in the century did foreign capitalists seek out investment opportunities in Odessa and its hinterland. Belgians, for example, financed and constructed the city’s first electric tramway in the 1890s.

Moreover, in this nineteenth-century boom town, labour costs remained high, buoyed by the high costs of housing, food, water and fuel. For long the cheapest accessible coal was from Britain. One further hindrance to early industrial development in Odessa was the lack of railroads. The first line opened in 1865, but remained for several years a local service. Not until 1872 was Odessa connected to Moscow by rail, and not until 1876 could one take a train to Kiev. Nonetheless, during the great push for industrialization which marks economic development in the Russian empire from the 1890s Odessa did achieve substantial industrial expansion. By 1899 over five hundred enterprises were functioning within the city. During the fifteen-year period from 1885 to 1899, both the value of industrial output and the number of employees increased by a factor of three. (The size of the total urban population had meanwhile not quite doubled.) To be sure, the ten years before the outbreak of the First World War were difficult for Odessa. Depression, unemployment, industrial unrest, strikes and revolutionary agitation slowed to a halt the hitherto galloping expansion. Even the imperial government, which viewed the town as a nest of conspirators, appeared to promote the port of Mykolaiv at Odessa’s expense. But in spite of these setbacks, Odessa held its rank as Ukraine’s largest city.

This spectacular growth would not have been possible without the improvement of public hygiene. In the early nineteenth century Odessa faced formidable problems with its unpaved streets, which mud made impassable in winter and dust unbearable in summer; with wells, the water from which soon became insufficient in quantity and unacceptable in qual­ity; and with its open gutters and ditches which were designed to carry away the sewage. Moreover, the growing concentration of human beings in a small area raised the threat of communicable diseases—typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.³⁶

Against all these obstacles to urban growth, the city, especially from the 1870s, made remarkable progress. By 1873, 71 per cent of the houses had running water, and the water itself was piped in in large volumes from the Dniester river, some twenty-seven miles distant. At this time about 45 per cent of the houses were connected to a central sewer network. By 1878 the major sewer system was completed. Gradually the streets were paved and by 1895 all the central area of the city and much of the outlying districts had been successfully covered. The fruit of all these improvements was a dramatically lowered death rate. In this opportune change, Odessa was initially more favoured than either Moscow or St. Petersburg. During the 1880s the death rate fell below the urban birth rate, and the city was no longer dependent upon immigration simply to maintain its size. In achieving demographic self-sufficiency, Odessa had also, in a real sense, become a modern city.

Odessa’s society showed certain qualities which rendered it unique among Ukrainian cities. More than any other town, it retained a highly cosmopolitan character, with large numbers of foreign visitors and immigrants. The census of 1897 records that no fewer than fifty languages were spoken in the city, excluding Russian. It was also a major centre of Jewish settlement; Jews by the late nineteenth century constituted about one-third of the urban population. Curiously, this ostensibly Ukrainian city contained very few Ukrainians. To be sure, in reporting their language and origins to the census takers, many true Ukrainians preferred to pass them­selves off as Russian in order to procure the economic and political advantages of membership in the empire’s dominant national group. Still, in 1897 only 5.7 per cent of Odessa’s population identified Ukrainian as their first language. Even Russians formed only 41.2 per cent of the urban residents.

Several factors explain the small numbers of Ukrainians in Odessa. Overseas trade, which established Odessa’s early prominence, was a risky business. Those involved in it had to have experience in foreign markets; usually t∞, they had to rely upon a network of foreign correspondents and have ready access to capital. Both Ukrainians and Russians had little knowledge of overseas commercial affairs. The successful merchants were initially Greeks, Frenchmen and Italians, and, later in the century, Jews. Ukrainians (and Russians too) scarcely participated in this lucrative economic activity.

