The statue commemorating 'murky' life of forgotten Scottish industrialist in Russia-occupied Ukraine

Now details of the life of Falkirk-born Charles Gascoigne - an industrialist originally invited to Russia by Catherine the Great - have been uncovered by an academic at a Scottish university.

Victoria Donovan, professor of Ukrainian and East European studies at the University of St Andrews, was researching her new book, Life in Spite of Everything, on the history of the Donbas region, where European industrialists founded factories in what was then part of Russia, when she came across information about Mr Gascoigne.

Before the Russian invasion, Prof Donovan was working with a visiting museum curator from eastern Ukraine who asked her for archival information on the industrialist, whom she had never heard of before.

“He's really famous in eastern Ukraine,” Prof Donovan says. “They called him Karl Karlovich Gaskoin over there. He’s known as the founder of Luhansk.”

Luhansk, in the Donbas region of Ukraine, has been largely controlled by Russia since 2014 and was fully occupied from the beginning of the invasion in 2022. In Mr Gascoigne’s time - he is credited with founding Luhansk in 1795 - the territory was all part of the Russian Empire.

However, far from being an heroic character, Mr Gascoigne’s past is described by Prof Donovan as “murky”.

“I've been digging in in the archives, in the National Library of Scotland, and he's quite an elusive character,” she said. “There's not much, but it's a bit of a murky story.”

Working in the Carron Company near Falkirk, Mr Gascoigne ran into problems.

“It seems that he got into trouble there and got into a lot of debt,” said Prof Donovan. “As they put it in the archives, he ‘embarrassed himself’.”

However, Mr Gascoigne was key in the invention of a “short nosed cannon”, which could be transported on ships and proved popular with both the British and Russian military - and attracted the attention of Russian queen Catherine the Great.

“She invited him over to Russia,” said Prof Donovan. “And then, because he was ‘embarrassed’ back at home in Falkirk, he stayed in the Russian Empire and was involved in all sorts of different industrial projects, including setting up the first metallurgy work in Luhansk.”

Aged 59, he married Anastasia Guthrie, the 15-year-old daughter of Matthew Guthrie, a Scottish doctor working in the court of Catherine the Great.

Prof Donovan’s initial investigations began after she started looking into the Welsh founder of nearby Donetsk.

“I dug into it, and then I found out that there was this world of foreign capitalist investment in this part of Ukraine at that point in time,” she says.

“I think partly, it's been obscured from history, because after the Russian Revolution, the story about foreign capitalists developing industry in what then became Soviet Union was not very popular.

“They wanted people to think that this whole region had been a Soviet project, that Stalin had developed all these factories and mines, and so they really sidelined that history of foreign capital investment.”

When conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, when Russia sent troops into the Donbas region and annexed Crimea, Prof Donovan says she believes local historians reverted to the narrative of European investment to strengthen European ties.

“There was a really active recovery of that early European history of industrialisation [in Ukraine],” says Prof Donovan. “They wanted to distance themselves from the Soviet narrative of this area being part of the Russian world. But it gets romanticised a bit too much from that point of view afterwards.”

She compared their influence to that of Donald Trump, who this week announced a deal with Ukraine to get access to the country’s rare minerals.

“They wanted to make a lot of money, like Trump does now, they were there for their own benefit,” she says. “They weren't there to help the Ukrainians.”

Life in Spite of Everything is published by Daunt Books in April.