House entrepreneur Nicholas von Ditmar

After receiving a good experience while working as an engineer at the Putilov factory and at the construction of the Ryazan-Kazan railway, von Ditmar turned out to be in Kharkov as a participant in the construction of another railway, Balashovskaya, where he was engaged in setting up drilling wells and artesian water supply. In 1893, Nikolai von Ditmar opened a mechanical and mechanical workshop in Kharkov, eventually expanding the enterprise to two engineering plants ”—the boiler-mechanical and cast-iron-copper foundry, united by the same name:“ Kharkov engineering factory N.F. von Ditmar. His brainchild still exists as the Kharkov machine-building plant “Svet Miner” and is one of the leading machine-building plants in Ukraine. Ditmar was also a talented statistician and accountant who singled out accounting in a separate science. Since 1893, he has been participating in the work of the miners of southern Russia congresses (the building of the council of congresses still exists on Sumskaya Street, 18–20), initially organizing the statistical work of the mining industry. In 1907, von Ditmar published the textbook “Fundamentals of Accounting (in a new form)”, which he dedicated to his teacher, DI Mendeleev. In 1906, Nikolai von Ditmar was elected chairman of the Council of Congresses of Miners of Southern Russia. He was also a member (deputy) of the Kharkiv City Council, held a number of major posts in public and private organizations. During the Civil War, von Ditmar became one of the ideologists of the White movement and organizers of the Volunteer Army. He died in July 1919 of typhus on the way from Rostov-on-Don to Kharkov. Perhaps the main achievement of von Ditmar's activities was the search for a dialogue with the workers. Despite the rejection of left-wing ideas (for example, an industrialist strongly opposed the eight-hour working day), he did much to improve the working conditions of the proletarians. So, von Ditmar improved the rescue case in the mines of Donbass and initiated the opening of the first in the Russian Empire Medical and Mechanical Institute (“Institute for the Treatment of Injured Workers”) in 1907 in Kharkov (Ekaterinoslavskaya Street, now Poltava Way, the house is preserved). Later, the institute (hospital) moved to the building on Pushkinskaya Street (the current address of the house number 80), now it is the Institute of Pathology of the Spine and Joints. prof. N. I. Sitenko.