As seen in the census of 1897, most Ukrainian immigrants to Odessa were male, poor and unmarried. Of the 11,172 Ukrainian males then residing in Odessa, only 224 were independently wealthy, supported by interest on savings or stocks; and only 100 were rentiers, living from land rents. More Ukrainians were in the military than in any other profession. The high echelons of the civil service were, on the other hand, a predominantly Russian domain. About 14 per cent of the Ukrainian males were employed in the local quarries and mines, as unskilled, manual labourers. About 12 per cent engaged in manufacturing on a small scale, and 8 per cent were in transport. The Ukrainian carter, the chumak, had long been a familiar sight on the roads leading to Odessa, driving his grain-laden wagons to port. By 1897 the railroad had largely replaced the wagons, but Ukrainians continued to labour on the river barges, which still performed vital services to the local economy.

Few Ukrainian women came to Odessa (the sex ratio among Ukrainians was 159 males for every 100 women), and the census indicates that the birth rate was comparatively low, whereas rates of child mortality were high. Few marriages, few babies and low-skilled employment indicate that most Ukrainians were of humble socio-economic status. Among them, only

the destitute and the desperate found their way to Odessa. Perhaps the keen competition among merchants, traders and shopkeepers discouraged them from seeking a new life within the city.

In summary, then, Odessa owed its origins and its early growth to the favour of the imperial government and to the unexpected development of massive cereal export to Western Europe. The city attracted a variegated population, who took advantage of opportunities in government, trade and industry. However, the Ukrainians themselves were ill-equipped to participate intimately in the life of the new and booming city, owing to their rural origins and political disabilities. Perhaps it is indicative of their general relationship to urbanism, that the largest city in Ukraine was also the least Ukrainian.

Luhanske

In 1795, hardly more than a year after the creation of Odessa, the imperial Russian government founded another new town, Luhanske. Located on the Luhan river in the northern Donets basin, the town was destined to become a principal industrial centre in the guberniia of Katerynoslav. Indeed, in origin Luhanske was not so much a town as a factory. The ukaz of 1795 which gave birth to Luhanske ordered that iron works be constructed on the site. The government further allocated some 715,733 rubles to an English entrepreneur named Gascoigne, the director of the project. It also ordered that some three thousand serfs be shipped from the central Russian provinces in order to supply the needed labour force. The new works, it was envisioned, could exploit the iron deposits of the region and provide cannon and shot to the fledgling Russian navy on the Black Sea. Given the distance to the sea, the venture at first fared poorly. But the gathering storms of the Napoleonic wars showered the new factory with demands for armaments and allowed it to flourish. So also, during the Crimean War, Luhanske served as an important source of supply to the empire’s beleaguered southern army, pinned down at Sevastopil.³⁷

Apart from its military-industrial functions, Luhanske served also as a transportation centre and a market town. The highways from the central gubernii to the port cities of Rostov and Taganrog passed through it. Two fairs were held each month at Luhanske, but their importance never extended beyond the immediate region. Still, the inhabitants of the surrounding area—peasants and pomishchiky—purchased metals, tiles, bricks, coal, building stones, honey, wax, cattle, grain, meat, wool and leather, and other typical products of the southern economy.

By the middle of the century the factory town attracted its first manufactures of non-military items: tallow, wax, candles, soap, oils, tiles, bricks, lime and flour. Again the exploitation of local, largely agricultural, products, typical of industrial development in Ukrainian cities, should be apparent. Even with this industrial diversification, Luhanske remained for the most part a one-company town. Alongside the factory were the administrative offices, courthouse, police station, two dispensaries, the poorhouse, a pharmacy, two schools, a library and a small museum, a meteorological station and two churches. Most of the iron workers lived in cottages or in barracks holding from twenty-five to thirty men. The nearby village of Kamianyi Brid, where other workers resided, contained some 1,558 stone and 227 wooden houses. The managers of the factory resided in ten comfortable stone houses.”

Moreover, the prosperity of the iron industry largely determined the fortunes of the town. After the Crimean War, the iron factory entered upon a period of hard times. The population of Luhanske shrank from 9,000 in 1861 to 6,643 in 1862.” Finally, in 1887 the factory closed down altogether⁴⁰ and was not reopened until 1895. Meanwhile, the railroad reached Luhanske, rather belatedly in 1874, and by 1897 the town was joined to the Azov line. At this time the town had only 20,404 inhabitants, but Luhanske was slowly reorganizing and rebuilding its economy, and producing iron products for peaceful purposes. A German entrepreneur by the name of Hartmann built there the largest steam-engine factory in Russia, with the capacity of producing as many as twenty engines per month. By 1905 this single factory manufactured 21.1 per cent of all the steam engines made in Russia. From 1900 to 1903 the enterprise reportedly returned to its owner a profit of three million rubles. Other foreign entrepreneurs exploited and enjoyed the period’s “shower of gold.” In 1896 a Belgian stock company established an enamel works. Now long since nationalized, it still survives. Belgians also set up foundries, bone meal factories, distilleries, leather works and so on. By 1900 some 10,000 workers labouring in 230 factories had settled in Luhanske; they comprised about half the population of the town.

