Silver and Freedom: Why Altai's Factories Couldn't Survive Without Shackles
Author: Andrey Filimonov
Few people know that the Altai Mining District before the Great Reform of 1861 was the personal property of the imperial family, and the local peasants "cabinet"Their lives were "industrial hell": working at smelting furnaces until age 53, losing their sight from the glare of metal, and forced labor for pennies. The economic miracle of the Demidovs and the Cabinet was based solely on non-economic coercion—when a day's work cost between 5 and 25 kopecks, while free haymaking could earn up to 10 rubles a week.
Freedom came with a "side effect"As soon as the office workers became free citizens in March 1861, more than half of the 170 people immediately left the factories. Some went into trade, others into government (like the energetic Yevgeny Klevakin, who traded his wheelbarrow for the Order of St. Stanislav), and some simply fled to their home villages. Without free labor, the silver-smelting empire collapsed: the cost of hired labor and strikes made ore mining unprofitable.
In 1893, the Barnaul and neighboring factories closed forever. The history of Altai took a dramatic turn: from an industrial center of the empire, the region transformed into an agrarian one, never able to adapt the "good old days" of coercion to the new rules of the free market.
On the anniversary of the Great Reform, we discuss the side effects of the abolition of slavery in Russia.
Who said there was no serfdom in Siberia?
On February 19, 1861, with a single stroke of the pen, Alexander II gave freedom to almost 25 million of his subjects, who had previously known no freedom as serfs.
The Tsar's manifesto, "On the most gracious granting to serfs the rights of free rural inhabitants," was read in all churches of the empire a week after its signing, on "Forgiveness Sunday," before the beginning of Lent. The authorities decided this would be better and more peaceful than "declaring emancipation on Maslenitsa, when everyone is drunk."
Rumors that the Manifesto was ready and about to be signed by the Tsar had been circulating throughout the country since the beginning of the year, causing a vague sense of unease. What would happen?
On January 30, 1861, a St. Petersburg high school student wrote in his diary: "This morning, around 3 o'clock, a drunken peasant shouted in the street, 'Freedom, lads, freedom!' He was immediately seized. All the janitors were summoned. The peasant was given 200 lashes, and the janitors were told to report him to the police at the first such incident, otherwise they would be dealt with as guilty. Word has it that the nobles are very dissatisfied with the Emperor and greeted him in silence at the last meeting, so he almost single-handedly decided everything."
A few days later, censor Alexander Nikitenko wrote in his diary after a meeting of the State Council, where Alexander II presented his Manifesto: "The Emperor, they say, delivered a fine speech, in which, among other things, he uttered the words: 'The autocratic power established serfdom in Russia, and it must also end it.' He expressed his absolute sovereign will with great firmness. Some members protested against the fundamental principles of freedom, and among them, they say, one distinguished himself pitifully by expressing sorrow at the end of the tender patriarchal relations between landowners and peasants."
On the eve of the Manifesto's publication, it seemed as if the document had more opponents than supporters. Moreover, no one could predict the reaction of the people—the primary recipient of the Tsar's favor.
Just in case, on February 17th, a notice signed by the military governor-general Ignatiev was published in all St. Petersburg newspapers stating that "no government orders regarding the peasant issue will be made public" on the 19th. Ignatiev hoped to calm the situation by this means.
On the same day, a St. Petersburg citizen, Ivan Zabelin, recounts in his diary a gossip he heard from a cab driver: “People are talking on all the streets that they called the Tsar, you see, to the Senate on purpose at an unlawful time. Constantine (Grand Duke Constantine, the Emperor's brother - ed.), a clever fellow, figured out what was going on. He galloped to the Senate. He found the Tsar already stripped naked, kneeling and begging for mercy. Constantine swept them all away, cut them down, and saved the Tsar.
Taxi drivers have always known better than anyone what was really going on.
