Ideal capitalists: how faith helped Russian Old Believers get rich

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In Russia today there are about one million Old Believers. For 400 years, they existed separately, in fact, in spite of the state, introduced their own rules and regulations in the communities, which contributed to the creation of strong industries and a reliable business economy. Conservatives in the spiritual sphere, they nevertheless always gravitated towards new production and easily introduced the latest developments in manufactories and factories. Ruposters understands the phenomenon of the economic structure of the Old Believers during the Russian Empire.

The economy of dogma

To understand why Old Believers are so often associated with economic success, it is necessary to look at some of the underlying principles that guide them.

The Old Believers are a conservative offshoot of the already conservative Orthodoxy, which makes it close to fundamentalist sects. The reluctance to accept politically motivated religious innovations that unified the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches forced the Old Believers to flee.

Members of the Board of the Moscow Merchant Society

They escaped, however, not far. The main communities were located in Nizhny Novgorod, Karelia, Veliky Novgorod, near Kirov and in Poland. But with the end of the bloodiest persecutions, many Old Believers returned to large cities, mainly to Moscow, establishing communities and centers of their faith in cities.

The basic principle of conservatism, oddly enough, led to innovation. Various branches of the Old Believers appeared, the most famous of which were the non-popovtsy, who abandoned the religious hierarchy. Their way of life is often compared to inherently progressive Protestantism. The general spirit of asceticism, community interaction and economy ultimately led to prosperity and prosperity.

Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile and publicist, noted during his missionary trips around the country that the villages of the Old Believers were always cleaner and richer. He explained that this situation was due to their isolation and hard work, as well as direct disgust and rejection of idleness. Idleness, according to the Old Believers, is a "school of evil."

Group of Old Believers - Pomors, Nizhny Novgorod.

From the very beginning, the spiritual elite blessed trade as a good deed. Usury was not condemned. Interestingly, the Old Believers had to hide their spiritual leaders, and as a result, the most prosperous merchant or accountant was usually the authority and leader of the community - no one would do business with a priest. Hence another topic - the Old Believers were more literate than their official Orthodox colleagues, because they had to keep records and services themselves, which is confirmed by scrupulous revisions in the 19th century.

The Old Believers relied on the fact that the coming of the Antichrist had already happened, but the eschatological sense of the end only spurred the intensity of labor and self-confidence. Religious righteousness had to be preserved in the little things: when you eat, enjoy the benefits of civilization, keep accounting. That is, religious practice was transferred to everyday life as much as possible, and the changing environment forced religion to answer new questions related to the economy, management and progress in general. The Old Believers paradoxically combined the irrepressible "absorption" of economic innovations and religious conservatism bordering on fundamentalism.

Community and manufacture

The reasons for economic success were described in detail in his autobiographical work "The Fates of the Russian Master" by Vladimir Ryabushinsky (son of Pavel Mikhailovich, brother of Pavel Pavlovich). The main qualities of a Russian entrepreneur are composure and intuition. A "real" Russian merchant is not a gambler, like, for example, English entrepreneurs. He has no excitement, but there is caution in making decisions, even a certain slowness, tenacity, a desire to weigh all the pros and cons during a deal, even if time is against them.

The Old Believers could boast of their successes mainly in the textile industry. In the 19th century, the Old Believers (practically gold for them, except for the reign of Nicholas I, which deprived them of their property rights for 25 years) managed to return to big cities and found manufactories.

Nikolskaya manufactory Morozov

But even before that, in the 18th century, by decrees of Catherine II, the Old Believers were guaranteed some rights in court proceedings, the ability to hold office and enroll in the estate.

With the abolition of the double tax (tax), eminent merchants and industrialists flocked to the Old Believer centers to learn literacy and the science of doing business. So they became role models and contributed to the spread of religion through their own economic achievements:

"Raskolnikov has multiplied in the Urals. At the factories of the Demidovs and Osokins, the clerks are schismatics, almost all! And some industrialists themselves are schismatics … And if they are sent, then of course they have no one to keep the factories. And the Gosudarevs' factories will not be without harm!" For there, at many manufactories, like tin, wire, steel, iron, consider all the grub and needs, the olonyans, the Tula and the Kerzhens are selling - all schismatics, "secret spies in the Urals reported to the capital in 1736.

The Old Believers owned about 60-80 enterprises for the production of textiles and wool, which accounted for about 18% of this niche. Why textiles? Of course, the Old Believers took on other types of business, but the manufacture of this particular product did not require frequent contacts with the state, but at the same time brought a lot of money with the skillful organization of manufacturing production.