In the fourteen years before the First World War, the town’s population tripled, but the available amenities and services did not expand at a comparable rate.⁴¹ In 1912 there were only 7,993 private dwellings—mostly one-storey edifices constructed from local stone; more than a thousand of them had roofs of clay or mud. Only fourteen streets were paved and only 513 kerosene lamps lit the centre of the city. There was no sewage system and no adequate supply of water. The city lacked a telephone system and only the very rich could afford private lines. Medical facilities consisted of a single hospital, constructed as late as 1894, and there was only one doctor for every 1,365 inhabitants. Little wonder that typhus and cholera repeatedly ran through the populace—notably in 1908, 1909 and 1910. Schools were few and cultural centres rare. The latter consisted of a seasonal theatre, two clubs, a city library and three movie theatres. In terms of per capita expenditures on city services, the government of Luhanske was the most parsimonious in the entire guberniia of Katerynoslav.

Luhanske (now Voroshylovhrad) was not a predominantly Ukrainian town. The factory serfs and plant managers who originally settled it were drawn from central Russia. Other workers immigrated over the years into the city, but included few Ukrainians. In 1897 only 19.1 per cent of the urban population was Ukrainian (see Table 2). Perhaps because of its artificial creation and close connection with the imperial army, Luhanske possessed a greater proportion of Russians (68.2 per cent) than any of the Ukrainian cities listed in Table 2.

TABLE 2. NATIONAL COMPOSITION OF THE POPULATION IN FOUR UKRAINIAN CITIES IN 1897

source: Pervaia Vseobshchaia perepis Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g., prepared by the Tsentralnyi komitet Ministerstva Vnutrennikh del, under the supervision of N. A. Troinitskii₁ 80 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1899-1905). The data for Kiev appear in vol. 16; for Kharkiv in vol. 46; for Odessa in vol. 47; and for Luhanske in vol. 15.

Of the five Ukrainian cities here considered, Luhanske was unique for the early and continuing importance of its industry. It was, on the other hand, singularly lacking in charm and comfort. If the commercial, administrative and cultural centres previously studied attracted few Ukrainian immigrants, an industrial city such as Luhanske attracted fewer still. Like Odessa, it was an entirely new town, but unlike Odessa, it did not progressively assume functions beyond its original purpose; it never became in our period an important market town or intellectual centre. While large commercial cities, as we have seen, eventually invited industrialization, this purely industrial town did not assume important commercial or cultural functions. Luhanske remained in its development what it had been in its origins: a factory city.

Summary

In this sketch of five Ukrainian cities in the nineteenth century, is it possi­ble to discern common patterns? Clearly, few Ukrainians were attracted to any form of urban life. Their intellectual leaders, we might note, them­selves smitten by a kind of romantic attachment to the countryside, frowned upon settlement in the supposedly corrupt cities. Moreover, within the Russian empire land still abounded, and agriculture held the principal interest of the Ukrainians. To be sure, the constraints of serfdom limited their movement in the first half of the century. But many peasants (sometimes entire villages) made their way to underdeveloped and underpopulated southern Ukraine. After emancipation in 1861, as the empty southern lands were largely claimed and settled, Ukrainians moved in large numbers to the region of the Northern Caucasia.⁴² To a lesser extent they settled in enclaves, set within the vast spaces of the Ural mountains and the Volga basin. Some pushed even farther to the east through Siberia, into Central Asia, Kazakhstan and finally to the basin of the Amur river. Before the First World War some two million Ukrainians had emigrated to the eastern reaches of the Russian empire. With so much land inviting colonization, the Ukrainians not surprisingly largely avoided the great urban centres, where their skills earned them little reward. In Eastern Galicia, on the other hand, the most densely settled of all Ukrainian regions, open land was not so easily found. Here, the Ukrainians faced a difficult choice: either they would have to move to cities to earn their ways as labourers; or they could seek new farms or jobs in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and other newly settled territories. Between 1890 and 1913 numerous Ukrainians from the lands of Austria-Hungary came to seek their fortunes in the New World; estimates of their number vary, but range between 300,000 and 800,000.⁴³