But in 1861, such rumors were all that mattered. According to contemporaries, the emancipation of the serfs—an epochal event the country had been awaiting since the time of Catherine the Great—happened in a disappointingly mundane manner. On February 19, a resident of St. Petersburg recorded in his diary a state of complete public calm:
“Today, instead of the expected demonstrations and even unrest, there is nothing but mud and potholes in the streets…”
Serfdom or administrative lawlessness
In Siberia, the Tsar's Manifesto sparked greater rejoicing. The Tobolsk Provincial Gazette reported: "The Manifesto did not have a huge universal significance" (understandably so, as there were no landowners in Siberia), "but many exiled serfs... rejoiced at the liberation of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters."
According to pre-reform laws, a Russian peasant could be exiled to Siberia either by his landowner or by fellow villagers who wanted to rid themselves of an undesirable member of the community. Clearly, exile wasn't for exemplary behavior. There were no other serfs in Siberia. And this always gave rise to local pride: Siberians, it was said, had never known serfdom.
Indeed, to the east of the Urals there was no gentleman with a kennel, no landowner with a lace parasol, no servants lost at cards - nothing of the sort, no private property in living souls... since they all belonged to the state.
In a lecture given in Tomsk in 1863, historian Serafim Shashkov asserted that "Siberia did not know serfdom, but it did know administrative lawlessness. The history of mining in Siberia is also the history of serfdom and all its consequences."
Shashkov wrote an entire book, "Slavery in Siberia," which recounts horrific details: "It happened, for example, that a Siberian would rip open the belly of his female slave just to check whether she had eaten a piece of fish without his permission!" Grigory Potanin, recalling his childhood in Omsk in the 1830s, writes: "My grandfather was a slave owner. There was a severe famine in the Kyrgyz steppe; people were dying, especially children; the Kyrgyz would travel to the border (the border between Russia and Kazakhstan – ed.) and exchange children for flour."
As for mining, it was indeed carried on using slave labor until the mid-18th century. Workers and peasants at state-owned and privately owned factories were considered utterly insignificant in the civil sense. Demidov's clerks at the Kolyvano-Voskresensk factories had the right to shackle and flog violators of labor discipline. Those who violated labor discipline, therefore, had no right to complain.
Even in the enlightened 19th century, child labor was rampant in the mining centers of Altai. According to the "Regulations on the Mining Population": "Minor and adolescent children aged twelve to eighteen may, with parental consent, be employed in factory work appropriate to their strength and age. Children under twelve may be employed for no more than eight hours a day and only during the day, and in mines—only on the surface, not inside them."
Moreover, work experience was only counted from the age of 18.
In Altai, there were 175 thousand registered, or "factory," peasants employed in mining and silver-smelting plants. They belonged to the treasury, lived on state-owned lands, and performed labor service in production.
The German scientist in Russian service, Karl Ledebur, while traveling through Altai to collect herbariums (1826), described the life and working conditions of factory workers who belonged to the main feudal lord of the country - the Emperor, who was also the owner of all the mining factories.
"In the mining industry," writes Ledebour, "two categories of workers are employed: the actual mining workers and the assigned peasants. The latter are obliged to cut down trees, burn charcoal, transport firewood, coal, ore, and driftwood to the smelting furnaces, and also repair dams after floods, which they do without being forced, since the well-being of their own farms depends on it. The workThe work they do is divided into foot and horse. The former consists mainly of cutting down trees and burning coal, the lattere - in the transportation of the mentioned products. Each of the men assigned during the audit is required to work 17 days annuallyshim and 12 days with a horse».
Ledebour meticulously described the economic mechanism of the Altai factories, based on forced labor. The Mining Council in Barnaul, composed of engineers and officials, determined the volume of work for the current year. Local volost offices assigned the duties to specific individuals: the wealthy were sent "with horses," while the poor were forced to work on foot. Officials had only figures on paper—the number of souls included in the census. But if a worker counted in the census was actually incapacitated, their share had to be worked by those who were healthier.
A wealthy peasant had the opportunity to send a farm laborer in his place. The state didn't care who performed the "task," as long as the numbers added up. This system of duties remained in effect for over a hundred years, ever since Elizabeth Petrovna ordered the Demidovs' factories in Altai confiscated (1747) and transferred them to the Cabinet. Therefore, the peasants who worked there became known as "cabinet workers." However, this didn't exempt them from hard physical labor outdoors.
