12_Industrial Developments

This is the twelfth #generalhistory note, following 11_Habsburg Ukraine.

Wake-Up Call

• In September 1854, British and French expeditionary forces landed in Crimea. This was the latest development in the Crimean War, in which the future of the Ottoman Empire and its possessions was at stake.
• The British and the French besieged Sevastopol in a campaign to defend their interests in the Mediterranean. After lengthy military operations spanning a year, the city fell to the invading forces in September 1855.
• Following this, the Paris Peace Treaty was signed, which barred the Russians from building naval bases in Sevastopol or anywhere else on the Black Sea coast.
• This development, paired with the death of Emperor Nicholas I, led to a change in government policy aimed at catching up with the West.
• The war had demonstrated that Russia lacked several things:
  • A modern navy capable of competing with British steamboats
  • A rail infrastructure to move troops (the British were the first to build a railroad in Crimea) to effectively defend the region
• While the Russian Empire attempted to invest in railroads, it simply lacked the funds to do so—partly due to its clampdown on Polish rebels, which triggered something akin to sanctions. The French government convinced the Rothschilds not to invest in the country, and British companies couldn't raise the required capital.
• As such, the construction of the Moscow–Sevastopol line was postponed until the 1870s. Instead, the first railroad built in 1865 connected Odesa with Balta.
• This line's main purpose was economic. Siberian furs as an imperial export had lost value, while Siberian oil and gas weren't yet valuable—so Ukrainian grain filled the gap (Ukraine accounted for 75 percent of all exports of the Russian Empire). Balta lay in a major grain-producing area, while Odesa served as an important trading harbor.
• The administration broke the vicious cycle of the empire needing cash from exports (for which it required infrastructure, for which it required cash again) by using punitive labor.
• There was a plan for the line to go through Kyiv at first, for political reasons—it would have connected the troublesome Right Bank with the imperial authorities—but it was struck down due to its economic unsuitability. As such, it went through Poltava and Kharkiv, where it would later connect to the Moscow–Sevastopol line (finished in 1875).
• That Moscow–Sevastopol line would prove crucial for the rebuilding of the Black Sea Navy (which Russia regained the right to after the French loss in the Franco-Prussian War), as well as the economic and cultural integration of the peninsula into the empire. One prominent example of this was Yalta, which the imperial elites transformed into their summer residence.
• By 1894, railways crisscrossed the entirety of Ukraine, promoting economic development, increasing mobility, and breaking down old boundaries of all kinds.
• It also meant the control of the steppe by the nobles and its rise to prominence as the breadbasket of Europe. The only impediment to its rise was the scarcity of people to cultivate the land. This led to the peasants in the region being far better off than any similar group in the entire empire. As a comparison, the average peasant landholding in the Tavrida gubernia was around forty acres, while it was only nine in Podolia and Volhynia.
• The old Muslim-Christian divide was retreating into irrelevance, as the steppe became more internally connected and tied to international markets through the Dnieper, Dniester, and Don trade routes.

Urban Growth

• Railroad construction contributed significantly to the increased rate of city population growth.
• Some examples:
  • Kyiv grew from 25,000 in the early 1830s to 250,000 by 1900.
  • Even that paled in comparison to southern cities like:
    • Odesa, which grew from 25,000 in 1814 to 450,000 in 1900
    • Yuzivka (today's Donetsk), which increased more than fivefold in the decade leading up to 1897, and then proceeded to double again over the next two decades
• Yuzivka was a prime example of the interplay between industrialization and urbanization. It was named after John James Hughes, a British entrepreneur who established metalworks in Ovechii. Ovechii had previously been a small settlement, but the 1,800 workers at the metalworks transformed it into a city—as well as the largest metal producer in the empire.
• Foreign companies like Hughes’s produced the majority of Ukrainian steel, pig iron, and coal, and nearly all of its machinery in the early 20th century.
• The workers moving to the cities were a mix of a few hundred skilled laborers from Britain, France, and Belgium—who saw financial opportunities—and a massive supply of unskilled workers from across the Russian Empire. Following the emancipation of the serfs and technological advancements, improved infant mortality and life expectancy led to relative overpopulation in the villages. Cities absorbed this “surplus” population.
• Most of the peasants migrating to cities since the 1870s came from villages in southern Russia, where the soil was less productive than in Ukraine.
  // Interestingly, two future leaders of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, were part of this migration.
• This migration wave contributed to the underrepresentation of Ukrainians in the cities. According to the 1897 imperial census, 17 million Ukrainians and 3 million Russians lived in the Ukrainian territories of the Russian Empire. However, when it came to the cities, the numbers were nearly equal: just over one million Russians lived there, compared to fewer than one million Ukrainians. In major cities and industrial centers, the disparity was even greater. Russians made up:
  • more than 60 percent of the population in Kharkiv
  • more than 50 percent in Kyiv
  • almost 50 percent in Odesa
• Ukrainians were also underrepresented in other sectors of society, such as the entrepreneurial class—where Poles, Russians, and Jews outnumbered them—as well as in the industrial working class.
• This was due in part to the previously mentioned fact that Ukrainian peasants were relatively better off, and thus not compelled to migrate. But many also preferred to resettle in the far imperial east if push came to shove, as urban working conditions were often worse.
• This is evidenced by more than 1.5 million Ukrainians settling on the southern and eastern frontiers of the Russian Empire in the two decades leading up to World War I.

Austrian Similarities

• Ukrainian "land hunger"—which led to population outflows—was an even bigger phenomenon in Habsburg Ukraine, where the average landholding (6 acres) was lower than in the most overpopulated Russian province, Volhynia (9 acres).
• Accordingly, around 600,000 Ukrainians left Austria-Hungary before 1914. Popular destinations included Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the U.S., as well as Manitoba and Alberta in Canada. This trend was even more pronounced among Ukrainian Jews, 350,000 of whom emigrated during the same period.
• Galicia was the poorest province in the empire. Industrialization occurred, but it had limited economic impact. The only new sector that emerged was petroleum, but it didn’t create many jobs and only benefited a small geographic area.
• This stagnation is visible in the growth rates: Lviv grew from 50,000 inhabitants in 1870 to 200,000 in 1910, whereas Kyiv grew tenfold from the mid-nineteenth century to 1914.

Recap

• While the two parts underwent different levels of industrialization and urbanization, both experienced major economic changes that fundamentally transformed their societies.
• The quicker movement of capital, goods, and people—and the creation of an industrial working class—led to the economic decline of some regions, while others benefited.
• Among the greatest beneficiaries was the south, with its Black Sea ports that channeled the new wave of international trade. In addition, the discovery of iron ore and coal deposits turned the region into an industrial boom area, with its inhabitants better off than most in the empire.

Continuation

Continues in 13_Prelude to Chaos

Sources

This information was gathered from The Gates of Europe_A History of Ukraine (pages 175-186).