In the Russian elite, the Stroganovs kept themselves apart. They had merchant roots, but due to the antiquity of the family and the degree of influence on state affairs, they could give odds to many aristocrats.
Tatars or Novgorodians?
The founder of the Stroganov family was a certain Spiridon, who married a relative of the Moscow prince Dmitry Donskoy. According to some reports, this Spiridon was a Tatar, converted to Christianity, but in 1395 he was captured by his fellow tribesmen. Refusing to convert to Islam, he was tortured by them: having tied him to a post, they “cut him off” by cutting off pieces of flesh. From the name of the torture, the son of Spiridon Kuzma received the surname Stroganov.
Nikolai Karamzin, without challenging Tatar roots, rejected the legend of torture, and another historian, Nikolai Ustryalov, studied the genealogy of the family and wrote about its Novgorod origin.
An indirect confirmation of the Novgorod roots of the Stroganovs can be considered an entrepreneurial acumen, as well as an interest in the underdeveloped northern lands, which were traditionally colonized by people from the Veche republic.
The foundations of the family capital were laid on salt cooking. Already the grandson of the semi-legendary Spiridon, Luka Kuzmich, was so rich that he almost single-handedly bought out the Moscow prince Vasily II the Dark, who was captured by the Tatar after the mediocre lost battle of Suzdal. Most often, an amount of 200 thousand rubles is called, which clearly exceeded the annual budget of the entire Moscow state.
However, the creator of the financial empire of the Stroganovs is considered Anikey, the youngest of the four sons of Luka Kuzmich (the other three died childless).
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Probably, as compensation for the ransom paid, the Stroganovs received vast lands in the Kama region and on the Kola Peninsula. Having engaged in the development of the largest salt fields, they made Solvychegodsk their residence, but Anikey obtained from Ivan the Terrible another important privilege - control over the trade with England going through Arkhangelsk.
He acted as a government official, but did not forget about his interests, especially since the place turned out to be super-profitable. Indeed, during the Livonian War, England periodically turned out to be Russia's exclusive European partner, and the road through Arkhangelsk was the only trade communication linking Moscow with Europe.
Tired of the labors of the righteous, Anikey Lukich took monastic vows under the name of Joasaph. Before that, the eldest sons - Yakov and Grigory - he sent to master the possessions given by the tsar in the Kama region and along the Chusovaya river, and left Semyon in Solvychegodsk.
Colonial ram
The elder brothers not only turned the Perm lands into their fiefdom, but also financed the conquest of Siberia. Here they got a fair amount of property along the Tobol, Irtysh and Ob, which, however, for decades, not only made a profit, but also required hefty investments.
In fact, the main income of the family was still in the North, where Semyon Anikeevich continued to do business on salt and overseas trade. Considering that Grigory and Yakov take more than they give, he quarreled with them and tried to start a division of family assets. Ivan the Terrible did not like this, since the Stroganovs' firm was a kind of colonial ram of the type of the later British East India campaign. In general, Semyon was "handed over headlong" to his older brothers, they arranged for him to be dragged out, and he never fought again.
The male line of Yakov Stroganov's offspring was cut short in 1668 by his great-grandson Daniel. Grigory's son Nikita did not leave male heirs either. The female line, however, was quite numerous, its representatives quite successfully jumped out in marriage, so that by the middle of the 17th century the Stroganovs became related with many boyar and noble families.
But only the line of Semyon Anikeevich could boast of an abundance of male offspring, who so oppressed the Solvychegodsk proletarians that he was stabbed to death by them.
During the Time of Troubles, his sons and grandchildren stood on statist positions, supporting with money first Vasily Shuisky, and then Mikhail Romanov in their confrontation with False Dmitry II, Poland and Sweden. At the same time, the interventionists did not get to the Stroganov northern and Ural-Siberian possessions, and they were not subjected to ruin.
Saving the family business
When the Troubles ended, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich granted the Stroganovs new lands and trade privileges. True, the family firm actually began to creep apart, and in the 1680s Grigory Dmitrievich (Semyon Anikeevich's great-grandson) began to collect it in earnest. Peter I favored such efforts, since it was easier to take money from one oligarch than from several.
Land holdings inherited by female representatives of the dynasty, as a rule, were transferred to Grigory Dmitrievich in exchange for providing relatives with dowries. So, when he died, he left to his sons an industrial empire of two estates (Perm and Solvychegodsk) with a total area of about 100 thousand square kilometers, which significantly exceeds the territory of such not the smallest modern states like Portugal or Hungary.
The three sons of the close oligarch - Alexander, Nikolai and Sergei - were bestowed baronial titles by Peter I in 1722, and in 1740 the brothers finally divided the family business.
Then the usual story happened. Being a strong entrepreneur, Grigory Dmitrievich tried to raise his sons as enlightened people, and he succeeded. But they didn't have their father's bulldog grip. The Stroganov industrial empire was gradually waning. For example, the creators of the mining industry in the Urals were not the Stroganovs, but the Demidovs. The state actually took over the Solvychegodsk industries, and the lands in the Kama region and Siberia were bought or "squeezed" by the Vsevolozhskys, Golitsyns, Lazarevs, Shakhovskys as relatives.
This, of course, does not mean that the Stroganovs went all over the world. They worked quite successfully in the military and public service, spent a lot of money on charity and patronage.
