Why are Russian custom/craft knives good?

The question in the headline contains a thesis that certainly not everyone agrees with, but generally, for the purpose of this post, I assume that among knife users outside the kitchen or dining room, the prevailing opinion is that Russian products, firstly, offer very decent quality, and secondly, provide a favorable price-to-quality ratio compared to Western knives. If we accept this assumption, it might be interesting to try to answer the question of why this is so. Why do Russian knives en masse have a reputation for being good, while Polish knives, for example, do not? Yes, there are Polish craftsmen mentioned by magazines like "Blade", who sometimes manage to rank high in the charts of this and other periodicals addressed to knife enthusiasts, but generally our knives are not considered to stand out above mediocrity, and no one in the States or England will advise a friend asking "what should I buy?" to go for Polish knives, while many will say 'go Russian.' I have my own answer/opinion to the question, which I take the liberty of presenting here. And the most essential component of this answer is not the industrial base, leading technology, or a favorable climate created by the state for business activity (the latter sounds like a total joke when applied to Russia), but is contained in a single word: "tradition."

Why is tradition important?

There are surely certified industrial development specialists who would claim that this is not a decisive factor, but I will persist that it is of paramount importance. When we talk about custom knife manufacturing, but also about the most important industrial knife-making factories, we are talking about several production hubs, such as the area around Zlatoust in the Urals, the Nizhny Novgorod region, or Vladikavkaz. In these places, knife manufacturing does not date back just a few or even a dozen decades. If we are to believe the guides at the Ethnographic Museum in Pavlovo near Nizhny Novgorod, back in 1666, in a fortified town with a permanent garrison established a century earlier by Ivan the Terrible, there were 40 blacksmith shops employing 80 master blacksmiths. It is hard to say what explains such a high concentration of economic activity representing the high tech of those times. Perhaps the reason lies in the poor quality of the arable land in these areas which, even by the very low fertility standards of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, did not allow for high agricultural yields. It is also possible that the abundance of so-called bog ore (sedimentary iron ore found on the banks of water bodies or in peat bogs) played a role. Though on the other hand, is a crappy soil such a rarity? There are plenty of such places, yet Ruhr regions do not just pop up everywhere. Either way, we can take it as a fact that as early as the early 17th century, there was an above-average number of craftsmen involved in ironworking and blacksmithing in general at this location. Of course, not everyone made knives and weapons—that was the top tier. But the production of hinges, fittings, locks, and other metal everyday items laid the foundation for the development of what we call the metallurgical industry today. It is worth noting that the local peasants, if not lucky, were at least not unlucky with their masters. The local rural population, just like in the rest of Russia (let’s remember that the colonization of Siberia was yet to begin), remained in feudal dependency. And what is the rational policy from a landowner’s perspective toward peasantry settled on agriculturally poor lands? Naturally, to increase their serfdom labor requirement from a reasonable and humane eight days a week to twelve. But as it happened, the representatives of the Cherkassky, and later Sheremetev families, for reasons probably incomprehensible to a statistical Polish nobleman, did not try to restrict their subjects in their non-agricultural activities (even though they could have). If a peasant generated income for them from such activity, they let him pursue it, including in the form of so-called wandering "artels" that periodically left the villages and, especially during the autumn-winter period, provided labor for the residents of nearby towns. 

What's more, the Cherkasskys and Sheremetevs allowed them to abandon field work altogether, provided that the so-called "obrok" (rent) they paid out of their non-agricultural income matched or exceeded what could be beaten out of them as serfs. It seems like a minor thing, but one could bring up a million examples, from dimwitted coat-of-arms-bearing Polish nobles to district party secretaries under communism, for whom making such a simple calculation was too much to handle. The result was that, due to a process of accumulating experience and passing down knowledge that had been ongoing since the early 17th century, dozens of villages made their living mostly from non-agricultural work and, out of nowhere, became a talent pool for the industry being built by Peter the Great. In the 18th century, in the village of Pavlovo, almost every household had a blacksmith shop or something that could be called a "metalworking workshop". Catherine the Great issued a special decree under which the residents of Vorsma, a village near Pavlovo, were exempt from certain taxes and granted the right to trade their products throughout the empire without additional permits. A dozen or so villages with a total population of 12,000 to 20,000 became a country-leading center for the production of knives, sabers, cleavers, and axes, at least until the Ural metallurgical centers emerged. And this tradition has survived and continues to pay off today.

Tradition - but also something more.

