Simultaneously with the inauguration of this enterprise, Russia began to build thousands of miles of railroads, and to encourage the foreign investor, subsidized the Company in the form of advance orders of such magnitude that the New Russia Company, as it was called, in a few years was employing twelve thousand workmen and paying an annual dividend of over twenty per cent. The British workmen, to-day, are all foremen and managers. The workmen are all Russians.
Thus the iron- and steel-workers and the coal-miners came into existence in Russia. Other companies, especially under French and Belgian initiative, followed John Hughes and his New Russia Company into the field.
The English employers introduced British housing conditions, and British systems so that the Russians early had the advantage of Western methods. Wages were low, and still are, because throughout the country wages are low. Sporadic strikes have occurred; but there are no trade unions as yet. It seems to have been the policy of the foreign companies to pay their workmen, who have come out to Russia from abroad, more than the same men would have received at home, but to pay the Russian workmen the current wages of the country.
The name Yusofka is a corruption of Hughesofka, from John Hughes. Mr. Arthur Hughes, my host, the grandson of old John Hughes, was the only member of the family left at the works of the New Russia Company to deal with the men and look after the vast and valuable properties, the holdings of the Company.
There is always a deal of romance about engineers who carry civilization into the wilderness, who wrest earth’s treasures from remote plains and unexplored mountains, whether in Mexico or the Andes, South Africa or interior Russia. My experience has been that these men are always workaday fellows who resent it when the picturesque and the heroic side of their lives is mentioned; and Hughes was no exception. A rich man, the son of a now wealthy family, educated at a leading English technical school, and in the Carnegie works in Pittsburg, an expert in the Bessemer process, a cultivated English gentleman in thought, instincts, manner and speech; only thirty; master of twelve thousand restless, wretched workmen, in a foreign country in time of revolution and general lawlessness, and his life constantly threatened; once, when he rescued a young Jewish girl from drunken Cossacks; again, when he recklessly interfered to save a lot of stupid workmen from a Black Hundred entanglement—such is Hughes. He lives absolutely alone, and coolly attends to business day after day, striving to maintain the precedence of his Company over all others in Russia, through the merit and quality of the goods produced.
After a day or two I began to understand what Mr. Medhurst meant when he urged me to remain at Yusofka a fortnight.
“Hughes will be delighted,” he said, “to have some one to whom he can talk in his own tongue—and, besides, it makes another gun in the house.”
As it turned out I remained ten days. During that time Hughes did everything a perfect and generous host could do, not only in regard to helping me to all of the information I wanted concerning the lives of the workmen, but also to make my visit happy. Late afternoons we would ride out over the rolling steppe, straight away as the crow flies, and come back by the compass when night began to fall. Evenings I was initiated into the intricacies of chess, which I had never before had the boldness to approach.
The great industrial section of Russia corresponding to the “black country” of England, is in the provinces of the south, chiefly about Yekaterinoslaff. Here are the deepest coal-pits, the largest factories and forges, the richest iron-mines. Here, across the miles of intervening steppe, between the villages and towns, are always visible the towering stacks of “works.” The nights are made fascinating by the clouds of fire that ever and anon belch starward from the mighty furnaces which melt the ore to fluid, and where are fashioned the rails destined to join East with West and North with South, and the girders which shall span the great rivers. The steppe is a place of vast silence. The widest expanses of the world’s oceans are not lonelier. But where the work and industry of man have possessed the steppes, claimed the earth and all that lies beneath the fields of waving grain, reared structures of stone and metal for the molding and fashioning of civilization’s necessities from these crude riches, silence there is none, neither night nor day. The summer winds which gently bow the corn on the encircling fields are ladened with the sounds of mighty hammer-strokes, grinding wheels, the shrieks of whistles and the labored puffing of the engines. Over the steppe broods the mystic spell of limitless nature. Over the industrial plains, which are the steppe in transition, is the palpable heart-beat of the workaday world. And the men whose labor is the soul of these great industries are themselves like the country, of the past and of the future. Few have permanently left the soil. The men who swelter in the glare and blinding heat of the blast furnaces, who turn the cooling metal in the rolling-mills, pause in their labor and see in the distance a hut of stone and mud with a roof of thatch, and about it a farm—a farm too small and too poor to support them and their families—yet to them home. The Russian workman is an industrian through necessity. Some there are, of course, who have tired of this dual existence and have relinquished the farm land. As time goes on more and more will do this. The “working-class” will cease to be the inert mass it is to-day, and will become a potent factor in the country. But to-day this working-class is largely composed of men who work in the mills and factories while their families work the land, or rent their land, or who hire cheap labor for their land, or who themselves drop their tools, lay by their picks and drills, quit the furnace and the forge at spring-and harvest-time, and return to the open to sow and to reap.
Russian workers, therefore, are workmen in the making, or at best, men not yet weaned from the soil, workmen of the first generation, with the blood and traditions and even the property of the peasant.