By the early 1980s, blacksmithing had almost disappeared in our country, says gunsmith Leonid Arkhangelsky.
At the end of the USSR, he worked as an engineer at NPO Energia, worked on the engines of spacecraft, including Buran and the Mir station.
Since then, Leonid has become one of the most recognized masters in the country.
He regularly arranges exhibitions at the Central House of Artists in Moscow, and the videos on his YouTube blog, which he runs with his daughter and which is called “The Forge of Maria and Alexander Arkhangelsky”, collect tens of thousands of views.
"Patriarch, guru" - this is how his colleagues speak about Arkhangelsk.
According to their stories, it was he who, back in Soviet times, revived the manufacture of Damascus steel.
This steel has nothing to do with the city of Damascus, the name comes from the Turkic "Damascus" - a pattern.
“Then, in the late Soviet Union, there were blacksmiths who, until lunch, until they had drunk, did nothing but forge crowbars with industrial hammers and shoe horses at hippodromes,” Arkhangelsky recalls.
- There was no artistic forging.
There were only a dozen or one and a half blacksmiths for the entire USSR.”
© Photo from the personal archive
While still a student at the Higher Bauman School, Arkhangelsky became interested in damask steel and blacksmithing.
In space production, he experimented with metal, including Damascus and damask steel.
In 1986, he brought his Damascus steel knife to a blacksmiths festival in the Moscow region.
“I was told that it was impossible to make stainless Damascus, but I did it,” says the master.
At that festival, he took second place, a year later - first, became the champion of the USSR, left the space industry and devoted himself entirely to his beloved work.
Then there were ten people in the entire Union of intelligent blacksmiths.
“Dropped everything.
He went to a barn on Losiny Ostrov, a smithy built in the 1930s, where crutches for a narrow-gauge railway were also forged on the set of the first sound film, The Road to Life, Arkhangelsky continues.
In this barn, the master forged for several years, often these were fences for cooperative orders.
But he did not give up scientific research in metallurgy - with the collapse of the USSR, access to metallurgical plants, research institutes appeared, and new opportunities opened up.
Then the revival of weapon blacksmithing art began.
Blacksmiths-gunsmiths began to be invited to the Kremlin Museums, to the Armory Chamber at conferences.
“There is a demand for high-tech weapons based on old technologies.
There are new Russians.
They wanted expensive gifts, they bought knives for $20,000 made of Damascus steel with jewelry,” says Arkhangelsky.
Already in the 1990s, according to him, 70 forges producing Damascus steel were opened in Tula, Zlatoust and Nizhny Novgorod.
People began to engage in artistic forging, there was a demand for forged railings, fences.
“In the 2010s, Russia took second place in the world in artistic forging, weaponry — Damascus steel.
The first was America, but there is a completely different demand, there are many millionaires, the price must be justified by its place in the rating of the American Blacksmiths Association, a sales precedent,” explains the blacksmith.
From fences to blades
Now blacksmiths are busy in the field of artistic forging and making knives, says Dmitry Spirov, head of the Moscow branch of the Blacksmiths Guild.
He founded his company in 2006.
Prior to that, he worked in other forges, starting as a welder, then became a manager and manager.
Dmitry Spirov, head of the Moscow branch of the Blacksmiths Guild
© Photo from the personal archive
“Artistic forging today is mainly fences, gates, gates, balcony railings, stair railings, building canopies, window bars.
Many people make money from it.
Our average client is the owner of a cottage under construction or radically reconstructed,” Spirov explains.
Artistic forging includes the production of forged furniture - beds, tables, swings, benches, barbecues, gazebos.
And also these are ritual (cemetery) fences and crosses.
There are craftsmen specializing in small architectural forms - forged sculptures.
Bladesmiths are engaged in the manufacture of knives - hunting, tourist, kitchen.
They also make sabers, swords, battle axes.
Blacksmith products
© Photo from the personal archive of Svyatoslav Orlov
“But not edged weapons - their manufacture is limited by law.
These are all works of art, works of art.
They are willingly bought as a gift,” said the leader of the Moscow blacksmiths.
There are no exact statistics on how many people are employed in blacksmithing in modern Russia.
Dmitry Spirov believes that about 3 thousand people work with artistic forging and the same number of bladesmiths.
The blacksmiths' guild now consists of 260 people.
Without leaving the checkout
The salary of a highly qualified specialist in artistic forging is 80-100 thousand rubles per month, in the "hot season" of construction from April to October it can reach up to 150 thousand rubles.
“It all depends on the orders - the payment is piecework,” Spirov clarifies.
But investments in the forge will be required.
For artistic forging, you need a forge, a pneumatic hammer, a welding station and an apparatus, band saws, grinders, rollers, a truck for traveling to objects.
It is necessary to lay in the cost and rent of the premises.
An ordinary blacksmith at a large knife-making enterprise earns from 35,000 to 50,000 rubles, says bladesmith Svyatoslav Orlov.
“A large company is considered to be one that employs 60 people and produces about 2,000 knives per month,” he specified.
Representatives of 10-15 professions take part in the manufacture of a high-quality knife - specialists in blade heat treatment, grinding, sharpening, as well as milling cutters, turners and seamstresses.