What contribution did industrialization make to urban growth? Among the five cities, only at Luhanske did industry make an early and substantial contribution to urban expansion. The other towns were all initially administrative, commercial and cultural centres. Most notably at Kiev and Odessa, governmental favour was also a significant factor in promoting the growth of cities. With much reason, therefore, scholars have recently questioned the tight linkages, presumed to have existed between industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century.⁴⁴

On the other hand, the importance of industrialization in the growth of these cities cannot be entirely discounted. All five achieved some industrialization, especially after the coming of the railroad (here Odessa was less favoured than the others). The earliest industries typically processed local raw materials, both agricultural and mineral. Industrialization, in turn, heightened the rate of population expansion within these already established urban communities. Between 1861 and the First World War the population of Kiev increased eight times; Luhanske, ten times; Odessa, six times; Kharkiv, five times; and Lviv, three times. There seems, in other words, to be a rough correlation between the degree of industrialization and the rate of subsequent urban expansion. This observation lends support to Roger Thiede’s contention that “industry played a greater role than trade in the urbanization process.”⁴⁵

In more specific terms, industrialization appears to have been a signifi­cant factor not during the establishment of most Ukrainian cities, but during a subsequent, specific stage in the process of urban growth. Although trade, administration and culture are all important in the formation of urban nuclei and although cities can survive indefinitely as commercial, administrative and cultural centres, nevertheless industrialization alone provides the impetus to sustained and substantial urban growth. In Ukraine, as in the world, it made an essential contribution to the appearance of the first, truly great, truly modern cities.

Notes

1. Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, ed. V. Kubijovyc, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1963-71), 1: 169.

2. J. Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine 1917-1923: The Communist Doctrine and Practice of Self-Determination (Edmonton, 1980), 66.

3. Istoriia Kieva 1 (Kiev, 1963), 248.

4. Ukraine: Encyclopaedia 1: 199.

5. Istoriia Kieva 1: 248, gives the population in 1861 as 65,000. Serhii Shamrai, “Kyivskyi odnodennyi perepys 2-ho bereznia 1874 roku,” Kyiv ta ioho okolytsia v istorii ³ pamiatkakh, ed. M. Hrushevsky (Kiev, 1926), gives the population as 127,251 in 1874.

6. For the figures from 1861, see N. Sementovsky, Kiev, ego sviatyni, drevnosti, dostopamiatnosti ³ svedeniia neobkhodimyia dlia ego pochitatelei ³ Puteshestvennikov (Kiev, 1864), 17. The numbers are 41,327 males and 29,263 females. For the figures from 1874, see Kyiv ta ioho okolytsia, 367.

7. Istoriia Kieva 1: 254.

8. Kyiv ta ioho okolytsia, 367. Trudy Ctnografichesko-Statisticheskoi ekspeditsii V zapadno-russkii krai, ed. P. P. Chubinsky, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg, 1872), 179.

9. For a colourful description by a German woman of the pilgrims coming to Kiev in 1900, see R. Binion, Frau Lou (Princeton, 1968), 271-3.

10. Kyiv ta ioho okolytsia, 372. An Englishwoman noted the influx of pilgrims to Kiev in 1890 and spoke also of English visitors to the city: “There are very few fixed English residents in Kieff, but our country is always fairly represented by a floating population of travellers, military officers, commercial gentlemen, and governesses, most of whom I met.” She then observed that military officers from Indian stations often came to board with native families in order to master the language. See I. Morris, A Summer in Kieff or Sunny Days in Southern Russia (London, 1891), 63, 82.

