Nature's Evil

By this time Justi had written many books on the theory and practice of cameralism; he had also written about metals. His fiscal theory was considered an achievement, but his conception of metallurgy was not very different from that of the alchemists. In his view, metal was obtained when the heat of the furnace caused inert matter to combine with phlogiston. The appointment of Justi to the mines was disastrous. One of the furnaces built to his design produced iron that was fit only for making horseshoes; another one produced no metal whatsoever. To fuel his furnaces he cut down trees in two royal parks, leading to conflict with Frederick’s personal forester. His new method of smelting copper didn’t work either; it turned out that he couldn’t distinguish between copper ore and barren rocks. In 1768 the enraged king sent Justi to prison, where he went blind and soon perished.

Historians disagree about how much he was to blame; early biographies posited that Justi was guilty only of ignorance, but recently discovered documents mention forgery and embezzlement. 24 Whatever the case, over millennia the same tragedy overtook the owners and managers of mines and boreholes from Sextus Marius to Mikhail Khodorkovsky: some were guilty, others not, but the nature of evil runs deeper than the passion for profit. Rare raw materials are profitable for their owners, opaque to inspection, ruinous for society. Their geographical distribution is beyond rational understanding. Even Frederick the Great, an experienced and thrifty ruler, was tempted by the fantasies of Justi; and nobody could explain to him why his inept neighbours had good iron while he did not. Nature originates the conditions for evil, but it is people who are the evil doers, and when they punish evil they multiply it.

The Demidovs

The Russian lands were familiar with bog iron from the time of the Vikings. Deposits of bog iron were scattered under peat or lay in the silt at the bottom of lakes. These deposits were widely distributed but were known mostly in the northern lands; when the wetlands were drained, bog iron was forgotten. In fact, it is a renewable product of natural biotechnology: anaerobic bacteria, Leptothrix, create nuggets of iron in ferruginous water in the absence of air. This iron can be harvested and the process will continue. New nuggets will have formed after a couple of decades, as long as the bog hasn’t been drained in the meantime. Such nuggets are usually hidden in turf, water or peat. As the bacteria digest the iron, they secrete an oily liquid that floats on the surface of the water in patches. Looking for the nuggets is like looking for mushrooms; it involves a lot of labour, time and local knowledge, but requires no capital investment at all. The techniques for smelting the nuggets in single-use stoves, and for hammering and reforging the iron, were also accessible to many primitive smallholdings scattered about the northern expanses. This was how the Vikings obtained their iron, and they disseminated their craft round the northern lands. Unlike mined ore, which concentrated highly valuable production around a few mines, bog iron was a diffused resource like timber, peat and grain. Even during the Renaissance, when mines supplied iron to the massed armies of Western Europe, iron was still extracted from bogs on the north of the continent, for example in the Novgorod republic. When supplies of bog iron were depleted as a result of the felling of the forests and the draining of the wetlands, metalworks moved further north and east. The main region for bog metal ores was the sparsely populated Olonets district, today’s Karelia – a quiet, distant corner of Russia, bordering Finland. Local blacksmiths performed wonders, and in the nineteenth century they forged bog iron that was close to the quality of steel. 25 Bog ore was also known in North America – some rails and ploughs were made of this cheap iron.

In 1639, the Dutch merchant Andrey Vinius founded the first mining and smelting factory near Tula, the birthplace of Russian metallurgy, not far from Moscow. He became a Russian subject, and the Kremlin gave him hundreds of serfs. Vinius soon switched to tar and wool, but his son became the head of the Siberian chancellery. 26 Central Russia was poor in ores, but the military ambitions of the tsars required them in large quantities. Moving from the centre to the distant peripheries of the country, mining involved alien landscapes, exotic peoples and mysterious religions.