The most famous Russian philanthropists. Patrons of Russia

The very emergence of philanthropy in the West and here developed differently. In Europe and America, material well-being was considered a sign of godliness and righteousness (thanks to Protestantism and capitalism). With us for a long time there was a real anti-cult of wealth. Marina Tsvetaeva also noted that in the soul of a Russian person there is an unerasable feeling of the untruth of big money. We are accustomed to not considering poverty as a vice, and merchants and bankers were considered bloodsuckers and money-lenders.

Despite the generally negative attitude of society, Russian rich people still shared their capital, promoting science, culture and art. The appearance of philanthropists in Russia is no coincidence, because many millionaires came from the peasantry, being deeply religious. Such rich people lived according to the principles of Christian morality, sincerely wanting to help the “orphan and wretched.” Although some philanthropists, deep down, cherished the dream of receiving a state award for their actions or having their name shined. Today, philanthropy in Russia is experiencing a revival, so it would be appropriate to remember our most famous patrons of the arts.

Gavrila Gavrilovich Solodovnikov (1826-1901). This merchant became the author of the largest donation in Russian history. His fortune was about 22 million rubles, 20 of which Solodovnikov spent on the needs of society. Gavrila Gavrilovich was born into the family of a paper merchant. The future millionaire was introduced to business from childhood, so he never really learned to write or express his thoughts. But at the age of 20, Solodovnikov had already become a merchant of the first guild, and at the age of 40 he earned his first million. The businessman became famous for his extreme prudence and frugality. They say that he did not hesitate to eat yesterday's porridge and ride in a carriage without tires on the wheels. Solodovnikov conducted his affairs, albeit not entirely cleanly, but he calmed his conscience by drawing up a well-known will - almost all of the merchant’s fortune went to charity. The patron made the first contribution to the construction of the Moscow Conservatory. A contribution of 200 thousand rubles was enough to build a luxurious marble staircase. Through the efforts of a merchant, it was built on Bolshaya Dmitrovka concert hall With theater stage, where ballets and extravaganzas could be staged. Today it has become the Operetta Theater, and then it housed the Private Opera of another philanthropist, Savva Mamontov. Solodovnikov wanted to become a nobleman, for this he decided to build a useful institution in Moscow. Thanks to the philanthropist, a Clinic for Skin and Venereal Diseases appeared in the city, equipped with all the most interesting things. Today, its premises house the Moscow Medical Academy named after I.M. Sechenov. At that time, the name of the benefactor was not reflected in the name of the clinic. According to the merchant's will, his heirs were left with about half a million rubles, while the remaining 20,147,700 rubles were spent on good deeds. But at the current exchange rate this amount would be about 9 billion dollars! A third of the capital went to the arrangement of zemstvo women's schools in a number of provinces, the other third - to the creation vocational schools and a shelter for homeless children in Serpukhov district, and the remaining part - for the construction of houses with cheap apartments for poor and lonely people. Thanks to the will of the philanthropist, in 1909 the first “Free Citizen” house with 1,152 apartments for single people appeared on 2nd Meshchanskaya Street, and the “Red Diamond” house with 183 apartments for families was built there. With the houses came the features of communes - a store, a dining room, a laundry, a bathhouse and a library. On the ground floor of the family house there was a nursery and kindergarten, the rooms were offered already with furniture. Only officials were the first to move into such comfortable apartments “for the poor.”

Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884). This baron and banker was able to donate 6 million from his fortune of 100 million rubles to good causes. Stieglitz was the richest man in the country in the second third of the 19th century. He inherited his title of court banker, along with his capital, from his father, the Russified German Stieglitz, who received the title of baron for his services. Alexander Ludvigovich strengthened his position by acting as an intermediary, thanks to whom Emperor Nicholas I was able to conclude agreements on external loans for 300 million rubles. Alexander Stieglitz in 1857 became one of the founders of the Main Society of Russian Railways. In 1860, Stieglitz was appointed director of the newly created State Bank. The baron liquidated his company and began to live on interest, occupying a luxurious mansion on the Promenade des Anglais. The capital itself brought Stieglitz 3 million rubles a year. Big money did not make the baron sociable; they say that even the barber who cut his hair for 25 years never heard the voice of his client. The millionaire's modesty took on painful traits. It was Baron Stieglitz who was behind the construction of the Peterhof, Baltic and Nikolaevskaya (later Oktyabrskaya) railways. However, the banker remained in history not for his financial assistance to the tsar and not for the construction of roads. His memory remains largely due to charity. The Baron allocated impressive sums for the construction of the Technical Drawing School in St. Petersburg, its maintenance and museum. Alexander Ludvigovich himself was no stranger to art, but his life was devoted to making money. The adopted daughter’s husband, Alexander Polovtsev, managed to convince the banker that the country’s growing industry needed “scientific draftsmen.” As a result, thanks to Stieglitz, a school named after him and the country’s first museum of decorative arts appeared. applied arts (best part his collections were eventually transferred to the Hermitage). Polovtsev himself, who was Secretary of State Alexandra III, believed that the country would be happy when merchants began to donate money to education without the selfish hope of receiving government awards or preferences. Thanks to his wife's inheritance, Polovtsev was able to publish 25 volumes of Russian biographical dictionary“However, because of the Revolution, this good deed was never completed. Now the former Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing is called Mukhinsky, and the marble monument to the philanthropist baron was thrown out of it long ago.

Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov (1834-1913). This nobleman donated a total of about 3 million rubles. At the age of 46, he unexpectedly became the owner of an entire network of glass factories. He received them from his diplomat uncle Ivan Maltsev. He turned out to be the only one who survived the memorable massacre at the Russian embassy in Iran (Alexander Griboyedov was killed at the same time). As a result, the diplomat became disillusioned with his profession and decided to take up the family business. In the town of Gus, Ivan Maltsev created a network of glass factories. For this purpose, the secret of colored glass was obtained in Europe; with its help, the industrialist began to produce very profitable window glass. As a result, this entire glass and crystal empire, along with two rich houses in the capital, painted by Aivazovsky and Vasnetsov, was inherited by the middle-aged, already single, official Nechaev. Along with his wealth, he also received a double surname. The years lived in poverty left their indelible imprint on Nechaev-Maltsev. He was known as a very stingy person, allowing himself to be spent only on gourmet food. Professor Ivan Tsvetaev, the father of the future poetess, became a friend of the rich man. During rich feasts, he sadly calculated how many building materials could be bought with the money spent by the gourmet. Over time, Tsvetaev managed to convince Nechaev-Maltsev to allocate 3 million rubles required to complete the construction of the Museum fine arts in Moscow. It is interesting that the philanthropist himself did not seek fame. On the contrary, for the entire 10 years that construction was underway, he acted anonymously. The millionaire went to unimaginable expenses. So, 300 workers he hired mined special white frost-resistant marble right in the Urals. When it turned out that no one in the country could make 10-meter columns for the portico, Nechaev-Maltsev paid for the services of a Norwegian steamship. Thanks to a patron of the arts, skilled stonemasons were brought from Italy. For his contribution to the construction of the museum, the modest Nechaev-Maltsev received the title of Chief Chamberlain and the Diamond Order of Alexander Nevsky. But the “glass king” invested not only in the museum. With his money, a Technical School appeared in Vladimir, an almshouse on Shabolovka, and a church in memory of the murdered on Kulikovo Field. For the centennial anniversary of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2012, the Shukhov Tower Foundation proposed to give the institution the name of Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov instead of Pushkin. However, the renaming never took place, but a memorial plaque appeared on the building in honor of the philanthropist.

Kuzma Terentyevich Soldatenkov (1818-1901). A wealthy merchant donated more than 5 million rubles to charity. Soldatenkov traded in paper yarn, he was a co-owner of the Tsindelevskaya, Danilovskaya, and Krenholmskaya textile factories, and also owned the Trekhgorny brewery and the Moscow accounting bank. Surprisingly, Kuzma Terentyevich himself grew up in an ignorant Old Believer family, not learning to read and write. From an early age, he already stood behind the counter in his rich father's shop. But after the death of his parent, no one could stop Soldatenkov from quenching his thirst for knowledge. A course of lectures on ancient Russian history was given to him by Timofey Granovsky himself. He introduced Soldatenkov to the circle of Moscow Westerners, teaching him to do good deeds and sow eternal values. A wealthy merchant invested in a non-profit publishing house, printing books for himself at a loss. common people. Even 4 years before Pavel Tretyakov, the merchant began to buy paintings. The artist Alexander Rizzoni said that if it were not for these two major patrons of the arts, there would simply be no one for Russian fine art masters to sell their works to. As a result, Soldatenkov’s collection included 258 paintings and 17 sculptures, as well as engravings and a library. The merchant was even nicknamed Kuzma Medici. He bequeathed his entire collection to the Rumyantsev Museum. For 40 years, Soldatenkov donated 1,000 rubles annually to this public museum. By donating his collection, the patron only asked that it be placed in separate rooms. The unsold books of his publishing house and the rights to them were donated to the city of Moscow. The philanthropist allocated another million rubles for the construction of a vocational school, and gave two million for the creation of a free hospital for the poor, where they would not pay attention to titles, classes and religions. As a result, the hospital was completed after the death of the sponsor; it was called Soldatenkovskaya, but in 1920 it was renamed Botkinskaya. The benefactor himself would hardly be upset upon learning this fact. The fact is that he was especially close to Botkin’s family.