11. Istoriia Kieva 1: 253.

12. G. Hume, Thirty-Five Years in Russia (London, 1914), 255. The iron for the bridge was partially prepared in Birmingham, England; the construction machinery also came from England. It took sixteen ships to carry the materials from Liverpool to Odessa. Carl Vignoles, the English chief engineer, brought his two sons and two helpers to aid the work. The bridge was built mostly by local labourers at a cost of 2.5 million rubles. See Kiev, ego sviatynia, 12.

13. O. Parasunko, Massovaia politicheskaia zabastovka v Kieve v 1903 g. (Kiev, 1953), 16.

14. Hume, Thirty-Five Years, 257.

15. Istoriia Kieva 1: 344.

16. Istoriia mist ³ sil Ukrainskoi RSR: Kyiv (Kiev, 1968), 130.

17. Istoriia Kieva 1: 262.

18. Ibid., 339.

19. Ibid., 358-9.

20. Ibid., 340.

21. Thirty-Five Years, 115. For more details on Kharkiv’s fairs, see I. O. Hurzhii, Ukraina v systemi Vserosiiskoho rynku 60-90kh rokiv XIX st. (Kiev, 1968), 114-15.

22. Thirty-Five Years, 115.

23. Kharkov. Spravochnaia kniga (Kharkiv, 1957), 23.

24. Ibid., 24. From the 1860s, heavy industry concentrated in the city.

25. Ibid., 28.

26. Ukraine: The Land and its People (New York, 1918), 141.

27. A. Zuk, “Lviv, Center of Ukrainian Economy in Galicia,” Lviv. A Symposium on Its 700th Anniversary (New York, 1962), 305.

28. Statistische Ubersichten Hber die Bevdlkerung und den Viehstand von Osterreich nach der Zahlung vom 31 Oktober 1857 (Vienna, 1859), 21. For discussion of the economic importance of the city in the nineteenth century, see Naryry istorii Lvova, ed. I. Krypiakevych et al. (Lviv, 1956), 115-16.

29. S. Y. Prociuk, “Economic Development of the City of Lviv,” Lviv. A Symposium, 377.

30. Zuk, “Lviv,” 312.

31. Ibid., 314.

32. V. Radzykevych, “Lviv—A Center of Ukrainian Culture between Two World Wars,” Lviv. A Symposium, 203.

33. For the ethnic composition, commerce, industry and urban growth, see my articles, “The Ethnic Composition of the City of Odessa in the Nineteenth Century,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1 (March 1977): 53-78; “Odessa: Staple Trade and Urbanization in New Russia,” Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 22 (1973): 184-95; “Russian Wheat and the Port of Livorno, 1794-1865,” The Journal of European Economic History 5 (Spring 1976): 45-68; “Greek Merchants in Odessa in the Nineteenth Century,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3-4 (1979-80): 399-420.

34. M. V. Kasperoff, “Commerce des cereales,” La Russie a la fin du 19e siecle, ed. M. W. De Kovalevsky (Paris, 1900), 724-43, for the growth in grain exports.

35. V. A. Zolotov, Vneshniaia torgovlia Iuzhnoi Rossii v pervoi polovine XIX veka (Rostov, 1963), 145.

36. P. Herlihy, “Death in Odessa: Population Movements in a Nineteenth Century City,” Journal of Urban History 4, no. 4 (August 1978): 417-42.

37. Istoriia mist ³ sil Ukrainskoi RSR. Luhanska oblast (Kiev, 1969), 67.

38. Lugansk. Istoricheskii ocherk (Donetsk, 1969), 10.

39. Istoriia mist ³ sil. Luhanska oblast, 68, and Lugansk, 21.

40. Istoriia mist ³ sil. Luhanska oblast, 69.

41. Ibid.

42. Ukraine: Encyclopaedia 1: 196-7.

43. See The Ukrainians in America ed. V. Westman (New York, 1976), 68-9.

44. See, for example, D. Brower, “L’urbanisation russe a la fin du XIXe siecle,” Annales-Economies-Societes-Civilisations, 32 (1977): 83.

45. R. L. Thiede, “Industry and Urbanization in New Russia from 1860 to 1910,” The City in Russian History, ed. M. F. Hamm (Lexington, Kentucky, 1976), 136.