Abstract
Reviewed by: Janet Hartley, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
In 2007, on an excursion during a conference on the ‘Fate of Russia’ in Ekaterinburg (Soviet Sverdlovsk), Professor Dukes was presented with a diploma by a woman in national dress calling herself the ‘Mistress of the Copper Mountain’ certifying that he had reached the crossing point between Europe and Asia and warning that a forfeit such as a song or a gift had to be paid were the border to be breached. After this rather bizarre experience he reflected that there was no English-language account of the history of the Urals and he set about rectifying that situation. The result is a clear and comprehensive chronological account of the old industrial heartland of Russia.
The definition of the Ural region is not straightforward; this is illustrated by three maps at the beginning of the book that show how the boundaries changed in the Tsarist, the Soviet and the post-Soviet period. This book concentrates on the industrial heartland of the Urals: ‘the middle of the range where the mountains are less in evidence but which has been most significant as a centre for the metallurgical industry from the eighteenth century onwards, as a crucible of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union’ (4). There is no coverage of the fringes of the region, such as Orenburg in the south, and the Khanty-Mansi lands in the north, which means in turn there is little discussion of the role of the Cossacks in the southern borderland or of the lifestyle of the several groups of indigenous peoples who inhabit the Ural region or of their relationships with new settlers.
The book is divided into eight chapters, of which four cover the period from 1552 to 1921 and four Soviet and post-Soviet Russia – almost half the book is concerned with developments in the twentieth century. The account draws on a number of significant post-Soviet historical accounts of the Urals.
The industrial development of the central Ural region is the main focus of the book, from the factories established by the Stroganov and the Demidov families in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the intensification of industrial development in the late nineteenth century and the massive drive to industrialization in the 1930s and the years of the Second World War. The richest sections of the book assess the enormous human cost of the industrial effort in the mid-twentieth century. The description of the construction and development of the great new steel city of Magnitogorsk in the eastern Ural region are particularly revealing, including accounts by contemporary Soviet citizens and the young American, John Scott, whose Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, published in 1942, charts not only the hardships of those years but also the disillusionment of many who felt that they had sacrificed so much not only to modernize the country but also to ensure military success in the war.
The general picture drawn of the Urals is one of almost unrelenting grimness: for most of the Tsarist, Soviet and now in the post-Soviet period, factory and urban workers in the region experienced poorer living standards than in other parts of the country – worse housing, low standards of safety at work, poor health care, pollution, radiation in the modern period – only in part compensated by the establishment of educational establishments (the zemstvos of Verkhotur’e and Ekaterinburg were particularly active in the late nineteenth century), cultural outlets and, in the twentieth century, sporting centres and cinemas. The conditions of prisoners (in Soviet Gulags and camps of German POWs) were particularly harsh, but many ordinary Soviet citizens left the Urals when they could. The exception to this hardship in the Soviet period was life in the secret ‘closed towns’, half of which (five) were set up the Urals in the 1940s to develop atomic and other military weapons and technology. The general living conditions were better in these closed cities than elsewhere, not only in the Urals but in the Soviet Union as a whole, but at a potentially huge price in terms of radiation leaks and accidents, the most notorious of which was the nuclear accident in the closed city of Ozersk, near Cheliabinsk, in 1957 which exposed some 270,000 people to a deadly radioactive cloud.
While the stoicism and suffering of the Russians in this region are well documented in this book, there is less analysis of their self-perception of being ‘Russia’s crucible’. Did the inhabitants regard themselves as different from any other workers in factories in European Russia or Siberia? Was there a sense of being special as a borderland between Europe and Asia? Or is the Mistress of the Copper Mountain demanding forfeits in vain?