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Shakhty

Shakhty (Russian: Ша́хты) is a city located in Rostov Oblast (region), Russia. The city is located 75 km northeast of Rostov-on-Don on the south-eastern spur of the Donetsk mountain ridge. According to the 2002 Census, the population of Shakhty was 222,592. Historical Overview The city of Shakhty was founded on October 3, 1867 as the Gornoye Grushevskoye (Горное Грушевское) settlement. From 1881 until 1921, the settlement was referred to as Alexandrovsk-Grushevsky (Александровск-Грушевский). By 1914, the population of the city-settlement had reached 54 thousand. The city’s main source of income was derived from coal mining, an occupation that had been carried out in that region since the 18th century. Though the general population was poor, the town had rail, telegraph and telephone networks, electricity and plumbing as well as libraries, hospitals and a post office. Unlike the local labourers, most of the merchants and industrialists chose to live in either Rostov or Novocherkassk. In 1917, Alexandrovsk-Grushevsky changed hands three times during the fighting which took place between the Bolsheviks and the White Army during the Russian civil war resulting from the October Revolution. On April 28th, 1919, the city was taken by General Fitzkhelaurov who was commanding the Don Army (which formed part of the White Army fighting against the Bolsheviks). For 20 months, the city was free of the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, during this same time period, the city was ravaged by typhoid. On January 13, 1921, the city of Alexandrovsk-Grushevsky, now firmly under Bolshevik control, had its name officially changed to ‘Shakhty’ which in English means ‘mine shafts’; a reference to the city’s economic association with coal mining. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, many of the city’s churches and the archives were destroyed; and as was occurring throughout the rest of the Soviet Union, the names of street were all changed. In July, 1942, during the Great Patriotic War (The Russian designation for World War II), the town was occupied by Nazi Germany. Many coal mines and pits as well as many of the buildings were blown up by the Nazis during their retreat in February 1943. Following the withdrawal of Nazi forces, 29 of the townspeople were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for acts of bravery. In 1948, three years after an end to the hostilities, coal production levels in the mines reached what they had been before the war. During the Brezhnev years (1964-1982), the city was at the height of its development, with a population of over 250,000, and about 10 million tons of coal being mined each year. Unfortunately, the introduction of Perestroika (or restructuring) in June 1987 and its accompanying political and economic reforms proved devastating for the city, as many of the mines were privatised and/or shut down, causing massive unemployment. Today Shakhty is the main industrial centre of the Eastern Donbass. The city is also one of the main producers and exporters of tile in Eastern Europe, Shakhtinskaya Plitka (шахтинская плитка). A Slice of History – The Shakhty Trial of 1928 When the Russian Civil War came to an end, the communists took control of the economy. Unfortunately, due to communist mismanagement, coal production in the Shakhty area steadily fell for several years. Calls for constant increases in coal production, combined with inexperienced or fearful mining superintendents unwilling to press for needed equipment and overhaul of the mining industry eventually led to the inadequate maintenance, repair, and replacement of equipment, much of it dating back to pre-revolutionary times. In 1928, under the orchestration of Efim Georgievich Evdokimov, the local OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) arrested a group of fifty-three engineers in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty, and accused them of conspiring with former owners of coal mines (who were now living abroad and barred from entering the Soviet Union) to sabotage the Soviet economy. This accusation led to the Shakhty Trial of 1928 which became the first important ‘show trial’ (used for propaganda benefits) to be held in the Soviet Union since the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922. Assisted by faked confessions extracted by Evdokimov, a torture and intimidation specialist, the trial resulted in five of the fifty-three accused engineers being sentenced to death and another forty-four sent to prison. The Shakhty trials marked the beginning of the use of accusations of sabotage (non-execution or careless execution of one's duties) and wrecking (deliberate acts aimed against the normal functioning of state and cooperative organisations) against real and imagined class enemies within the Soviet Union. These accusations, wrecking in particular, would eventually become a hallmark of the Great Purge of the 1930s. Those familiar with the storyline behind ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will recall that Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, an engineer who advised carrying heavier-than-average loads on freight trains for the betterment of the economy, was executed for being a wrecker having been accused of overloading the trains for the purpose of wearing out the rails faster.