NONFICTION
| Gornozavodskaya tsivilizatsia |
The Mining Civilization. Nonfiction. Alpina. Moscow 2022. 284 pages with photos.
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Foreign rights:
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China/ NeoCogito |
The Urals is the most industrialized zone on planet Earth. The full industrialization of the region began with the reforms of Peter I, and under Catherine II, thanks to the Urals, the Russian Empire became a world-leading industrial nation. In Russian history, this happened only once – at the end of the 18th century. By this time, more than two hundred mining facilities were being built in the Urals.
The Russian government achieved such an excellent result using very specific methods. National industry, private and state, was extracted from the laws of the empire and organized as a separate power within the power. A mining state was established in the Urals with its own legislation and court, its own bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative department, and its capital – the „ideal city“ of Yekaterinburg.
The economic potential of mining equipment gave rise to a new and unprecedented cultural phenomenon, dubbed by 20th-century sociologists as the „mining civilization.“ This is a variant of the Russian world, but with a special value system, with a special mythology, with special culture heroes. And the identity of Russian mining and metallurgy, which is also the identity of the Urals, turned out to be the benchmark for its industrialization.
At a time when globalization is reshaping the world into a post-industrial consumer society, it is very important to consider what the industrial creation society looked like, especially in this exemplary Russian version.
| Khrebet Rossii |
The Backbone of Russia. Nonfiction. Alpina. Moscow 2022. 220 pages.
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Foreign rights:
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China/ NeoCogito |
People live on earth, life takes place in space. So country, territory, space cannot help but influence the destiny and thinking of a society. Only modern megacities are “one-dimensional”, but the world looks very different outside of urban globalization.
With every jolt forward, Russia‘s mainstay rested on the Urals. Russia has always been aware of this, but without really knowing the Urals. Ivanov‘s book is a systematic description of the Urals as a sociocultural phenomenon. Not a portrait, but an identification of the region, an explanation of its „inner structure“.
Russians have settled in the Urals for half a millennium, but also the Urals the Urals have been fitting the immigrants for five centuries. The development of the Urals was industrial, and the old industry required a special organization of life: production, social relations and even culture had to correspond to unique local conditions.
Thus arose in the Urals quite an amazing world, unlike the Russian one, with a complex set of local ideas about nature and man. In everyday life it is difficult to understand how the Urals differ from Russia ¬ and yet remain Russia. In any case, the fact is that the world of the Urals is not an alternative to the Russian world, but one of its versions. And the happiness of the Urals is to live by rules that are organic and as fate wills. To be needed and in demand right here on site. To move up without losing the ground. This is only possible in the mountains. Even in low ones.
