National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (Tomsk, Russia)

G. Yu. Boyarko, Dr. Econ., Prof., gub@tpu.ru

In general, from 1860 to 1910, the Russian ferrous metallurgy overcame the crisis of lagging behind other industrialized countries, providing its products to national needs and significantly reducing the level of imports of ferrous metals, which had become uncritical. The volume of steel smelting has increased many times (from 8.3 thousand tons to 3.3 million tons), and the output of steel products (from 186 thousand tons to 2.8 million tons). New ferrous metallurgy centers have been established in the new Southern and Southeastern mining and metallurgical regions. The outdated metallurgical conversion technologies were systematically replaced with new technologies for Bessemer conversion and open-hearth melting in the old mining and metallurgical districts (Uralsky, Severny, Tsentralny, and Polsky), while they were initially used in the new districts. Mining of alloying materials has begun – manganese (up to 739 thousand tons per year), chromium (up to 26.4 thousand tons per year), cobalt (up to 1217 tons/year) and nickel (up to 468 tons/year) ores. The problem was the need for external supply of pig iron (import and import) to strategically important metallurgical enterprises of the Northern Metallurgical Region (Izhorsky, Obukhov and Putilovsky Metallurgical plants).

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