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Imperiia: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Labor Issues

An undertaking the scale of Kherson’s required a large investment of manpower and resources and stands as a testament to the Russian Empire’s mobilizational powers. The Admiralty estimated in 1780 that it required 2,616 laborers to be divided among the following tasks.¹

For the construction of six slipways:
150 carpenters, 50 masons, and 1020 assorted laborers for piledriving, stonebreaking, and clearing the sites.

For the construction of three ships and several ship camels:
1122 various carpenters, 24 joiners, 60 smiths, 40 sailmakers, and 150 common laborers.

The preoccupation with acquiring skilled laborers to build the fleet was a constant theme in Ivan Gannibal’s correspondence with the admiralty.² He stressed that the numbers of workers being sent to Kherson were misleading as he would find many of them to be either lame or ill upon their arrival. Of some 104-odd woodworkers and foremen who arrived in Kherson from Taganrog in the autumn of 1780, he complained that no more than 40 turned out for work on a weekly basis. And of those 40, a significant portion were third-rate ignoramuses who ordered about the foremen.³ Furthermore, those hired by the Admiralty would stay no longer than the terms of their one year contract, returning home and being replaced by new workers who were just as ignorant as the first.
Gannibal was so strapped for labor that he even complained of being oversupplied. He had been sent the wood to build prams, but his laborers were hardly sufficient to cover the initial stages of the shipbuilding and other, more pressing, admiralty constructions.⁴ He only offered the hope that the prams might be built by the time Kherson's ships were sent to Glubokaia Pristan' to be armed and supplied.
While the Admiralty continued to send laborers to Kherson, attrition rates were high. Of the 618 people sent to Kherson by the Admiralty in 1781, 130 had either died or fled by the dawn of 1783 and accusations of incompetence were still rampant.⁵

1. "Vypiska iz spravki o stroenii v Khersone elingov i korablei, 1780 goda fevralia 14," Materialy dlia istorii russkago flota VI, 717.
2. Ivan Gannibal, "Vypiska iz doneseniia Ganibala admiralteistve-kollegii, 1780 goda noiabria 17," ibid., 718.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 719.
5. Ivan Gannibal, "Donesenie general-poruchika Gannibala grafu Chernyshevu, iz Khersona, 1783 goda ianvaria 26," Materialy dlia istorii russkago flota XV, 1.

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An Imperfect Realization As Kherson made the transition from imperial vision to concrete reality, expectations had to be tempered. In May 1779, less than a year after the city received its name (if not its location), General of Artillery Ivan Gannibal, who had been given the responsibility of developing Kherson and its fortifications, oversaw the start of construction on Kherson’s first 66-gunner, named in honor of Catherine II. His initial, cautiously optimistic assessment that four ships could be built every year quickly soured when he found that Kherson’s ship master, Selyaninov, had inexplicably increased the draft of the Slava Ekateriny by over a foot. Dismissed from his post for being “unreliable,” Selyaninov was far from the last of Gannibal’s problems. In fact, Kherson would not launch the Slava Ekateriny until the end of 1783, constantly hindered by the harsh realities of developing such a large project on a newly acquired frontier ex nihilo. To explore some other issues facing Kherson during its early years, follow the links below:
Labor Issues
Supply Issues
Disease
Kherson's days as the main shipyard and headquarters for the Black Sea Fleet were numbered. The subsequent Russo-Turkish War (1787 - 1792) brought the western bank of the Bug river under Russian control and new possibilities for naval expansion. The city of Nikolaev (Mikolaiv) was founded as a shipyard in 1789 and quickly grew to supplant its predecessor on the Dnepr as the Black Sea Fleet's headquarters were transferred to the city in 1796.