Vladimir Potapov

L

ooking at an impeccably done work young craftsman Danila, one of the heroes of Ural taleteller Pavel Bazhov (1879-1950), was lamenting: "Smooth and precise, the pattern is all right, engraved as designed... But where is the beauty? Take this flower... it seems plainly bad but when looking at it, the flower makes you happy at heart". Whatever one might say, ordinary people can hardly grasp mysteries of the Mother Nature, Danila exclaimed. To what one wise elder replied that the Sorceress and Mistress of the Copper Mountain had such craftsmen. They were putting their hearts into the work. And everything was coming out of their efforts just fine. "No wonder! They have seen that stone flower and they have grasped the essence of the beauty".
Beauty understood
To Ural jewelers the Stone flower, craftsman Danila, Mistress of the Copper Mountain are not just fairytale characters but also a personification of their own history, though embellished and poeticized a little. Craftsmen capable of creating beauty with their own hands have always been highly valued in the Urals. Their works are prominent in the best exhibition halls, they decorate many houses and private collections. This tradition has been symbolically proved, when Russia’s president Vladimir Putin presented the silver statuette "Mistress of the Copper Mountain" to chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder at the meeting in the city of Ekaterinburg. The statuette decorated with emerald and malachite was created by D. Popov, a craftsman from Jewellers of Ural JSC.
The prehistory of this enterprise is over a hundred years old. In 1896 there was a mineralogical studio in Ekaterinburg, which was making collections of stones for Czar’s court, educational institutions. It started developing the jewelry business with cutting stones. Besides, the studio was manufacturing decorations and household goods for grandees, rich factory owners, merchants and ordinary people. In short, for all, who appreciated and understood the beauty of stones. The first exhibition of Ural jewelers’ works in Saint Petersburg in 1903 was a noisy success. Connoisseurs discerned a new original direction and what is called originality in the jeweler’s art.
The distinctive feature of the Ural jewelry craft is a diversity of natural stones, which are used as a main component of a jewel. Often silver and gold just supplement as well as emphasize the natural beauty of stone insert. At the same time there is nothing unusual, when a casing is manually adjusted to precious stone and complex fastening is done by hand. The Ural jewelry craft is particularly interesting because of its combination of different stones in one jewel. These stones may be comparatively cheap or expensive: for example, agates or amethysts are often combined with diamonds. Such a combination looks surprisingly harmonic thanks to stringent artistic solutions and simplicity of forms.

Based on traditions and raw material resources
The elegant laconism of Ural jewelers is based on the rich culture of processing precious and semi-precious stones with a thousand-year history. Even members of ancient East Slavic tribes liked to decorate themselves with necklaces and earrings made of comelian, rock crystal, coral, amber. Semi-precious stones as irregularly-shaped ground caboshons that were locally produced or brought from Byzantium, Central Asia and China can be found in jewels created by Russia’s craftsmen in the 10th to 13th centuries. Some luxurious jewels combine colored stones and pearls with plique-a-jour and filigree.
As the centralized Russian State grew stronger and Czar’s court was getting richer in the 16th century, court craftsmen became masterly in using such artistic decoration methods as blacking, stamping, filigree, jewel-filigree enamel. The jeweler’s art of the 17th century is characterized by works’ brightness, festive elegance. Attires of townswomen and female members of prosperous peasant families were decorated with combinations of semi-precious stones and river pearls. Jewels crafted for court aristocracy abounded with rubies, emeralds and diamonds.
Reforms implemented by Peter the Great influenced the development of mining and stimulated Russia’s search for its own minerals. Precisely the Urals’ subsoil with abundant deposits of ores became the base for the future Russian metallurgy. But besides iron and copper there were also raw materials for the jewelry craft, which were unique by their variety: gold, silver, platinum, emeralds, other jewel and semi-precious stones. It was no accident that one of the first lapidary factories was built in Ekaterinburg.
The baroque jeweler’s art of the first half of the 18th century featured the widest range of precious stones along with casting, high-crinkle stamping, bright enamels. Jewels in those times were typically distinguished by their picturesqueness, splendid decorativeness. And in the second half of the 18th century, which jewelers call "the century of brilliants", this stone dominated gala decorations.
The era of classicism (from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century) was marked by jewelers’ aspiration for precision in forms, strictness and laconism of decor. Light lilac amethysts, softly blue aquamarines and, of course, brilliants became favorites. Agates, topazes, quartzes and demantoids were clearly preferred for daytime decorations. The passion for the antiquity art was clearly reflected by the wide spread of decorations with cameos and intalia.
Developing jasper, rhodonite and amazonite fields in the Urals provided a raw material base for a new surge of the stone-cutting craft. Starting in the 1780s this craft reached its peak. The art of Russian mosaic was born, when Ural malachite and other colored stones were discovered.
In the 19th century large perfectly equipped jewel firms began operating in Russia. There were world-known leaders among them, such as Faberge, in the first place. By the beginning of the 20th century the Russian jewel industry accounted for 95% of the domestic market.