Sign of businessman Tryndin, who owned a store on Lubyanka, 13

In addition to individual surnames like Shchukin (the main filler of the French collections of the Hermitage), Soldatenkov (who financed the publication of Western historical books in Russian), Gromov (the founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory), history most remembered entire dynasties that consisted entirely of Old Believers or had Old Believer origins.

The Morozovs, Ryabushinsky, Prokhorovs, Markovs, Maltsevs, Guchkovs, Tryndins, Tretyakovs … According to Forbes, the combined wealth of these families at the beginning of the 20th century is about 150 million gold rubles (not all of them are included in the rating). Today, the total capital of these families could be 115.5 billion rubles.

"I was always struck by one feature - perhaps a characteristic feature of the whole family - this is the internal family discipline. Not only in banking, but also in public affairs, each was assigned his place according to the established rank, and in the first place was the elder brother, with whom others reckoned and in a sense they obeyed him, "recalled one of the richest entrepreneurs, Mikhail Ryabushinsky, in Pavel Buryshkin's memoirs" Moscow Merchant."

An example of the economic and social culture of the Old Believers is the Nikolskaya manufactory "Savva Morozova and Co." While the Committee of Ministers of Alexander II was deciding what to do with periodic outbreaks of cholera in factories with more than 1,000 workers, Morozov founded his own wooden hospital with 100 beds in the early 1860s. Soon, medical institutions appeared at all of his factories: four hospitals served almost 6, 5 thousand workers-weavers. On them, Morozov spent an average of 100 thousand gold rubles a year. Later, the state will begin to oblige manufactories to build their hospitals.

Checkpoint at the Krasilshchikov manufactory

At the end of the 19th century, the workers of the manufactory of the family of the descendants of the Krasilshchikov Old Believers were completely illiterate. In 1889, an elementary school was opened at the factory. Both the factory workers themselves and their family members were trained there. In 10 years the number of illiterate men in the factory dropped to 34% (1901), and by 1913 only 17% were illiterate. At the beginning of the 20th century, factory schools also trained women, reducing the number of illiterates from 88% to 47%.

The congregations of the Old Believers invested money in almshouses, folk houses - teahouses for 400 people with libraries and exhibitions. The same Krasilshchikovs had a similar house in the Rodnikovsky District, where meetings of various societies and entrepreneurs were held.

Good corruption

However, sometimes, despite all the precautions and attempts to create closed structures with their own schools and hospitals, the Old Believers still had to deal with the state. According to the professional "fighter against schism" publicist Nikolai Subbotin, "corrupt bureaucracy to a large extent paralyzed the power of the orders" of Nicholas I, directed against the Old Believers in the first half of the 19th century. It can be stated that the contacts of the Old Believers with officials were reduced to corruption deals. And since they were actually withdrawn from official political and social life, it was even more difficult to bring them to justice.

Nevertheless, bribes accounted for almost the bulk of community spending in the first half of the 19th century. Corrupt schemes were common in the Urals, Poland and the northern territories, but the most striking example is the situation in Moscow. Subbotin writes about the whole business of delivering secret papers from ministerial offices by minor officials to Old Believer merchants. Thus, they learned about the planned raids against them, new bylaws and had time to prepare and hide money in various ways.

Meeting of merchants of the 1st, highest guild

It wasn't just government officials who were involved in corruption. The right to perform rituals was "bought out" from the priests of the Synodal Church, as is known from the police data on the Monino community in Moscow, which was growing by leaps and bounds without proper legal registration. The official church personally provided premises for prayer, acted as a landlord, etc.

We also know about corruption from the records of the Old Believers themselves. The leaders of the Guchkovs' factory (already at the end of the 19th century) kept separate "black" ledgers, which contained records of approximately the following content:

Followed the expenses of the cash desk E. F. Guchkov:

- "To the Office of the Chief of Police" (in each monthly bill 5-10 rubles), - "To the warden for registration", - "For treating employees in the Duma and the Orphan's Court", - "To the scribes of the 3rd quarter", - "Parts donated", - "To the guards in the Duma", - "It was distributed to different people for the oil".

