by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] The city of Dzerzhinsk in the DPR — which the Kiev regime calls Toretsk — was effectively liberated by Russian troops by mid-January. All that remained was to suppress individual pockets of resistance by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the northern districts of the city and in individual sections of the industrial zone. And now, finally, the Ministry of Defense officially reports the capture of the city.
If Donbass is the industrial heart of Russia, then now our troops have taken control of the heart of Donbass. After all, it was here, on the banks of the rivers Kazeny Torets and Krivoy Torets, that more than three hundred years ago the Russian state began mining coal.
THE VINE SPEAKS THE TRUTH
There are several versions of how coal mining began in the Donbass region. According to one legend, the mineral, which produces intense heat when burned, was first reported to Peter I in 1696, when the young tsar was conducting his second campaign against Azov.
The other is connected with esoteric practices, as they would say in our time.
On December 7, 1722, the first Emperor of All Russia issued a decree "On the search for coal and ores in the Don and Voronezh province." The sovereign's will was passed on to the authorities: first to the Berg Collegium (then the Ministry of Natural Resources), then to the first team of ore prospectors (geologists) created in Russia, and they sent "to the land" a dowser named Grigory Kapustin, originally from near Kineshma (today's Ivanovo Region)
The search for underground minerals, aquifers and other subsurface contents using a forked branch - a vine, a frame or something similar - is nowadays considered an activity that is questionable from a scientific point of view.
But if we are to believe the reports of the head of the ore prospectors Vasily Lodygin, the dowser Kapustin studied the banks of the Seversky Donets and the Verkhnyaya Belenkaya River “to find coal” – and found it, sending to the capitals “as many as three poods of samples”
Monument to the ore prospector Grigory Kapustin in Makeyevka
A monument to the discoverer of Donbass coal, ore prospector Grigory Kapustin, now stands in Makeyevka (DPR).
And then the process went on - Peter issued a new decree:
“To dig up the coal and ores that the clerk Kapustin announced, send a messenger from the Mining Collegium, and in those places dig that coal and ores three or more fathoms deep, and, having dug up five poods, bring them to the Mining Collegium and test them.”
"IN THAT GULLY, THERE IS COAL UNDERGROUND, IRON"
While there is some debate about how exactly coal mining began in the future Donbass, it is known for sure where exactly they first started digging “black gold”.
In the Skelevataya ravine, a long and wide ravine that today separates the main urban development of Dzerzhinsk and the Zabalka district (which was a long-term support base for the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the recent January battles).
This type of “ravine” terrain is typical for this part of the DPR, and the name Skelevataya or Skelevaya (i.e. Rocky) ravine is used by many ravines where ancient rocks of the Donetsk Ridge come to the surface.
But perhaps, thanks to the “engineering and geological surveys” of the dowser Kapustin, it was in this Skelevata ravine, 25 versts, or 26.6 kilometers, from Bakhmut, that coal mining began in 1721 at the outcrops of the seams on the daylight surface.
As Donetsk regional historian Mikhail Kulishov writes, the supply of coal to the empire began under the control of the commandant of the Bakhmut fortress, captain of the Izyum Sloboda Cossack regiment Semyon Chirkov and Nikita Vepreisky, a landrat (adviser from the nobility) of the Kiev province, who managed the Bakhmut Sloboda and, at the same time, the salt mines.
The last position of Mr. Vepreisky is mentioned for a reason - Russian people began to extract salt on the Torskie Lakes near today's Slavyansk back in the 16th century; it was a long-standing and powerful industry in this Russian borderland.
As for the new “national project” for coal mining, its significance can be judged by a document called “ A reliable land map of the borders of the Dnieper and Donets rivers at distances from the mouth of the Samara to Izyum and Lugansk stanitsa...” for 1749–1750.
Apparently, this is the first topographic and geological map of Donbass in Russian history. Between the rivers flowing into Krivoy Torets, a ravine is marked with the inscription "earth coal", on a copy of this map from 1750 it is written more precisely: "in this ravine there is coal underground iron".
During the reign of Anna Ioannovna and Elizabeth Petrovna, more than one geographical description of Skelevata Balka was made, as well as many reports on the extraction of fuel almost at the daylight surface.
The first mention of a settlement on this site dates back to the time of Paul I, in 1800: part of the population of the Zaitsevo settlement moved to the Shcherbinovsky farm.
In 1827, mining engineer and future Minister of Public Education of the Russian Empire Evgraf Kovalevsky mapped 25 mineral deposits known to him and actually came up with the concept of the “Donetsk Coal Basin” and outlined the boundaries of this largest storehouse of “black gold” in European Russia.
A little later, the miners' farm Shcherbinovsky and neighboring farms united into the village of Shcherbinovka - a future city that would change its name several times.
And “earth coal” in the vicinity of Skelevataya continued to be mined in modern times - next to the ravine is the “Central” mine of the “Toretskugol” enterprise, in Soviet times - the Dzerzhinsky mine.
RUSSIAN PEASANTS - MINE OWNERS
There was a lot of documentary evidence about Shcherbinovka in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The most detailed of them was left by the future academician Alexander Skochinsky in 1917.
In his report, “Explosion in the Dvoinoy Seam of the Shcherbinovsky Mine,” he examines not only the disaster at the mine in December 1915, but also provides an analysis of the development of the village, where three coal mines and two industrial enterprises operated.