“Universal workers capable of performing all the necessary operations, working alone, can be counted on one hand in our country,” says Orlov.
Such a master wagon can earn up to 100 thousand rubles a month.
Rust coating
Despite the successes achieved, blacksmiths believe that the industry is currently going through a difficult period.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the demand was so great that even advertising was not required, it was enough to write “Artistic Forging” on the fence and leave a phone number - there was no end to customers, says the head of the Spirov guild.
“There were so many orders that colleagues had to give.
I have two workshops.
Now there is only one left.
Many were forced to leave the market altogether.
After the introduction of anti-Russian sanctions, there were fewer customers, ”he complains.
It became difficult for Russian blacksmiths to compete with the flow of cheap forgings from China and Iran.
“Our production is more expensive – it is art.
A hand-forged leaf is ten times more expensive than a stamped Chinese one.
But due to economic problems, people are looking for cheaper goods, they are slipped these stampings instead of a real blacksmith's work, ”explains Spirov.
The blacksmith Svyatoslav Orlov agrees with him.
“The purchase price for a Chinese knife is $20.
Here he is sold for 7-8 thousand rubles, and he is blunted by cucumber.
The layman does not understand this,” says the blacksmith.
Leonid Arkhangelsky also points to serious problems in the industry.
“Earlier, in our Central House of Artists, people bought knives for $1,000 in bags.
Now no one takes products at such a price, - says the master.
“Blacksmithing is an art, and art is a luxury and cannot exist without solvent connoisseurs, patrons or government support.”
Girls on a roll
However, the demand for the profession is quite high.
Among the hundreds of thousands of blacksmith YouTube channel subscribers, there are many who want to learn how to work with a hammer and anvil.
For some forges, conducting workshops for beginners has even become one of the ways to earn money, Spirov notes.
And this is not surprising, because the nearest specialized college for blacksmiths is located in Minsk.
Russian higher educational institutions and colleges do not train blacksmiths, but specialists in decorative and applied arts, where artistic forging is only one of the disciplines.
The Vasnetsov Abramtsevo College of Art and Industry in Khotkovo near Moscow trains specialists in artistic metal.
Blacksmithing is studied here in the first year, and then students get acquainted with chasing, jewelry engraving, and enameling for almost four years.
Go to college after the ninth grade of high school.
In the blacksmith shop
© Photo provided by the college administration
The blacksmith's forge is on fire in the training workshop, students are working at the anvils.
There is a welding machine and other tools here.
Samples of work hang on the walls - steel masks, candlesticks in the form of an owl, samples of forged gratings with rivets.
The majority of students are girls, 57% of them in college.
Girls learn how to make various artistic elements, such as curls.
Students are very clever with a pneumatic hammer, and this is not an easy task - the blow is regulated by pressing the foot pedal.
Pressed too hard - the workpiece will flatten out and go into marriage.
And this device is unsafe.
If handled incorrectly, the forging can be knocked out and seriously injure the hands or the pincers will hit the stomach.
But the girls do everything competently and proudly demonstrate their own forged blacksmith tongs.
Development vector
Today, most blacksmiths in Russia are self-taught.
And master classes are the most accessible form of education.
Group classes usually follow a specific program for making the simplest products: a nail, a key chain, a souvenir horseshoe, a poker, and a simple “kuyabrik” knife (aka “Belevsky knife”).
Until recently, each such course cost from 15,000 to 20,000 rubles.
Most of the students are employees of IT companies looking for a replacement for boring fitness centers, as well as men who received gift certificates from their spouses in the form of an original gift.
But sometimes those who are thinking about getting a new profession also come.
Some then equip a workshop in a garage or in a summer cottage, continue to master blacksmithing on their own.
The only licensed private educational institution in Moscow that offers three-month courses for blacksmiths, even with the assignment of a rank, is the Russian Academy of Crafts.
The instructor of the course, blacksmith-gunsmith Vadim Kulichkin, has been teaching it since 2014.
“People who come here are motivated — someone to get skills for a hobby, someone hopes to master a profession,” says the mentor.
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It is impossible to teach blacksmithing in three months, "you can only give an impulse, a vector of development," Kulichkin says.
This profession must be studied seriously, the interviewed experts unanimously agree.
“To become a blacksmith, you have to forge.
He took a piece of iron in his left hand, a hammer in his right - and bale-bale.
There were no teachers then, there was no literature, there was no Internet.
They gave me a Czech book on artistic forging,” Leonid Arkhangelsky recalls his first steps in the profession.
The lack of professional education leads to the fact that "self-taught people make junk," the master complains.
He cited the experience of Great Britain as an example, where it is impossible to get an order for forging without a diploma from an appropriate educational institution.
In Germany, according to the guild tradition of old Europe, apprentices demonstrate their skills to masters, and they decide whether they can open their own business.
In Japan, this is allowed only to those who have studied with the master for at least six years.
But in modern Russia, a blacksmithing training system has not yet developed.
Blacksmiths are reluctant to accept students as apprentices - some refer to the lack of places in the forge, others complain about the frivolous attitude of neophytes to study.
Attempts by recognized masters to create their own academies were also unsuccessful.
So people learn from videos on the Internet.
“I’m forging my second year, graduating from the YouTube Academy,” says one of the novice blacksmiths.