The Old Believers did not distinguish between the concepts of bribes and taxes, uniting them under the general word "tribute". Tribute could be given to the "wicked", but only for the preservation of the faith. Indicative in this respect is the dispute in letters between the two communities of Fedoseevites and the Philippians, in which the latter accused the former of an excessive passion for trade and money. It was explained that tribute cannot be paid to government officials if it is a purely economic relationship. But everything that concerns faith is necessary in satisfying the whims of forced evil in the form of unbelieving government workers and priests:

"So that no one has anger on us, take offense to the end: if the enemy demands gold - give it, if the robe - give it, if it wants honor - give it, if it wants to take away the faith - take courage in every possible way. We are living in recent times and therefore we give every tribute to anyone who asks, so that the enemy does not betray to torment, or imprisoned in an unknown place …"

The style of doing business of the Old Believers is also indicative. Thanks to the established mutual responsibility and collective responsibility, as well as family continuity, the communities of the Old Believers acted as banks. During the period of the prohibitions of Nicholas I, they acted virtually illegally, lending huge sums either to dummies, or even on parole. The Old Believers (in particular the Polish ones) worked in the same way with Western merchants. No one saw anything risky in this - the communities treasured their name.

Major General of the Russian Imperial Army Ivan Petrovich Liprandi, better known as the author of memoirs about Pushkin, at the turn of the 1850s was engaged in researching the issue of threats to the economic security of the Empire, allegedly emanating from several communities in the Kursk, Oryol and Tambov provinces. According to Liprandi, the Old Believers' concept of property was "like a (symbiotic) institution of capitalism and socialism." However, he never found any signs of the Old Believers' hostility to the state and stopped the investigation.

Conservative progress

Old Believers actively intervened in politics. After the adoption of the tsarist Manifesto of 1905, the Old Believers received complete freedom of religion, which also meant a change in the economic model. In fact, the communal model ceases to exist - the capitalist one completely supplants the socialist principle.

Concerns and syndicates are organized on the basis of communities and religious centers. The merger of banking and industrial capital begins. Thus, the banking assets were combined in the St. Petersburg Bank, the Nizhny Novgorod-Samara Bank by the Markov family, and the Northern Insurance Company, the plates of which can still be found on many Moscow houses.

"Union on October 17"

With the adoption of the Manifesto, a number of Old Believers, namely Pavel Ryabushinsky, Alexander Konovalov and Alexander Guchkov (Chairman of the Third Convocation of the State Duma), organized the "Party of Progressives" to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, Ryabushinsky and his comrades became ideological opponents of the economically conservative leaders of Moscow entrepreneurs, defended a new vision of capitalism under the conditions of a constitutional monarchy.

The Old Believers collaborated with the October 17 Union, the Trade and Industrial Party, and the Peaceful Renovators, they opened their own newspapers to promote the bourgeois political life in the country.

It was they who, indirectly or directly, contributed to many political and economic changes in the country, including the adoption of the Stolypin agrarian reform, the law on zemstvo (where the Poles received de facto autonomy), and participated in the life of the Provisional Government.

Their departure towards tough, bourgeois capitalism largely predetermined the fate of the Old Believers during the 1917 Revolution, throwing this virtually isolated people back 200 years, forcing them to hide again, and then suffer, and then rebuild their place in the sun.

The Secret of the Third Power / Commissioner Qatar /

… In the middle of the 19th century, the Russian government realized that there would be no industrial breakthrough with such an elite, so they began to attract foreign capital. But the main thing is to rely on their own talents. And they appeared - the old believers Morozov, Ryabushinskiy, industrialists Gromov, Avksentyev, Buryshkins, Guchkovs, Konovalovs, Morozovs, Prokhorovs, Ryabushinsky, Soldatenkovs, Tretyakovs, Khludovs. a dime a dozen.

The industry that was in the Russian Empire is that which grew from below from the Old Believers' strata plus foreign capital. The participation of the aristocracy was minimal.

In pre-revolutionary Russia, the richest and most enterprising people were precisely the champions of the old faith. At the turn of the 20th century, there were only three financially wealthy groups of people in Russia: Old Believers (merchants and industrialists), foreign businessmen and noble landowners. Moreover, the Old Believers accounted for more than 60% of all private capital of the empire. It is not surprising that with the growth of capital, they seriously thought about their relationship with the secular authorities that did not recognize them. At the same time, a conflict was brewing with foreign companies for the right to dominate the financial and industrial markets of tsarist Russia.

The question came up squarely: either the country is turning into a foreign business colony, or it relies on Old Believer capital and builds a new nationally oriented bourgeois economy. The Old Believers set about reforming the Romanov military-rural monarchy, with all the prospects of becoming a leading country in the whole world. A revolution was being prepared from above. And it almost happened when large Russian capital came to power in 1917. Remember the Provisional Government - all the largest capitalists of Russia from the Old Believers are present in it …"