Villages of Iuzha and Boniachki: a One-Company Factory Town in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

This study focuses on the evolution of two “factory villages” in the Upper Volga area of late Imperial Russia — Iuzha and Boniach’ki — into “industrial one-company towns”, i. e. into communities with some elements of urban infrastructure owing the growth of local textile mills. It is based on reference and PR publications issued between 1897 and 1913 and contemporary essays of Russian and non-Russian authors. Possible reasons behind the long-term and systemic efforts of industrialists belonging to the second and third generations of the Balin and Konovalov families to provide their factory workers with housing, schools, hospitals, recreation facilities, and retired workers’ homes are discussed.

Among the possible motives for these activities are the absence in both communities of either marketoriented social infrastructure or municipal authorities able to run welfare facilities. The combination of two other factors: the low labour productivity of textile workers, who were mostly of peasant origin, and their inexperience in dealing with their incomes were also significant. This combination turned factory owners into “guardians” of their employees, in part by keeping wages relatively low and re-directing part of the salary funds toward welfare programs. Systemic and comparativebased approaches are used to assess the results of the latter. The author’s finding is that while such efforts helped ease some problems of the growing factory villages, in the long run they slowed the emergence of a modern factory worker able to independently support his/her existence in a 20th-century urban milieu.