Urals mining continued to thrive in the eighteenth century. Business dynasties
such as the Demidovs, Stroganovs, Iakovlevs, and Batashevs dominated metal
foundries there; in Elizabeth’s reign the number of industries in the Urals more
than doubled. Numbering about 100,000 in the 1740s, the workforce had doubled
by the 1770s. Working conditions were harsh, food prices were rising, and the
increase in quitrent imposed on state peasants empire-wide in 1769 hit workers in
state factories in the Urals particularly hard; they joined the Pugachev rebellion
(1773–5) in droves. The uprising caused tremendous damage to factories and
worksites that took through the 1780s to repair. Catherine II responded by
mandating a wage increase and regulating work conditions at mines here and in
Siberia; whether private owners respected the wage rate increase is unclear, but for
workers in state factories conditions somewhat improved. As in Siberia, a skilled
industrial worker elite evolved here with better pay and conditions.
Mining and metallurgy made huge strides over the eighteenth century: by the mid-
1760s Russia was producing 2.5 times more pig iron than Great Britain and by 1803
Russia was Europe’s biggest exporter of iron, ahead of Great Britain and France. But
Peter I and subsequent rulers had promoted these industries not only for export
profit, but also to supply the domestic armaments industry. The production of
firearms, centered in Tula, was always in state hands (although private industry in
Tula became famous for smaller metal items), while related industries—artillery,
gunpowder, ammunition—were in state and private hands in the Urals, the Baltic
(Olonets), and the lower Volga. Similarly important for domestic military needs was
the woolen industry, which produced a rough quality of cloth suitable for rank and
file uniforms (officers’uniforms required higher-quality imported cloth). By the end
of the century textiles were primarily in private hands, mainly nobles employing serf
labor and serving the domestic market as well as army.
The state also took a direct role in the salt monopoly. Production was done by
state mills, private entrepreneurs, and recipients of state monopolies, such as the
Stroganovs, who made their fortune in the Perm’lands around towns with names
redolent of salt—Sol’Vychegodsk and Usol’e (salt in Russian issol’). Other
industries that the state took a self-interested role in founding or supporting
included linen factories, associated with paper making and the state monopoly of
stamped paper for official documents. State-owned brickmaking boomed with the
founding of St. Petersburg; the state recruited soldiers and ascripted peasant villages
aggressively to staff these factories and kilns; over the century private entrepreneurs
moved into thisfield. Copper was in demand by the state (for arms and coinage)
and by the populace (for household items, church bells); the state provided smelters
and support in the form of labor, land grants, and prospecting rights. By the 1760s
Russia was self-sufficient in copper, and by the end of the century it was exporting.
Conditions were propitious for the expansion of manufacturing in the eight-
eenth century. Nobles needed the income to support their Europeanized culture
and peasants had higher state and landlord obligations to pay. Expansion into black
earth lands opened up possibilities for distilling and other manufactories there,
while an empire-wide market in surplus grain freed peasants in the less fertile north
to concentrate on manufacturing. Peasants had always manufactured small items
320 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801