It is complicated to evaluate the role of foreign specialists in Russian modernisation and the transfer of European knowledge and technologies into the country’s metallurgical and armament industries. For almost three centuries, these industries were marked by a symbiosis of state protectionism, private initiative, foreign entrepreneurship, and the interaction of heavy and light production. To understand the economic and acculturational processes involved, it is essential to compare the experience of industrial regions in Russia and Western Europe. Small independent craft workshops developed as alternatives and supplements to mass factory production. Analysing the interrelation of Russian and European experiences can clarify the role of foreign entrepreneurs and specialists in Russian heavy industry while also demonstrating the positive or negative role of the state.

While the word ‘craft’ can be used today in a neutral way to denote any productive or creative activity, the concept behind the term often bears a negative connotation: this is connected with the evaluations of technological and scientific progress in industrial civilisation sometimes posited by the historiographical tradition. As a rule, ‘craft’ is attached to adjectives bearing negative associations, such as ‘routine’, ‘narrow’, ‘primitive’, or ‘illegal’. In this article, we attempt to understand what constitutes the work and products of craftsmen – can crafts be art? Are craft masters artists? While this may seem rather contradictory, we show that these terms are interchangeable and complementary. A craft can be art and a craftsman an artist: it depends on the interpreters, participants, and the context in which the activities in question occur.

The factories of the 20th century, the results of the Industrial Revolution and the megalomaniac arrogance of the past, are now akin to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt – they have become historical relics. In their place have arisen ecological, flexible, highly technological, and small forms of production: these have a direct genetic link with craft workshops, a fact which has led to a re-evaluation of the history of crafts and new horizons in historical research. Often, however, gigantic industrial factories, masterpieces of technological progress, sometimes obscure craft workshops in their shadows, making it seem as if they are towering over an economic wilderness. Looking at workshops, factories, and manufactories, we attempt here to consider the relationship between these terms in both the proto-industrial era of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries and the period of industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century.

The history of Imperial Russia began not only with new army and navy, but also with the new clothes. Growth to the new capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, on the one hand, absorbed the Moscow experience of cooperation with foreign experts from the German Slobode of the 17th century, on the other hand, was an experimental space in which to generate new knowledge and experience sharing to a new level. The tailors of Petersburg were supposed to supply the population of a large city with European clothes: nobility, burghers, craftworker and merchants, the Royal court, the army and navy. The presence of many foreign tailors in St. Petersburg strongly influenced the development of tailor’s and resulted in a major fashion center in Russia in the 18th century.

Today, the profession of a tailor, masters of their craft and artist in one person to become prestigious. But long before this trend existed in St. Petersburg in the first half of the 19th century. How changing social and economic situation tailors in Petersburg for this time? The impact of fashion on the development of Handicrafts? What fashion trends, found its dissemination with the Westernization of Russia after the reforms of Peter the great. Petersburg as a European capital, famous for its luxury, attracted many tailors masters from Europe, which has led to a remarkable symbiosis and the flourishing of the tailor’s craft in the 19th century.

The introduction of guilds in Saint Petersburg in 1722 played an important role in the growth of the city’s handicrafts and corporate self-administration. With signs of development in the middle of the nineteenth century, a civic consciousness appeared in the guilds. Initiatives of the guild masters during the period of reform, demanding the right to choose permanent and non-permanent masters, were not supported by the state, which brought about institutional stagnation, in spite of considerable growth of guilds up to 1914.