Don't spend all your money
The craving for art has always been characteristic of the representatives of this family. Even Anikey Lukich patronized the "bogomaz" (icon painters), so a whole Stroganov school of icon painting was formed in the North.
Alexander, the son of Grigory Dmitrievich, spent huge sums of money on the poor, translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Russian, and rose to the rank of a real privy councilor. His brother Nikolai became simply a privy councilor, but as an entrepreneur he was the most successful. The third brother Sergei chose a military career and laid the foundation for the famous Stroganov art gallery.
Catherine II spoke with irony about Sergei's son, Alexander, as a person who really wants to spend all his fortune, but cannot do it in any way. In 1769 he took part in the work of the Legislative Commission. Then he switched to education, advocating the creation of schools for peasants. His father's picture gallery supplemented by him was considered the second most important in Russia after the Hermitage collection. Thanks to him, St. Petersburg acquired such architectural landmarks as the Stroganov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt and the Stroganov Dacha on the Black River.
Since 1800, Alexander Sergeevich has been president of the Imperial Academy of Arts and concurrently director of the Imperial Public Library. But most of all he is known as the initiator of the construction and the main sponsor of the construction of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The consecration of this temple took place on September 15, 1811, 12 days before the death of the benefactor himself.
Interestingly, the architect of the Kazan Cathedral was Andrei Voronikhin, the son of a serf belonging to Stroganov. However, according to rumors, the real father of the architect was the cousin of the president of the Academy of Arts, Alexander Nikolayevich Stroganov, and the uncle only took the bastard under his patronage.
Parisian Adventures
If Alexander Sergeevich Stroganov - a humanist, philanthropist, freemason - was considered the true son of the Age of Enlightenment, then his son Pavel was also a significant and significant figure.
As a 15-year-old boy, he went to study abroad and ended up in revolutionary Paris. The details of his adventures are unknown, but he seems to have participated in the storming of the Bastille, joined the Jacobin club and took on a new name - Citizen Ocher. Fortunately, the priest convinced his son to return home and sent him to ventilate his brains at the Bratsevo estate near Moscow.
When the noise around his Parisian adventures subsided, Pavel Alexandrovich was enrolled in the most prestigious regiment of the Russian guard - Preobrazhensky, was given the court rank of chamber junker and married to the clever and beautiful princess Sofya Golitsyna. The views and tastes of the spouses were similar and the marriage turned out to be extremely successful.
Alexander I, who ascended the throne in 1801, tuned in to liberal reforms and included Stroganov in the Secret Committee - a circle of his young friends, which became something of an unofficial government.
But then the course changed and all of Stroganov's liberal projects remained unclaimed. He switched to military service, participated in campaigns against the Turks and Swedes, and in 1812, commanding a corps, distinguished himself at Tarutino, Maloyaroslavets and Krasny. But his finest hour was the battle of Craon on March 7, 1814, when he, with less forces, managed to hold back the onslaught of Napoleon himself. For this battle, Stroganov received the Order of St. George 2nd degree, but lost his only son Alexander in the battle.
Before his death, Pavel Alexandrovich asked the emperor to transfer all of his possessions to the status of a majorat, that is, an indivisible estate passed to the only heir. Pavel Alexandrovich's widow, with 46 thousand peasant souls, ruled this primate, and then it passed to their daughter Natalia.
The practice of transferring entitlements through the female line was not encouraged, but this was a special case. The fact is that Natalya Pavlovna was married to her fourth cousin Sergei Grigorievich Stroganov, who, moreover, turned out to be the only representative of the other - not the baronial, but the count's - line of the family, coming from the prominent diplomat Grigory Alexandrovich Stroganov.
Sergei Grigorievich won his favor in 1859 as Moscow governor-general, and then became famous in the field of education and patronage. For example, the "Scythian gold" stored in the Hermitage was found by archaeological expeditions financed by Stroganov.
Help from abroad
Two sons of Sergei Grigorievich - Pavel and Grigory - have collected magnificent collections of paintings. Their elder brother Alexander was the aide-de-camp of the tsar, he was remembered by his contemporaries for his love affairs, but he also contributed to culture as one of the founders of the St. Petersburg Archaeological Society. In addition, he donated a unique collection of coins to the Hermitage. Six children were born from his marriage to Princess Tatiana Vasilchikova, but the daughters got married, and two sons died in infancy.
As a result, the last representative of the male line of the family was the only son who survived to adulthood - Sergei Alexandrovich. After serving for a short time in the navy and taking part in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, he retired. Having settled in his estate Volyshevo, Pskov province, he was engaged in hunting and dog breeding.
During the Russo-Japanese War, he bought a steamer in Germany, which he converted into an aeronautical cruiser "Rus", the first Russian balloon carrier.
In the First World War, Stroganov organized the production of shrapnel at one of his factories, which he sold to the army at cost. At the same time, he himself lived abroad and did not intend to return to his homeland after the revolution. The last six years of his life he spent with his second wife Henrietta Leviez at the Villa Eze. Buried in the Russian cemetery Cocade near Nice.
In general, the Stroganov family had a long history. Before Peter I, they were the pillars of the Russian economy, and later they turned into classical enlightened aristocrats who served Russia honestly, although without much dedication. However, this is also a lot.
Dmitry MITYURIN