Ural school recognized
The first jewel decorations produced at Ekaterinburg’s factory were sketched by Vladimir Roschin, the oldest craftsman, who had an experience of working with the Emperor’s court. Later, the school of jewelers originally set up by Roschin acquired technologies and skills of craftsmen from the Kiev plant evacuated to the Urals during WWII. This served as a base for founding the Sverdlovsk jewel plant in August 1941. At present, the plant is called Jewellers of Ural.
The discovery of the largest diamond-containing area in Yakutia in 1954 gave a lot of qualitatively new opportunities to the national jewel industry. Precisely Ural craftsmen Boris Andreev and Andrei Chizhikov made facets on the first Yakut diamond. Cutting diamonds and brilliants was started real fast.
But searching for new ways of developing distinctive traditions continued. In 1958 jeweler Evgeny Gorkunov and artist Nadezhda Statsenko mastered the filigree production that became one of the major directions of the plant’s activity. In the 1960s the large collection of jewels made of silver with Ural semi-precious stones that replaced widely used Czech glass was produced. Multi-colored stones set in silver were turned into real works of the art thanks to skills of talented master jewelers. The "Caucasus" silver brooch with jasper was recognized the best at the international exhibition in Paris in 1961. Since then the Sverdlovsk jewel plant has been a constant participant of the most prestigious exhibitions in the French capital as well as in Montreal, Tokyo. Successes of Ural craftsmen in the jewel market were furthered by new technologies, such as model casting and growing artificial emeralds. The latter one was developed in cooperation with the Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Geophysics.
The triumphal march was continued with the striking victory of artist Elena Opaleva at the Brilliants-96 contest of jewel designers held in London by De Beers. The ’Gizza sphinx’ necklace with over 700 brilliants, which were used to make it, was the first to represent the Ural jewel school at this contest. In 2000 the ’Twins’ necklace made by Opaleva drew much attention again at the exhibition of jewels and watches in Basel, Switzerland. There were 2,400 well-known firms participating in that exhibition. A special attention of the competent public was also attracted to two works by Elena Lavrenova: the perfectly made ’Insomnia’ and ’Yula’ gold brooches with brilliants that amazed visitors by the harmonic combination of emotionality and liveliness of images.
Articles produced by Ural jewelers gained fame and started having much demand. Their sales began in Switzerland, Great Britain, Germany and Hong Kong, where elegance and luxury are highly valued.

New technologies, freedom of creativity
The century-old tradition, national peculiarities and the desire to conquer new heights of craftsmanship are today’s characteristic features of Jewellers of Ural JSC. The company’s artists and designers are closely following whims of the fashion in jewels. The range of jewels is constantly widening. There are new areas of activity, such as production of souvenirs and items of heraldry.
This gives a strong incentive for technical re-equipment. The line to produce gold chains and bracelets, technologies of processing diamonds and making hollow jewels, laser devices to create cameos are just a few production innovations. Some technologies have been brought to perfection: the quality of casting and stone fastening at the enterprise is considered a model. By the way, stone fastening is the most labor-intensive process in the jeweler’s art and much skill is needed to make stone really attractive. Learning to do it takes longer than one or even two years. Jewellers of Ural JSC is famous in the industry for its virtuosic fastening craftsmen. The high engineering level of production allows artists to freely experiment with materials and forms. And that is why Ural jewels can hardly be confused with any others.
Yuri Byrdin
General director of Jewellers of Ural JSC. Born in 1949. Graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute. Mechanical engineer. Went into the jewel business being 37 years old. Before that made a career in turbine construction becoming a deputy general director of a big engineering plant. Commenting on the drastic change of professions says that there is no such an "enormous gap" between making turbines and jewels as one can imagine. In his words, jeweler’s precision is equally needed in both fields.
In 1987 became the head of the Sverdlovsk jewel plant, which was transformed into the joint-stock company Jewellers of Ural JSC in December 1992.
President of the Ural branch of Russia’s Diamond Chamber, deputy chairman of Russia’s Guild of Jewelers. The Gold-and-Platinum Institute as well as the department of technology and decorative processing of materials at the Ural State Engineering University have been opened with the direct participation of Yuri Byrdin.
Likes theater, historic literature, chess playing.
Jewellers of Ural JSC
8 Marta St, 197, Ekaterinburg,620085 Russia.
Phone: (3432) 25-1210. Fax: (3432) 25-1322.
E-mail: ausup@ju.ur.ru