The Tretyakov brothers, Pavel Mikhailovich (1832-1898) and Sergei Mikhailovich (1834-1892). The fortune of these merchants was more than 8 million rubles, 3 of which they donated to art. The brothers owned the Great Kostroma Linen Manufactory. At the same time, Pavel Mikhailovich conducted business at the factories themselves, but Sergei Mikhailovich was in direct contact with foreign partners. This division was in perfect harmony with their characters. While the older brother was reserved and unsociable, the younger brother loved social gatherings and moving in public circles. Both Tretyakovs collected paintings, with Pavel preferring Russian painting, and Sergei preferring foreign, mainly modern French. When he left the post of Moscow city mayor, he was even glad that the need to hold official receptions had disappeared. After all, this made it possible to spend more on paintings. In total, Sergei Tretyakov spent about a million francs, or 400 thousand rubles, on painting. Already from their youth, the brothers felt the need to make a gift to their hometown. At the age of 28, Pavel decided to bequeath his fortune to the creation of an entire gallery of Russian art. Fortunately, his life turned out to be quite long; as a result, the businessman was able to spend more than a million rubles on purchasing paintings. And Pavel Tretyakov’s gallery, worth 2 million, and even real estate, was donated to the city of Moscow. The collection of Sergei Tretyakov was not so large - only 84 paintings, but it was estimated at half a million. He managed to bequeath his collection to his elder brother, and not to his wife. Sergei Mikhailovich feared that his wife would not want to part with the valuable collection. When in 1892 Moscow got Art Museum, then it was called the City Gallery of the brothers Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov. It is interesting that after Alexander III attended the meeting, he offered his elder brother the nobility. However, Pavel Mikhailovich refused such an honor, declaring that he wanted to die as a merchant. But Sergei Mikhailovich, who managed to become an actual state councilor, would clearly accept this proposal. In addition to the gallery's collection, the Tretyakovs maintained a school for the deaf and dumb, helped widows and orphans of painters, supported the Moscow Conservatory and art schools. Using their own money and on their site in the center of the capital, the brothers created a passage to improve transport links in Moscow. Since then, the name Tretyakovskaya has been preserved in the name of both the gallery itself and the passage created by the merchants, which turned out to be a rarity for a country with a turbulent history.

Savva Ivanovich Mamontov (1841-1918). This bright personality in history national culture had a significant influence on her. It is difficult to say what exactly Mamontov donated, and it is quite difficult to calculate his fortune. Mamontov had a couple of houses in Moscow, Abramtsev’s estate, land on the Black Sea coast, roads, factories and millions of dollars in capital. Savva Ivanovich went down in history not just as a philanthropist, but also as a real builder of Russian culture. Mamontov was born into the family of a wine farmer who headed the Moscow-Yaroslavl Railway Society. The industrialist made his capital from the construction of railways. It was thanks to him that the road from Yaroslavl to Arkhangelsk, and then also to Murmansk, appeared. Thanks to Savva Mamontov, a port appeared in this city, and the road connecting the center of the country with the North saved Russia twice. First this happened during the First World War, and then during the Second. After all, almost all allied aid came to the USSR through Murmansk. Art was not alien to Mamontov; he himself was a good sculptor. The sculptor Matvey Antokolsky even considered him talented. They say that thanks to his excellent bass, Mamontov could become a singer; he even managed to make his debut at the Milanese opera. However, Savva Ivanovich never made it to the stage or to school. But he was able to earn so much money that he was able to set up his own home theater and establish a private opera, the first in the country. There Mamontov acted as a director, conductor, and decorator, and also provided a voice for his artists. Having purchased the Abramtsevo estate, the businessman created the famous Mammoth circle, whose members constantly spent time visiting their wealthy patron. Chaliapin learned to play the Mamontov piano, and Vrubel wrote his “Demon” in the study of the patron of the arts. Savva the Magnificent turned his estate near Moscow into a real art colony. Workshops were built here, peasants were specially trained, and the “Russian” style was introduced in furniture and ceramics. Mamontov believed that people should be accustomed to beauty not only in churches, but also at train stations and on the streets. The millionaire was also sponsored by the World of Art magazine, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Only now the art lover became so carried away by charity that he managed to get into debt. Mamontov received a rich order for the construction of another railway and took out a large loan as collateral for the shares. When it turned out that there was nothing to repay the 5 million, Savva Ivanovich ended up in Tagansk prison. His former friends turned their backs on him. In order to somehow pay off Mamontov’s debts, his rich collection of paintings and sculptures was sold for next to nothing at auction. The impoverished and aged philanthropist began to live at a ceramic workshop behind the Butyrskaya outpost, where he died unnoticed by everyone. Already in our time, a monument was erected to the famous philanthropist in Sergiev Posad, because here the Mamontovs laid the first short railway line specifically for transporting pilgrims to the Lavra. It is planned to erect four more monuments to the great man - in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, on the Donetsk railway and on Theater Square in Moscow.