Freedom was granted to registered, factory, and cabinet peasants a few days later than to the serfs of the Russian Empire by a separate royal decree signed on March 8, 1861:
“To organize the life of the peasants assigned to the Altai mining plants, the following principles must be adopted: to extend to these peasants the rights of free rural inhabitants—personal, property, and wealth,” the decree stated.
The lower ranks and workers of the Altai Mining District, as well as factory workers, received the rights of free citizens: the majority - as free rural inhabitants, and the population of the Barnaul silver smelter - as urban inhabitants.
The key word: free. Ordinary Russians, whether in the city or the countryside, could achieve, if not much, then certainly much more than the forced laborers chained to a wheelbarrow. Barnaul official Yevgeny Polikarpovich Klevakin was born into a family of craftsmen and began his life in the mining industry, where a boy inevitably found himself in the lowest circle of industrial hell: apprentice, craftsman, and, in the long run, dismissal after 35 years of tending a smelting furnace, usually with loss of sight, when a person could no longer see anything but the glitter of molten metal.
In his "Notes of a Provincial Official," Klevakin recalled: "We were state-owned, obligatory artisans assigned to state-owned mining plants, obliged to work there our entire lives. How could we possibly be released from work 'to find our own living' due to illness at 53 years of age?" Thanks to the Tsar-Liberator, Klevakin didn't go blind at the stove, but enrolled in college and subsequently made a career. In 1879 (while Alexander II was still alive), the official received the Order of St. Stanislav, which entitled him to personal nobility. Of course, Yevgeny Polikarpovich was no ordinary man, but an exceptionally energetic one. At the height of his career, he oversaw the Tomsk prison and the Barnaul fire department, wrote the play "Savior from God," and headed the Altai branch of the Black Hundred monarchist party, the "Union of the Russian People." He lived to see the monarchy overthrown and resigned from all his posts at the ripe old age of 76. It's worth noting that a few months after Klevakin's resignation, the city of Barnaul was almost entirely destroyed in a massive summer fire in 1917. But this is most likely just a coincidence.
The end of the Altai Mountain District
The emancipation of the assigned peasants lasted for three years: in 1861, those who had worked in factories for more than 20 years were freed, the following year – those who had worked for more than 15, and in 1863 – everyone else.
"Many of the recruited workers immediately rushed to the villages from which they had been taken, selling their homes and property for next to nothing. Later, many of them were forced to return to the mining settlements because an indelible line had been drawn between their former status as farmers and their current status as miners who had forgotten agricultural labor," writes Pyotr Golubev, an ethnographer and publicist exiled to Siberia under Alexander III for excessive freethinking.
There was a great deal of unrest in Altai that year. In some villages, peasants refused to pay taxes that had appeared out of nowhere (a cash quitrent instead of the previous factory labor), and the authorities were forced to dispatch military detachments to bring the rural workers to their senses.
The abolition of serfdom in Altai alone cost the treasury a million rubles in annual losses. Before that, according to Golubev, the Cabinet had earned a net profit of 669,550 rubles thanks to the labor of the assigned peasants.
This profit was only possible due to cheap labor. A day's forced labor at the factory cost literally pennies—from 5 to 25 kopecks, depending on the worker's skill and length of service. Meanwhile, working in the hayfields of wealthy peasants could earn up to 10 rubles a week. Naturally, as soon as the choice arose, more than half of the 170 "assigned" workers left the factories, taking up trade and agriculture. The most capable became officials.
As a result, costs for ore mining and transportation, coal burning, and wages for free laborers, who even went on strike to defend their interests, skyrocketed. For several years, the industry survived on reserves accumulated during the "good old days," but production volumes began to decline in the late 1860s.
In 1893, the Barnaul, Pavlovsk, and Loktevsky silver smelters closed. Gold production fell to almost nothing, while silver and lead output plummeted. The Altai Mining District was ordered renamed the Altai Okrug, as mining no longer played a significant economic role in the region.
