Nature's Evil

A blacksmith from Tula, Nikita Demidov, brought metal works to the Urals and Siberia. 27 A charismatic and enigmatic Old Believer, he would grow into one of the most productive of Russian entrepreneurs – the actual creator of the country’s industrial revolution. It so happened that all the Russian ore sites – in Olonets, the Urals and the Altai mountains – had large concentrations of Old Believers, who were clearly attracted by the new industry. Conservative and secretive, they eagerly interacted with foreign experts. Historians have paid much attention to the visiting scientists and managers – English, Dutch, Saxon and Swedish. But I believe that the most interesting part of this story is their mutual understanding with the ‘natives’, who were either endemic peoples of Siberia or exiled Old Believers. 28 As in the Spanish mines in America, technical knowledge came largely from Europe, but the local folk – most of them also colonial settlers – appropriated it, combined it with their beliefs, and grew into the masters of the business.

After the Time of Troubles, the Moscow state had introduced a church reform. A significant part of the population, particularly in distant provinces, did not accept it. Some Old Believers refused to serve in the army, others rejected the use of the money or other official papers, and many believed that the tsar was the Antichrist. Culturally conservative, they were mobile, industrious and secretive; some of the biggest merchant families, including the Demidovs, came from these people. In the eighteenth century Old Believers encountered harsh oppression, including double taxation, resettlement, or conscription under torture. Some of them, such as the Demidovs, concealed their beliefs; others were persecuted. In several well-documented cases, Old Believers committed collective suicide, usually by self-immolation, when pursued by military units. In 1684 a cloister of the Old Believers was founded on a remote lake by monks who had fled from the Solovetsky Monastery when it was occupied by the Moscow troops. Many of them were Pomors – members of an ethnic community who still populate the European North of Russia. To escape persecution, in 1694 the Pomor monks resettled even further to the north. They founded a monastery on an island in the River Vyg, between Olonets and the White Sea, and collected ore from this vast area. In 1701 Peter I invited master craftsmen from Saxony to Olonets. Led by Johann Friedrich Blüher from Freiberg, the Saxonians installed new furnaces in the Olonets factories. These labour-intensive processes required discipline and exact timing, and also an endless quantity of charcoal. There was plenty of birch in the area, but manpower was a more difficult question. In 1702 thousands of the Pomor Old Believers were signed up at the ‘Olonets mountain factory’ – this was a Russian analogue of the Spanish mita . These pious sectarians had their own understanding of the life of metals; although we know even less about their beliefs than about the shamanic ideas of the Native Americans of Potosí, the Pomors were equally efficient. Clearly, their ideas were compatible with those of their Saxonian visitors, who taught them – and learnt from them – in the name of ‘science’.

Religious minorities often worked in the metal industries. The Huguenots, fleeing persecution in France, brought their metal-making skills to England and later to Prussia; Abraham Darby, who was the first to turn coal into coke and smelt pig iron, was a Quaker. It is hardly surprising that the production of metal in Russia was in the hands of Old Believers. But northern iron was an accursed business: the history of this idyllic territory was as packed with dramatic incidents as an adventure story from the South Seas. Monasteries were built by some, only to be destroyed by others. The ‘mountain factories’ bonded thousands of peasants as their ‘factory serfs’. In 1702, Peter I assigned some factories in the Urals to Demidov. Thousands of Old Believers found refuge there. Some miners perished in 1723 in the mass self-immolation at Yelunsk, near Tomsk: over 500 people committed suicide rather than give themselves up to the troops sent by the tsar-Antichrist. In 1735 the government investigated the Old Believers working for Demidov; 2,000 of them were discovered in just one factory. Nikita Demidov was constantly accused of heresy – trials and denunciations occurred throughout his life. By giving shelter to thousands of schismatics and runaway serfs, he was breaking the law but obtaining a cheap and devoted workforce.