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UNTERNEHMER UND STADT IN DER UKRAINE, 1860-1914: INDUSTRIALISIERUNG UND SOZIALE KOMMUNIKATION IM SÜDLICHEN ZARENREICH. By Rainer Lindner. Historische Kulturwissenschaft10. Konstanz: UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft, 2006. 555 pp. ISBN (paper) 3-39669-609-2.
Today we take Dnipropetrovsk's and Donetsk's major role in Ukrainian life for granted, but before there was a Dnipropetrovsk or a Donetsk there were Katerynoslav and Iuzivka. An important new book from Germany restores the centrality of the rise of these cities to the history of the southern Russian Empire and Ukraine. In a time when we continue to consider Ukraine's oligarchs to hold the key to the country's future despite the vagaries of the period after the Orange Revolution, Rainer Lindner's book Unternehmer und Stadt in der Ukraine, 1860-1914 comes as a pleasant reminder that there is much more to Ukraine's entrepreneurial tradition than politically motivated corporate takeovers and power plays.
During the time period covered in the book there was, of course, no independent Ukraine. Lindner concentrates on the area near the Donetsk basin, which-thanks to the discovery of coal and iron ore-became one of the centers of the tsarist empire's heavy industry beginning in the 1870s. The backdrop of the story is the gradual economic incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian imperial economy, not only through its mining industries, but also through Ukraine's large role in commerce, as, for example, in the imperial sugar trade.
Each of the five sections of this extensive book deals with an issue concerning the industrialization of the southern Russian Empire in the period between emancipation and the beginning of World War I: "City Landscapes and Industrialization," "Entrepreneurs in the Southern Tsarist Empire," "Entrepreneurs Between the State and the 'World of Labor,'" "Entrepreneurs in the City," and "Industrial Exhibitions as Communication Spaces." The cities discussed are Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk), Iuzivka...