Varvara Alekseevna Morozova (Khludova) (1850-1917). This woman owned a fortune of 10 million rubles, having donated more than a million to charity. And her sons Mikhail and Ivan became famous art collectors. When Varvara’s husband, Abram Abramovich, died, from him she inherited the Tver Manufactory Partnership at the age of 34. Having become the sole owner of large capital, Morozova began providing for the unfortunate. Of the 500 thousand that her husband allocated to her for benefits to the poor and the maintenance of schools and churches, 150 thousand went to a clinic for the mentally ill. After the revolution, the clinic named after A.A. Morozov was named after the psychiatrist Sergei Korsakov, another 150 thousand were donated to the Trade School for the Poor. The remaining investments were not so large - 10 thousand were received by the Rogozhsky Women's Primary School, the amounts were spent on rural and earthly schools, on shelters for the nervously ill. The Cancer Institute on Devichye Pole received the name of its patrons, the Morozovs. There was also a charitable institution in Tver, a sanatorium in Gagra for tuberculosis patients. Varvara Morozova was a member of many institutions. Trade schools were eventually named after her. primary classes, hospitals, maternity shelters and almshouses in Tver and Moscow. In gratitude for the donation of 50 thousand rubles, the patron's name was engraved on the pediment of the Chemical Institute of the People's University. For the Prechistensky courses for workers in Kursovoy Lane, Morozova bought a three-story mansion, and she also paid for the Doukhobors to move to Canada. It was Varvara Alekseevna who financed the construction of the first free library-reading room named after Turgenev in Russia, opened in 1885, and then also helped to purchase necessary literature. The final point of Morozova’s charitable activities was her will. The factory owner, held up by Soviet propaganda as a model of money-grubbing, ordered all her assets to be transferred into securities, deposited in a bank, and the proceeds given to the workers. Unfortunately, they did not have time to appreciate all the kindness of their mistress - a month after her death the October Revolution happened.

Savva Timofeevich Morozov (1862-1905). This philanthropist donated about 500 thousand rubles. Morozov managed to become a model modern businessman- He studied chemistry at Cambridge, and studied textile manufacturing in Liverpool and Manchester. Returning from Europe to Russia, Savva Morozov headed the Nikolskaya Manufactory Partnership, named in his honor. The managing director and main shareholder of this enterprise remained the industrialist's mother, Maria Fedorovna, whose capital was 30 million rubles. Morozov's progressive thinking said that thanks to the revolution, Russia would be able to catch up and overtake Europe. He even drew up his own program of social and political reforms, which aimed to transition the country to a constitutional regime of government. Morozov insured himself for the amount of 100 thousand rubles, and issued the policy to bearer, transferring it to his favorite actress Andreeva. There, in turn, conveyed most funds for revolutionaries. Because of his love for Andreeva, Morozov supported the Art Theater; he was paid a 12-year lease for premises in Kamergersky Lane. At the same time, the contribution of the patron was equal to the contributions of the main shareholders, which included the owner of the gold-canvas manufactory Alekseev, known as Stanislavsky. The reconstruction of the theater building cost Morozov 300 thousand rubles - a huge amount for those times. And this despite the fact that the architect Fyodor Shekhtel, the author of the Moscow Art Theater Seagull, did the project completely free of charge. Thanks to Morozov's money, the most modern stage equipment was ordered abroad. In general, lighting equipment in the Russian theater first appeared here. In total, the patron spent about 500 thousand rubles on the Moscow Art Theater building with a bronze bas-relief on the facade in the form of a drowning swimmer. As already mentioned, Morozov sympathized with the revolutionaries. Among his friends was Maxim Gorky, and Nikolai Bauman was hiding in the industrialist’s palace on Spiridonovka. Morozov helped deliver illegal literature to the factory, where the future People's Commissar Leonid Krasin served as an engineer. After a wave of revolutionary uprisings in 1905, the industrialist demanded that his mother transfer the factories to his complete subordination. However, she succeeded in removing her obstinate son from business and sent him with his wife and personal doctor to the Cote d'Azur. Savva Morozov committed suicide there, although the circumstances of his death turned out to be strange.

Maria Klavdievna Tenisheva (1867-1928). The origin of this princess remains a mystery. According to one legend, her father could be Emperor Alexander II himself. Tenisheva tried to find herself in her youth - she got married early, gave birth to a daughter, began taking singing lessons in order to get on the professional stage, and began to draw. As a result, Maria came to the conclusion that the purpose of her life was charity. She divorced and remarried, this time to a prominent businessman, Prince Vyacheslav Nikolaevich Tenishev. He was nicknamed the “Russian American” for his business acumen. Most likely, the marriage was of convenience, because only in this way could a girl raised in an aristocratic family, but illegitimate, get a firm place in society. After Maria Tenisheva became the wife of a wealthy entrepreneur, she devoted herself to her calling. The prince himself was also a famous philanthropist, having founded the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg. True, he still fundamentally helped the most cultured representatives of society. While her husband was still alive, Tenisheva organized drawing classes in St. Petersburg, where one of the teachers was Ilya Repin, and she also opened a drawing school in Smolensk. In her Talashkino estate, Maria opened an “ideological estate.” An agricultural school was created there, where ideal farmers were trained. And in handicraft workshops masters of decorative and applied arts were trained. Thanks to Tenisheva, the “Russian Antiquity” museum appeared in the country, which became the country’s first museum of ethnography and Russian decorative and applied arts. A special building was even built for him in Smolensk. However, the peasants, for which the princess cared well, thanked her in their own way. The prince's body, embalmed for a hundred years and buried in three coffins, was simply thrown into a pit in 1923. Tenisheva herself, who ran the magazine “World of Art” with Savva Mamontov, who gave funds to Diaghilev and Benois, lived out her last years in exile in France. There she, not yet old, took up enamel art.

