Today, soda is an accessible product that can be found in almost every store, but it wasn't always this way. Until the 1880s, soda was imported, as there were no factories for its production in Russia. Changes in this area began with the Perm merchant Ivan Ivanovich Lyubimov, who owned a saltworks for a long time and decided to convert it into a soda factory. The main difficulty was the lack of specialists, so chemists were sought throughout the country, and the chief engineer was invited from Belgium. He was the scientist Ernest Solvay, who developed the ammonia method for producing soda from table salt and invested 125,000 rubles into the enterprise.

A few years later, the factory in Berezniki, Perm Krai, produced over 1 million poods of soda per year, which were supplied to Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg. Thanks to this enterprise, the chemical industry in Russia made significant progress. The factory began to generate substantial income, part of which was invested in improving the living conditions of the workers. Several residential buildings with plumbing and a hospital with free services were built for them, all to European standards. In 1916, the poet Boris Pasternak stayed here and called the workers' settlement 'a small industrial Belgium.'

Soon, following Lyubimov's example, a similar factory was opened in Donetsk, and by 1892, soda imports to Russia ceased, as the country was able to rely on its own capabilities. Ivan Ivanovich continued to work until his death in 1899, after which the enterprise passed to his wife and was nationalized during the Soviet years. The factory, founded by a tsarist merchant, still operates today, but under a different name and in new buildings.