The Manufacturing Process of Samovar Production in Tula

Abstract

For many centuries the city of Tula, located 200 km south of Moscow, was the centre of Russia’s metallurgical and armaments industry. Apart from weapons, Tula was and still is also the producer of world-famous water boilers known as samovars. A samovar (in Russian literally self-boiler) is a metal urn usually made of brass or copper which is used to heat and boil water for making tea. This study will initially provide a historical background to samovar production in Tula noting that manufacturers incorporated peasant domestic handicraft workers into industrial production. It will then proceed to a detailed examination of the manufacturing process of samovar production as undertaken at the Lenin Samovar factory of the Commercial Industrial Trust of Tula in the early 1920s, highlighting the continued use of artisanal labour in the manufacturing process, despite increased centralization and mechanization of the industry.

Keywords:

• Tula
• samovar
• metal working
• manufacture
• handicraft
• artisan

Notes

1 Tula is first mentioned in the Chronicles in 1146.

2 V. V. Danilevskii, Russkaia tekhnika, 2nd edn (Leningrad, 1948), pp. 26–27. Writing in the period of ‘high Stalinism’, Bakulev asserts that Russian armaments manufacture preceded Western Europe’s by some fifty years. G. D. Bakulev, Tulskaia promyshlennost. Istoriko ekonomicheskii ocherk. (Tula, 1952), p. 24.

3 G. M. Belotserkovskii’s book on the town of Tula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Tula i Tulskii Uezd v XVI i XVII vekakh, provides valuable data on the iron artisans whose activity in the area served as a background to the first Russian efforts at iron manufacturing. Iosef Gamel’s account of the Tula iron manufactories, Opisanie Tulskogo oruzheinogo zavoda v istoricheskom i technicheskom otnoshenii, was the first effort at a serious study of the subject. Published in Moscow in 1826, the book contains descriptions and interpretations which are, on the whole, still reliable, along with a large number of important documents in the appendix. The collective work of N. B. Baklanov, V. V. Mavrotin and I. I. Smirnov, Tulskiye i kashirskiye zavody v XVII v. GAIMK, 98 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), is of importance for detailed explanations of the technology and organization of the Tula, Kashirskie, Porotovskii, and Ugodskii iron factories. The authors also raise interesting theoretical questions about the nature of Russian industry in this period, as does A. A. Kuzin in his pioneering study Istoriia otkrytii rudnykh mestorozhdenii v Rossii do serediny xix v. (Moscow, 1961). V. N. Kashin’s scholarly article on the Tula armaments settlement in the seventeenth century, ‘Tulskaia Oruzheinaia Sloboda v XVII veke’, in Problemy Istorii Dokapitalisticheskikh Obshchestv, 1–2 (1935), 111–41; 5–6 (1935), 76–99, deals at length with the factories of the area. Danilevskii’s erudite history of Russkaia tekhnika devotes considerable attention to iron manufacturing.

The two most outstanding monographs on the Russian iron industry are by S. G. Strumilin, Istoriia chernoi metallurgii v SSSR, vol. 1 feodalnyi period (1500–1860g.g.) (Moscow, 1954); and B. B. Kafengauz, Istoriia khoziastva Demidovykh v xviii-xix vv. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949). N. N. Stoskova’s book on the first Russian iron manufactories, Pervye metallurgicheskie zavody Rossii (Moscow, 1962), is a short work designed for the general reader. Two splendid books by N. I. Pavlenko, Razvitie metallurgicheskoi promyshlennosti Rossii v pervoi polovine xviii veka; promyshlennaia politika i upravlenie (Moscow, 1953) and Roger Portal, L’Oural au xviiie siècle, étude d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris, 1950), deal with Russian iron manufacturing in the eighteenth century. A. A. Vvedenskii’s study of the Stroganov family, Dom Stroganovykh v xvi–xvii vekakh (Moscow, 1962), is the most important source of information on the first Russian iron manufactory, built in Siberia during the late 1570s and early 1580s.

4 A written document (pravaia gramota) of Peter I dated 13 July 1696 records the settlement of thirty iron-smiths in Tula in 1595.

5 Cadastre — an official register showing details of ownership, boundaries, and value of real property by districts, made for taxation purposes.