Margarita Kirillovna Morozova (Mamontova) (1873-1958). This woman was related to both Savva Mamontov and Pavel Tretyakov. Margarita was called the first beauty of Moscow. Already at the age of 18, she married Mikhail Morozov, the son of another famous philanthropist. At 30, Margarita, pregnant with her fourth child, became a widow. She herself preferred not to deal with the affairs of the factory, whose co-owner was her husband. Morozova breathed art. She took music lessons from composer Alexander Scriabin, whom she supported financially for a long time in order to give him the opportunity to create and not be distracted by everyday life. In 1910, Morozova donated the art collection of her deceased husband to the Tretyakov Gallery. A total of 83 paintings were transferred, including works by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Perov. Kramskoy, Repin, Benois, Levitan and others. Margarita financed the work of the publishing house “Put”, which until 1919 published about fifty books, mainly on the topic of religion and philosophy. Thanks to the philanthropist, the magazine “Questions of Philosophy” and the socio-political newspaper “Moscow Weekly” were published. On her Mikhailovskoye estate in the Kaluga province, Morozova transferred part of the land to the teacher Shatsky, who organized the first children's colony here. And the landowner supported this establishment financially. And during the First World War, Morozova turned her house into a hospital for the wounded. The revolution destroyed both her life and her family. The son and two daughters ended up in exile, only Mikhail remained in Russia, the same Mika Morozov, whose portrait Serov painted. The factory owner herself lived out her days in poverty at a summer dacha in Lianozovo. Personal pensioner Margarita Kirillovna Morozova received a separate room in a new building from the state several years before her death.

A philanthropist is a person who, from personal motives and on a voluntary basis, contributes to the development of science and art, namely, sponsors the activities of outstanding personalities and financially patronizes museums, galleries, research centers and similar institutions. World and domestic history knows many examples of such selfless individuals. However, the time period from the 19th to the 20th century deserves special attention, because during this period there was a real flourishing of philanthropy in Russia.

About the causes of the phenomenon

The tradition of taking temples, hospitals, theaters, schools under one’s care, or showing mercy towards individual artists, scientists, dancers, etc. began its rapid revival in the Russian Empire in the 17th century, reaching an unprecedented rise by the 2nd half of the 19th century . The main representatives of the movement were wealthy merchants, who, unlike their Western colleagues, had less commercial spirit, but more faith in mission, destiny and God.

The man of the 1800s regarded his business, which in modern times would be called “business,” as a destiny prescribed from above, and therefore performed it conscientiously and honestly (although there were, of course, sometimes exceptions to this rule). Patronage began to be considered almost an obligation in the business environment - then it did not so much give status, but helped to gain spiritual harmony and pay tribute to the Lord for helping to earn such impressive sums. It was considered normal to save money for oneself, but it was considered much more worthy to use wealth for practical purposes aimed at the benefit of the whole society.

Interesting fact! The famous philanthropists of the world would not have received their name if it were not for one Roman who lived from 70 BC. to 8 AD and held the position of patron of the arts. The name of this wise and straightforward man, once close to the Emperor Octavian Augustus himself, is Gaius Cilnius Maecenas. It was in his honor that later they began to name all merciful donors on Earth.

Alexander Ludvigovich (1814-1884), who belonged to the “caste” of bankers and had a fortune of 100,000,000 rubles, gave over 6,000,000 to various charitable events. He came from a family of Russified Germans, had a hardworking and decent father, whose merits were marked personally by the Emperor of Russia Nicholas I. The ruler awarded the man the title of baron. Alexander was able to strengthen, develop and continue the achievements of his parent. So, having accepted the duties of the first manager of the State Bank, he began to invest in the construction of railways (Peterhof, Nikolaevskaya, later renamed Oktyabrskaya, and Baltic) and even founded the Main Society dedicated to them. However, these were only the first touches, “tests of the pen.”

