Problems in the Work of Mining Supervision in the Urals in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

This article continues the study of one of the constituent parts of the reform of the organisational foundations of the Russian mining industry in the second half of the nineteenth — early twentieth centuries, associated with the organisation of state supervision over private industry. The author deals with problems faced by officials of mining supervision, i.e. district engineers of the Ural mining region. In the early twentieth century, it remained the largest in terms of the number of objects of supervision and this aspect is in many respects indicative of what was happening around the whole country. According to the district engineers themselves, at that time, they had to face both problems of organising their work (defining the boundaries of districts and objects of supervision, financing, and official status), and problems related to the performance of their duties (lack of “measures of influence” on entrepreneurs). It turns out that if the former ones got solved, although not always promptly, the latter ones persisted, despite their acute character and social significance. It is concluded that the main reason for this was the different levels of overcoming certain problems. If organisational issues were resolved by means of administrative measures, as a rule, finding understanding in the mining department itself, functional ones required the approval of legislative bodies which brought them to a level of discussion where the mining department was no longer of decisive importance. The presence of diverse difficulties in the work of mining supervision in the early twentieth century indicates that at the final stage of its existence, it was not a perfect institution and did not always achieve its main goal of educating responsible entrepreneurship in such an important sector of the economy as the mining industry.