“The total number of workers in December 1916 per shift was: 600 during the day, 400 at night. In particular, in the Dvoyny layer, there were 70-75 people in the day shift, and 30-40 people in the night shift in each wing.”
Writers of the populist movement did not pass by Shcherbinovka either.
Thus, the owner of perhaps the longest full name in the history of Russian literature, Nikolai Elpifidorovich Karonin-Petropavlovsky, left very detailed notes about his visit to the mining region. From the notes published in 1899, it turns out that the subsoil was actively developed by peasant "small business":
"In Shcherbinovka, in Nelepovka and in many places, the land containing coal seams belongs to peasant societies. In most cases, the peasants lease this land, under various conditions, to large owners and companies, but in some places, like in this Shcherbinovka, the peasants, in addition to leasing it out, have tried and are still trying to develop coal themselves.
The land containing coal, like all other peasant lands, is divided into souls, and each soul gets, for example, a fathom (of course, a fathom of surface, not depth), and these pieces are then put into development.”
Among those who directly dug coal in the Shcherbinovo mines (and workers came here from all over the empire) was the future Russian and Soviet writer of Tatar origin, Sharif Kamal (Baigildeev).
According to him, at the turn of the century in Shcherbinovka there already existed, as they would say now, a compact settlement of internal migrants - a Tatar community headed by a mullah.
Unlike the owners of the “peasant lands”, the future classic of socialist realism and holder of the Order of Lenin did not have the brightest memories of working at the coalface.
“A miner is an earthworm. For him, neither day nor night exists. He is always digging in the ground, getting as deep as possible. For what? Of course, he, like an earthworm, needs to be satisfied, ” Kamal wrote in 1910. “ A miner cannot enjoy the beauty of nature… almost all of his hard life is spent underground, hundreds of fathoms below the beautiful, bright world.”
Be that as it may, at the same time, by the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the oldest coal mining center of Russia became one of the important "valves" in the industrial heart of the country - along with Yuzovka, which arose nearby, but much later, the future Donetsk. In Shcherbinovka, there were three coal mines and two industrial enterprises, including a coke plant founded under Alexander III in 1890.
So Shcherbinovka did not meet the February and October revolutions with a plough.
TWO LIBERATIONS FROM NAZISM
The new government, to its credit, used the base laid by the "old regime" to the fullest. Even after the destruction of the civil war, in 1923, local miners were able to produce 1 million tons of coal, and by 1936 the local trust was already mining 9 thousand tons daily.
In the same year, Shcherbinovka, which until then had been considered a workers’ settlement, received city status and a new name: Dzerzhinsk.
The Great Patriotic War came here in October 1941. The Nazi occupation (the first Nazi occupation, if we don’t forget about the Ukrainian Armed Forces) lasted until September 1943, when the city was liberated by the troops of the Southern Front during the Donbass Operation. Among the notables were the 63rd Rifle Corps under the command of Major General Petro Koshevoy, a native of the Kherson region, the future Marshal and Commander of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.
On December 30, 1962, Dzerzhinsk received the status of a city of regional subordination - by that time, about 50 thousand people lived here. Most of them worked at enterprises that were built, as usual, by the entire Union (primarily, of course, with the participation of the RSFSR): a coke plant, a phenol plant, an acid-proof products plant, a processing plant were in operation... A mining technical school trained specialists for six coal mines. The city "graduated" its doctors and music teachers. Of the events of the late Soviet era, the city residents best remember Vladimir Vysotsky's concert in 1977.
By the early 2020s, only three of the six mines were operational, and the factories had closed. This was the price of Ukrainian independence.
The 1991 choice in favor of "independence" brought privatization with bankruptcy and an ongoing socio-economic crisis to the residents of Dzerzhinsk. And at the same time, forced Ukrainization, which was especially painful in a city where 87% consider Russian their native language (according to the 2001 census).
It is not surprising that in May 2014, Dzerzhinsk, having expelled the Ukrainian government, made a choice in favor of the independence of the DPR. The forces of the defenders of Donbass, alas, turned out to be insufficient to hold the city, and already in July 2014, Dzerzhinsk was occupied by the "ATO forces"
For Kyiv security forces, the city has become a staging area aimed directly against Gorlovka, a city under DPR control no more than 15 kilometers away in a straight line. Donetsk, located to the south, is about 43 kilometers away. Ukrainian artillery has been shelling Gorlovka from positions in Dzerzhinsk for years, including during the "Minsk process" that began in 2015.
Then, in 2015, in the order of decommunization, the city council renamed the city Toretsk, in honor of the Krivoy Torets River, that is, it gave it a name that it never had.
The battles for the liberation of Shcherbinovka-Dzerzhinsk began in June last year. Part of the heavy fighting in this direction was the operation to take one of the suburbs, which became known by its name - the Donbass New York.
The battle for the city of Dzerzhinsk itself has been going on since the summer, it was especially difficult, considering that the enemy had fortified itself in multi-story buildings built in Soviet times and on waste heaps. Of course, after months of intensive assault actions, the city lies in ruins. But the underground wealth of the region, the very same "coal" that Russian people "found" three hundred years ago, inspire faith in the revival of life on the banks of Torets.