First, he donated 5,000 rubles each to the Chesme military almshouse and to naval employees who lost their property in Sevastopol. Then, when Stieglitz retired and continued living on the interest due to him, he gave his modest but virtuous nature full scope. A spinning and cloth mill in Narva, a settlement for workers, a library, a church, a clinic, the maintenance of a Kolomna children's boarding school and an eye hospital in Mokhov - all this would have been impossible without the financial assistance of Alexander Lyudvigovich. However, his main work was the construction in 1876 of the St. Petersburg Central School of Technical Drawing for men and women (now the St. Petersburg State Academy of Arts and Industry named after A. L. Stieglitz), to which the philanthropist first allocated 1,000,000 rubles in silver for construction, and then about another 5,000,000-7,000,000 as bequest. The establishment of such an institution for many years to come resolved the problem of the lack of professional engineers in the country necessary to move industry forward.

Baron Stieglitz passed away due to pneumonia. It was a true patriot, who never changed the principle of keeping money exclusively in domestic banks, and, at the same time, one of the quietest people in Russia, who did not have the habit of saying anything superfluous. The arrangement of his main brainchild, the school, was completed by his son-in-law, a nobleman and representative of the Senate, Alexander Polovtsev, the husband of the adopted daughter of the Stieglitz couple, Nadezhda.

The next famous philanthropist of Russia, Savva Ivanovich (1841-1918), was a descendant of an ancient merchant family. If we talk about his entrepreneurial activities, then we will talk again about rail tracks, but this time – only about them. Savva, like Stieglitz, continued the work of his father, who was once the director of the Moscow-Yaroslavl Railway Society. For Mamontov Jr., any “capitalist” and “bureaucratic” pursuits were not easy, but thanks to the ability to quickly get carried away, he was able not only to take the post of the above-mentioned association, but also to become a member of the City Duma, and a member of the Society of Lovers of Commercial Knowledge, and the most prominent representative of the capital’s merchants.

As often happened, one of the most famous philanthropists in Russia was distinguished by his creative character and fine spiritual organization. He loved to sculpt (the sculptor Matvey Antokolsky even found Savva Ivanovich’s crafts interesting and worthy of attention), sing (a beautiful bass could well make a philanthropist a singer, which was proven by a successful performance in the Milan opera), and perform with theatrical sketches. Because Mamontov failed to make any of these activities his life’s work; he turned them into a hobby, firstly, by establishing a Private Russian Opera on the stage of the Solodovnikov Theater, and, secondly, by establishing a permanent meeting place for the Mamontov circle in the Abramtsevo estate near Moscow. The rich man established a real theater and art studio in his residence, where he began to train peasants and host actors, dancers, writers and other cultural figures.

It was in one of the offices of this philanthropist’s estate that he painted his “Demon” (a painting known to anyone to modern man) Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel.

Helping creators captivated Mamontov so much that he did not notice how he began to get into debt. This was partly due to an unwisely taken loan of 5,000,000 rubles for the construction of a new railway, which Savva had nothing to repay, and partly due to the intrigues of financial and government officials (A.Yu. Rotshtein, director of the International Bank, and N.V. Muravyov, Minister of Justice). The merchant ended up behind bars in the Tagansk prison. Despite the fact that Mamontov was released from punishment several months later in the courtroom to deafening applause, many former friends turned their backs on him, and he himself never regained his money, his reputation, or the opportunity to engage in business.

Tretyakov brothers

The merits of the last great patrons of art in Russia in the 19th century are sometimes underestimated and unfairly reduced to mentioning the collection of paintings alone, although this, of course, is extremely significant. We are talking about Pavel Mikhailovich (1832-1898) and Sergei Mikhailovich (1834-1892) Tretyakov, who came from the family of the merchant of the 2nd guild and the owner of the 5th retail shops. The brothers did business together - for example, in the Big Kostroma Linen Manufactory they owned, it was not difficult for them to honestly share responsibilities with each other.

Pavel, who was more reserved and uncommunicative by nature, managed the internal policy of the factory, while the younger one, Sergei, arranged meetings with partners and established useful connections at exits and receptions. The two relatives also began collecting works of art - first, in 1851, they purchased a building on Lavrushinsky Lane, which became the main building for the creation of the gallery, and then they began to buy paintings and create their own collection. At the same time, Pavel gravitated more towards domestic painting, and Sergei towards foreign and, in particular, French.

We will not go into definitions and will consider patronage (support and encouragement provided by individuals to artists and scientists) and charity as synonyms. Here we will also include sponsorship, which arose already in the twentieth century, the defining moment of which, as the encyclopedia teaches us, is “the corporate strategy to support culture as a whole.”

In Russia, with its anti-cult of wealth (Marina Tsvetaeva accurately noted that “the consciousness of the untruth of money in the Russian soul is ineradicable”) and the saying “poverty is not a vice,” merchants were called nothing more than bloodsuckers, and bankers - interest-bearers. Nevertheless, the rich treated, taught and enlightened the poor, and promoted science, culture and art. And since our millionaires for the most part came from peasants, were pious people and lived according to the laws of Christian morality, the desire to “help the orphans and the poor” came from them pure heart. Although, of course, someone dreamed of acquiring a title, an order, and having the name on the pediment in capital letters...

