According to John McKay in his book Pioneers for Profit (Chicago & London, 1970; British Library X.529/11627), one of the most striking aspects of Russia’s economic development in the decades before the First World War was the emphasis on direct foreign investment to fuel industrial modernization. In the years leading up to the outbreak of war the growth of heavy industries drew much British capital and personnel to the country.

A map of mining concessions worked by British companies in 1916 Siberia, from Russian Mines; Covering Mining Concessions Worked by British Companies in Siberia  (London, 1916) British Library 07106.g.12.

John Wilford Wardell, a draughtsman from County Durham who ‘studied non-ferrous metallurgy in [his] spare time’, was one of these, taking a job for the Spassky Copper Mine Ltd  in 1913 and reaching its works in Siberia on 2 June 1914, his 25th birthday. As he later recollected in his memoir In the Kirghiz Steppes:

By good fortune or otherwise, my sojourn in southern Siberia coincided with one of the most critical periods in Russian history, when peace and war, revolution and counter-revolution passed in succession to that chaos from which a new Russia – since grown very powerful – ultimately emerged.

The Spassky Copper Mine in Siberia was established by the New Zealand-born Englishman E. Nelson Fell and his older brother Arthur Fell (later Sir) in 1903. It  was situated in West Siberia on the Steppes, reached at that time by travelling first to the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, then by horse and cart some 650 miles.

As he describes it, Spassk in 1914 (nowadays in Karaganda region of Kazakhstan) had a population of around 3,000, with 1,500 Kazakhs and Kirghiz, and 300 Russians employed by the company, managed by 18 Britons including himself. The Russian Revolution reached them gradually, and Wardell recalls the formation of workmen’s and peasants’ committees (Soviets) in June of 1917. By the end of the year the workers enjoyed an eight-hour day, a six-day week, and a 200 per cent rise in wages – and through the Soviets were increasingly controlling the day-to-day management of the mines.

 Workers at Spassky, from John Wardell, In the Kirghiz Steppes (London, 1961) 010127.cc.39.

Despite banishing the ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements, the revolutionary workers were still fond of the British and left them unmolested, even giving them an equal share of the expropriated stores of vodka – nine pints to every male, making management of the copper works somewhat more difficult for a few days at least. When the Bolsheviks nationalized the works in spring of 1918, Wardell remembered it as ‘an enforced holiday’.

Their attempt to return home was more fitting for a time of such historical significance, as the province became a front in the civil war. While in Petropavlovsk (Kazakh – Petropavl) in May, the British woke to find White Guards rounding up the Bolsheviks who had controlled the town. Cossacks managed also to arrest and remove the Soviets in Spassk, and the company returned to take up the management of the de-nationalized copper works in October of 1918, dodging an outbreak of Spanish influenza on the way.

By now, all of the previous friendliness towards the British had disappeared:

The workers, although subdued and tractable, were sullen, and they longed for the return of Bolshevism; they were a changed people in many respects and they looked upon the Company, as represented by the British staff, as largely responsible for the collapse of their short-lived freedom.

As Wardell wrote, ‘the malcontent Russians’ spoke darkly of ‘what they would do to the British when the Reds came back to power’. Nevertheless, he remained at Spassk through the civil war for another 10 months, until advised to evacuate by the British Consul to avoid a Red advance, finally returning to Britain in November of 1919. He finally wrote and published his memoir of the period, alongside a short companion booklet about Russian history, The Russian Revolution, Its Causes and Effects (X.708/474.), in 1961.

Mike Carey, Collaborative Doctoral Student

References

Peter Gatrell, ‘Industrial Expansion in Tsarist Russia, 1908-14’, The Economic History Review 35, 1 (Feb., 1982), 99-110.

Augustus Norman Jackman, Russian Mines; Covering Mining Concessions Worked by British Companies in Siberia (London, 1916). 07106.g.12.

E. Nelson Fell, Russian and nomad; tales of the Kirghiz Steppes (London, Duckworth, 1916) [Digital copy via Hathi Trust].

Melanie Ilič, ‘Preface: The diary and letters of Nelson Fell’, Revolutionary Russia, 12, 1 (1999), 115-56.