The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  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 contributed 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 differences 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.

  chapter 17

  The Unfinished Revolution

  On the cold winter morning of Sunday, January 9, 1905, close to 20,000 workers and members of their families began to proceed from the outskirts of St. Petersburg toward its center. Father Grigorii Gapon, a thirty-five-year-old native of Poltava gubernia and alumnus of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, led the demonstration. The people in the first rank carried a portrait of Emperor Nicholas II along with church banners and icons, and the crowd sang religious songs that included prayers for the tsar. The workers wanted to present the tsar with a petition drafted by Father Gapon calling on the sovereign to protect them against abuses perpetrated by their bosses.