1. Merchant Gavrila Gavrilovich Solodovnikov (1826-1901)
Net worth about 22 million. The largest donation in the history of charity in Russia: more than 20 million

Solodovnikov Gavrila Gavrilovich (1826, Serpukhov - May 21, 1901, Moscow)

The son of a paper goods merchant, due to lack of time, he poorly learned to write and express his thoughts coherently. At 20 he became a merchant of the first guild, at 40 he became a millionaire. He was famous for his frugality and prudence (he ate yesterday's buckwheat and rode in a carriage with only the rear wheels shod in rubber). He did not always conduct his affairs honestly, but he made up for this with his will, devoting almost all of his millions to charity.

Solodovnikov Theater on Bolshaya Dmitrovka (now the Moscow Operetta Theater), 1913.

He was the first to make a contribution to the construction of the Moscow Conservatory: with his 200 thousand rubles, a luxurious marble staircase was built. He built on Bolshaya Dmitrovka “a concert hall with a theater stage for performing extravaganzas and ballets” (the current Operetta Theater), in which Savva Mamontov’s Private Opera was located. Having decided to gain the nobility, he volunteered to build a useful institution for the city. This is how the Clinic of Skin and Venereal Diseases appeared, equipped according to the last word science and technology of that time (now the Moscow Medical Academy named after I.M. Sechenov), but without mentioning the name of the donor in the title.

Clinic of skin and venereal diseases
View from B. Pirogovskaya Street.

He left less than half a million to the heirs, and divided 20,147,700 rubles (about 9 billion dollars according to today’s accounts). A third went to the “establishment of zemstvo women’s schools in the Tver, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Vyatka provinces,” a third to the establishment of vocational schools in the Serpukhov district and the maintenance of an orphanage for homeless children. A third “for the construction of low-cost apartment houses for poor people, singles and families.”

Solodovnikov Passage on Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow, 1903

In 1909, the first house “Free Citizen” (1152 apartments) for singles and a house for families “Red Diamond” (183 apartments), classical communes: a store, a dining room, a bathhouse, a laundry, a library were opened on 2nd Meshchanskaya. In the family house, a nursery and kindergarten were located on the ground floor, and all the rooms were already furnished. Of course, officials were the first to move into the “houses for the poor.”

2. Court banker Baron Alexander Ludvigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884)
Net worth over 100 million. Donated about 6 million

Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884)

The richest man in Russia in the second third of the 19th century. He inherited capital and the title of court banker from his father, through whose mediation Nicholas I concluded agreements on foreign loans for more than 300 million rubles, for which the Russified German received the title of baron. In 1857, Alexander Stieglitz became one of the founders of the Main Society of Russian Railways, and in 1860 the first director of the newly founded State Bank. He liquidated his company and lived as a rentier in a luxurious mansion on the Promenade des Anglais. Having an annual income of 3 million, he remained just as uncommunicative (the hairdresser who cut his hair for a quarter of a century never heard the voice of his client) and painfully modest. Of course, the most meticulous know that the baron built the Nikolaevskaya (Oktyabrskaya), Peterhof and Baltic railways, and during the Crimean War he helped the tsar obtain foreign loans. But he remained in history because he gave millions for the construction of the Technical Drawing School in St. Petersburg, its maintenance and museum.

Petr Fedorovich Sokolov
Baron Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884) 1847

Undoubtedly, Alexander Ludvigovich loved beauty, although all his life he was engaged only in making money. And if his son-in-law Alexander Polovtsov, the husband of his adopted daughter, had not convinced him that Russian industry could not survive without “scientific draftsmen”, we would not have had either the Stieglitz School or the first Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts in Russia (the best part of the collections of which later went to the Hermitage) . “Russia will be happy when merchants donate money for teaching and educational goals without hope of getting a medal on your neck,” said A. A. Polovtsov, State Secretary of Emperor Alexander III. He himself, thanks to his wife’s inheritance, published 25 volumes of the Russian Biographical Dictionary, but did not manage to cover all the letters until 1918. The marble monument to the baron from the Mukhinsky School (the former Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing), of course, was thrown out.

3. Nobleman Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov (1834-1913)
Donated over 3 million

Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov (1834-1913), chief chamberlain of the Supreme Court (1907), millionaire industrialist, philanthropist and philanthropist. Lawyer by training, graduate of Moscow University

At the age of 46, he completely unexpectedly became the owner of an empire of glass factories - he received it in his will. Uncle diplomat Ivan Maltsov was the only one who survived the massacre committed at the Russian embassy in Tehran, during which the diplomat-poet Alexander Griboyedov died. Having hated diplomacy, Maltsov continued the family business, setting up glass factories in the town of Gus: he brought the secret of colored glass from Europe and began producing profitable window glass. This entire crystal and glass empire, along with two mansions in the capital, painted by Vasnetsov and Aivazovsky, was given to the middle-aged bachelor official Nechaev, and with them, a double surname.