6 See S. G. Strumilin, Istoriia Chernoi metallurgii v SSSR, i (Moscow, 1954), 31; N. I. Pavlenko, Razvitie metallurgicheskoi promyshlennosti Rossii v pervoi polovine xviii veka: promyshlennaia politika i upravlenie (Moscow, 1953), pp. 29–30; and R. S. Livshits, Razmeshchenie promyshlennosti v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1955), pp. 24–25.

7 W. H. Parker, An Historical Geography of Russia (London: University of London Press, 1968), p. 167.

8 O. Gamel, Opisanie Tulskogo oruzheinogo zavoda v istoricheskom i technicheskom otnoshenii (Moscow, 1826), p. 3.

9 Fasmer, Etymologicheskii slovar’, vol. iii, 553 cited in R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt. A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 237.

10 Robert Smith, ‘Whence the Samovar?’, Petits Propos Culinaries, 4 (1980), 68.

11 <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/ entry/Samovar> (accessed 19 April 2012).

12 Ibid.

13 Po Tulskomu kraiu: posobie dlia ekskursii (Tula, 1925), p. 231; V. N. Ashurkov, Stranitsy Tulskoi Starariny: ocherki po istorii Tuly (Tula, 1988), p. 51; Nauka I zhizn’, 4 (1967), 94 cited in Smith and Christian, p. 240. For a short description of the factory, see I. Ia. Miasnikov, Genezis Tulskogo Samovarnogo Proizvodstva (Vtoraia Polovina XVIII–Nachalo XIX Vekov), (Tula, 1978), p. 75.

14 Miasnikov, p. 76.

15 Ibid., p. 80.

16 Legal category of small producers and traders living in towns.

17 In 1782 about 45% of the registered male population was employed in weapons production.

18 Weapons production spurred a number of local industries in Tula. For example, Tula samovars were first made by the ‘arquebusier’ blacksmiths. ‘By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tula’s expert craftsmen also executed “personalized” orders, a large range of metal objects including “lamps, sewing boxes, writing instruments, furniture, umbrellas and mirrors, bucklers, seals, snuffboxes, buttons”’. M. N. Kosareva, ‘Tula, the City of Master Craftsmen’, in Imperial Saint Petersburg: from Peter the Great to Catherine II, ed. B. de Montclous et al. (Milan and Monaco, 2004), p. 225; Antoine Cheneviere, Russian Furniture. The Golden Age 1780–1840 (New York, 1988), pp. 245–55; and Robert Bremner, Excursions in the Interior of Russia, 2 (London, 1839), 307–08.

19 Miasnikov, p. 78.

20 E. I. Ivanova, Russkie samovary (Leningrad, 1971), p. 14.

21 M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii, The Russian Factory in the 19th Century (Homewood, Ill.: Published for the American Economic Association by Richard D. Irwin, 1970), pp. 173–75.

22 V. N. Ashurkov, Stranitsy Tulskoi Starariny: ocherki po istorii Tuly (Tula, 1988), p. 61.

23 I. Popov, ed., Kustarno-remeslennye promysly, Tulskaya gub (Tula, 1913), p. 5; G. D. Bakulev, Tulskaya promyshlennost (Tula, 1951), p. 61.

24 Bakulev, Tulskaia promyshlennost, p. 61.

25 Po Tulskomu kraiu: posobie dlia ekskursii (Tula: Izd-vo Tulskogo Gubispolkoma, 1925), p. 232.

26 The Lenin Samovar factory manufactured samovars from 1922 to 1931.

27 Po Tulskomu krai: posobie dlia ekskursii (Tula: Izd-vo Tulskogo Gubispolkoma, 1925), p. 234.

28 For example, in the village of Skorovarovo Alexinsky area an artel was called ‘Speed’; in the village of Fedorivka Leninsky district an artel was called ‘Samovar maker’.

29 M. Gosberg, Po Tulskomu krai: posobie dlia ekskursii (Tula: Izd-vo Tulskogo Gubispolkoma, 1925), pp. 238–62.

30 1 arshin = 71.120 cm or 16 vershoks.

31 Tugan-Baranovskii.