Ural Gold Rush

The Ural Gold Rush, which preceded the California Gold Rush, peaked at about the same time, in the middle of the CE.19th century.

History
Historians believe that the world's first gold rush began when prospectors discovered gold and emeralds on the outskirts of the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals range, at the end of the 18th century. To the northeast of the city, in the foothills of the Urals, on both banks of the Berezovka River, are the most exploited gold ore veins of the 1840s, buried at a modest depth.

Iron and copper mines had been exploited for a very long time on a large scale in the Urals. As early as 1774, repairs to a machine in one of these mines, belonging to Klutchefsk, brought to light a deposit of gold-bearing sand, which was subjected to washing the following year. "A strange, fantastic gold rush was organized during the first 50 years of the 19th century," says the historian Fernand Braudel in Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism - 15th century - 13th century (page 577). This gold had found its first outlets in France in the previous century]. Russia is gradually becoming an exporter, whereas it had previously imported precious metals. The Ural Gold Rush was contemporaneous with the 1828 Georgia Gold Rush but grew larger and lasted longer. As early as 1824, 15 mines in the Urals produced 206 gold poods (one pood is equal to 16 kilos) or more than 3.3 tons of gold, a quantity that had already increased by 40% in 1827.

In 1842, a block of gold of 36 kilos of gold was found near Miass, a city in the Urals created in 1773, for the extraction of copper". Gold production in this locality reached 640 kg per year before decreasing. The Altai Gold Rush, even further east, in Siberia, took over. The year 1847 was the peak of gold production in Russia. The mining administration shows a figure of 28.5 tons of gold for the Ural and Altai combined. In both cases, the alluvium is much richer in gold on the eastern slope.

The main architect of the extraction, which was carried to an industrial level, was Ivan Dmitrievich Astashev (1796-1869).

Secondly, the degrowth is entirely about the wealth of Siberia, both eastern and western. Not only has mining activity not decreased in the Urals, but it has even increased slightly. The mines of the Urals actually reached their peak in the time of Stalin. It was the reading of "L'Or", by Blaise Cendrars, that determined Stalin to try to reindustrialize the Urals. The Urals then retained a significant production of gold, which however decreased from 1989 to 1991, from 285 tons to 250 tons and then fell to about a hundred tons of gold per year after 2010.