As I said before, tradition is of immense importance in my opinion. But there is also something more besides tradition understood as a certain capital of competence.
The archives are teeming with records of peasants who, thanks to income from manufacturing, bought their way out of serfdom long before it was officially abolished. The story of the founder of the "Zavyalov Company" is worth mentioning here. Zavyalov was a serf on the estate of another Count Sheremetev. He was a peasant only nominally; in reality, he was a blacksmith and knife maker with an excellent reputation. At Sheremetev’s personal request, he made a hunting knife for him. The knife must have been something special, because Sheremetev decided it was worthy of being presented to the Tsar, which he did. The Tsar liked the knife so much that, in gratitude, he publicly (meaning in front of the entire court) embraced and kissed him (a tsarist kiss was an official form of reward in Russia, ranked on par with the highest medals). As a token of gratitude, Sheremetev handed Zavyalov a "volnaya" - an official certificate of emancipation from serfdom. From then on, Zavyalov and his descendants were free people. They must have already been well-off, because soon after, they fouded their own family knife factory: the "Zavyalov Company". Generally, the status of being a subject living in serfdom was probably not particularly painful for the local peasant-craftsmen, considering that Vasily Shmakov, a peasant engaged in trade and moneylending and the founder (1780) of the region's first folding knife factory, decided to buy himself a "volnaya" only in 1803. Over the course of about 250 years, completely on its own, without any special effort from the authorities, aside from the fact that the government simply didn't interfere, an industrial hub emerged within a single governorate. It was inhabited by a population that seemed identical to, yet visibly differed from, theoretically identical peasants in other parts of Russia. And I’m not talking about the carbon-copy stories you can hear in every other local family about some great-grandfather who, well into his old age and deep in the throes of dementia for years, would transform beyond recognition the moment he stepped over the threshold of a blacksmith shop or workshop - he would straighten up, his lost gaze would regain focus, and the look of confusion and numbness would vanish from his face. Those are nice fairy tales, and they’re certainly fun to listen to. But besides them, there is something more concrete and verifiable. Over those two and a half centuries, not only skills were formed, but also a work ethic and a way of operating that even the Bolsheviks couldn't fully stomp out. Of course, the Zavyalovs and Shmakovs said goodbye to their factories (and quite often to their lives as well), but the ability to forge one's own destiny, even under minimally favorable conditions, remained.

It so happens that I vividly remember one of the most painful periods in Russia’s modern history - the decade of the 1990s. I remember it because I lived there at the time, albeit with the status of an inostranets (foreigner), which largely insulated me from most negative factors. In the '90s, the crisis caused by the collapse of the old order and the lack of anything solid to replace it took on harsher forms in Russia than in other Eastern Bloc countries, where things weren't exactly sweet either. Especially in the provinces, people who for decades had been untaught to take risks, punished for initiative, and rewarded mainly for obedience, were completely unable to find their footing when the authorities abdicated, shrugged off their responsibilities, focused on themselves, and told their subjects: "You are free to fend for yourselves". And what were people who had been employed in state jobs for three generations supposed to do when they suddenly stopped getting paid? They weren't laid off; they were simply no longer paid, or they were offered payment in the unmarketable output of their factory. On that basis, a toy factory worker would get twenty teddy bears and ten parrots at the end of the month. This experience, known as the "non-payment crisis", is remembered to this day as one of the greatest traumas of the Russian transition period. In the collective memory of the Russian province, it was a terrible time, when schoolteachers became lot lizards and men with clean records joined organized crime syndicates en masse.

It was roughly around that time that, quite by accident, I stumbled upon one of the first Moscow knife shows. Back then, they were held in the community center of the Ordzhonikidze factory. There you could meet and chat with figures who are legendary today in the community of knife makers and knife enthusiasts, like Igor Sklyarov, the founder of NOKC Company. That was where I first got to know this crowd and learned to value these people who, regardless of the fact that, like in any group, there were smarter and dumber ones among them, shared two common traits. First, they all had their hands screwed on right. Second, unlike the vast majority of Russians, they didn't complain. For them, it was the first time in a very long while that they could breathe a little easier. The weakness and collapse of power structures meant for them that the entire state-adjacent pack of hounds, from the tax office and militia economic crime units to activists from the so-called workers' inspection stopped breathing down their necks in their workshops. They no longer had to constantly explain where they got so many flat bars or what an industrial grinder (something you couldn't just buy in a store) was doing in their workshop. Now they could make a knife, stamp it with their own touchmark, and openly sell it at an exhibition. This ability to fit into new, difficult, but ultimately more normal times was the most important legacy left to them by generations of Zavyalovs and Shmakovs.
Of course, everything said above does not fully exhaust the question of "why are Russian knives good?". There are factors and conditions rooted in more recent times, but more on that in the next post: "why Soviet knives were good?