IVAN KOROBOV TELLS THE STORY OF HIS OWN LIFE 

WAS born in 1882 in a suburb of the town of Malo-Archangelsk in the province of Orel. My grandfather had been a conscript and served twenty-five years in the tsarist army. He returned worn out and emaciated, with a disease of the eyes. He was treated with village remedies and became totally blind. Not to be a burden to his family, he took to begging, wandering from village to village singing soldiers  songs. But his songs were not plaintive enough and brought him little. He was too proud to have a guide. Once, he lost his way in a snowstorm and was found frozen to death. 

My father worked as a slagman at the blast furnaces in Yuzovka, in the Donbas. I was left in charge of my grandmother. My father visited us very rarely. He was a man of powerful build, tall, broad-shouldered, with a blonde bushy moustache. The following story is told of him. 

In 1885 a cholera epidemic broke out in the Donbas. The workers  barracks were placed under strict quarantine. The poor received no medical attention; the sick were left to their fate. The police behaved brutally. Wherever disease was discovered, the workers  hovels and their meagre effects were burned without scruple. One day a man in the garb of a blast furnace worker appeared in the workers  quarter. He raged through the streets, smashed the windows of the police station, demanding that doctors be summoned from Ekaterinoslav. He called upon the iron-workers to join him in the steppe. The crowd came into collision with the police. The rioters were dispersed and their ringleader locked up. He was beaten senseless. When he recovered consciousness he was beaten senseless again. This lasted for a fortnight. He left the lock-up a raw mass of wounds and bruises, but went straight back to work at the blast furnace. 

That was my father, Grigory Korobov. He it was who taught me not to fear the furnace. 

The foreman was a Frenchman. When he ordered it, my father would have me let down into the shaft of the furnace to distribute the ore evenly with a spade. It was a job that required strength and courage. It was the best my father could do for his son. Only thirty years later was this hellish work abolished by a simple device in the shape of a revolving bucket. In modern blast furnaces, of course, the ore is fed to the furnace mechanically. 

I first went to work at the age of ten, assisting a cowherd for ten copecks a day, working from dawn to dark. At twelve I went to work for the squire as a farm hand. In 1899 my father took me to work with him in Makeyevka. We lived in wooden barracks, sleeping on bunks which stretched In tiers. We slept in our clothes with our boots under our heads, it being the only safe place for them. 

There were about a hundred men in each barrack, which were lighted by wick-lamps burning pitch. The stench was overpowering, the soot all-pervading. We were allowed ten buckets of water for the lot of us. I remember in a heavy rain we would run out naked to wash. 

The Makeyevka Iron and Steel Works were then being erected in the Ukrainian steppe. 

The first furnace was blown in in 1899. The shareholders came in their carriages to witness the ceremony. A carpet was spread for them; they passed between lines of policemen. The priest blest the furnace and sprinkled it with holy water. The deacon chanted sonorously. But at that moment the cage hawser snapped; the cage was smashed to atoms, and the furnace was sprinkled with workers  blood. The furnace stood idle because of this for fifteen days. 

At that time I worked hauling ore tubs. I made twenty-five hauls of one ton each a day, for which I was paid a ruble. After eighteen months I becahe a slag remover. Then I joined my father in charging the furnace. Three men were choked to death while I was working on this job. I was once asphyxiated myself, but was saved by my comrades. 

Blast furnace workers in those days had to be men of great physical strength and courage. The shifts were long; often the men would be too tired to make their way home to their barracks, and would drop to sleep by the side of the furnace. Awakening in the morning, they would resume their labour. 

I married at the age of twenty and left the barracks to live with my wife in a mud dug-out, I worked hard and persistently. I would stay after my shift to assist the foremen and study the work of the smelters. How else could I learn the business of ironsmelting? People used to keep their knowledge a secret in those days. A little while ago I glanced through a popular booklet on blast furnaces. It could be read in a couple of hours, whereas I had to spend many valuable years of my youth to acquire the knowledge contained in that booklet. 

I would get up at five in the morning and return home at seven in the evening. I was often too tired to eat. On free days there was nowhere to go theatres and cinemas were unknown. The streets lay deep in mud and were swept by a hot, dust-laden wind. Not a green thing was to be seen. Vodka shops, taverns, drunkenness and brawling made up the life around us. 

My son Pavel was born in 1902, Nikolai in 1905, and Ilya in 1910. With great difficulty, I managed to put the elder boys to school, and did not spare myself to earn a few extra copecks for their sake. Fortunately, I was strong and healthy...