The years lived in poverty left their mark: Nechaev-Maltsov was unusually stingy, but at the same time a terrible gourmet and gastronome. Professor Ivan Tsvetaev (Marina Tsvetaeva’s father) struck up a friendship with him (while eating delicacies at receptions, he sadly calculated how many building materials he could buy with the money spent on lunch), and then convinced him to give 3 million, which was missing for the completion of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts ( one million royal rubles - a little less than one and a half billion modern dollars).

I. V. Tsvetaev and Yu. S. Nechaev-Maltsov

Not only did the donor not seek fame, but he acted anonymously throughout the 10 years it took to complete the museum. He went to enormous expense: 300 workers hired by Nechaev-Maltsov mined white marble of special frost resistance in the Urals, and when it turned out that 10-meter columns for the portico could not be made in Russia, they chartered a steamship in Norway. He ordered skilled stonemasons from Italy, etc. Apart from the museum (for which the sponsor received the title of Chief Chamberlain and the Order of Alexander Nevsky with diamonds), with the money of the “glass king” the Technical School in Vladimir, an almshouse on Shabolovka and a church in memory of killed on the Kulikovo field.

Yu. S. Nechaev-Maltsov

For the centennial anniversary of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in 2012, the Shukhov Tower Foundation proposed renaming the museum and giving it the name of Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov. They didn’t rename it, but they hung a memorial plaque.

4. Merchant Kuzma Terentyevich Soldatenkov (1818-1901)
Donated over 5 million

Soldatenkov Kozma Terentievich (1818-1901) - entrepreneur, publisher, collector, philanthropist and philanthropist, commercial advisor
Portrait of Apollinary Gilaryevich Goravsky
Tretyakov Gallery

Trader of paper yarn, shareholder of textile Tsindelevskaya, Danilovskaya, and Krenholmskaya manufactories, Trekhgorny brewery and Moscow accounting bank. An Old Believer, who grew up in the “ignorant environment of the Rogozhskaya outpost”, barely learned to read and write and stood behind the counter in the shop of a rich (!) father, after the death of his parent, he greedily began to quench his thirst for knowledge. Timofey Granovsky gave him a course of lectures on ancient Russian history and introduced him to the circle of Moscow Westerners, encouraging him to “sow the rational, the good, the eternal.” Soldatenkov organized a non-profit publishing house and began printing books for the people, at a loss to himself. I bought paintings (I started doing this four years earlier than Pavel Tretyakov himself). “If it weren’t for Tretyakov and Soldatenkov, then Russian artists would have no one to sell their paintings: at least throw them into the Neva,” the artist Alexander Rizzoni liked to repeat.

Soldatenkov Kozma Terentievich (1818-1901)

He bequeathed his collection - 258 paintings and 17 sculptures, engravings and the “Kuzma Medici” library (as Soldatenkov was called in Moscow) - to the Rumyantsev Museum (he donated a thousand annually to this first public museum in Russia, but for a whole 40 years), asking for one thing: display the collection in separate rooms. Unsold books from his publishing house and all rights to them were received by Moscow. A million went to the construction of a vocational school and almost 2 million to establish a free hospital for the poor, “without distinction of rank, class and religion.” The hospital, built after his death, was called Soldatenkovskaya, but in 1920 it was renamed Botkinskaya. It is unlikely that Kuzma Terentyevich would have been offended if he learned that she was given the name of Doctor Sergei Botkin: he was especially friendly with the Botkin family.

5. Merchants brothers Tretyakov, Pavel Mikhailovich (1832-1898) and Sergei Mikhailovich. Net worth more than 8 million.
More than 3 million were donated (1834-1892).

Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov and Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov

Owners of the Great Kostroma Linen Manufactory. The eldest conducted business in factories, the younger communicated with foreign partners. The first was closed and unsociable, the second was public and secular. Both collected paintings. Pavel - Russian, Sergei - foreign, mostly modern, especially French (having left the post of Moscow mayor, he was glad that he had gotten rid of official receptions and would be able to spend more on paintings; he spent 1 million francs on them, or 400 thousand rubles according to the then exchange rate).

The brothers had a desire to give back to their hometown from their youth. At the age of 28, Pavel decided to bequeath his capital to create a gallery of Russian art. Fortunately, he lived a long time and in 42 years managed to spend more than a million rubles on buying paintings. Pavel Tretyakov's gallery went entirely to Moscow (for 2 million paintings plus real estate), together with the collection of Sergei Tretyakov (the collection is small, only 84 paintings, but was estimated at more than half a million): the younger managed to bequeath the collection to his brother, and not his wife at all, foreseeing that she He definitely won’t part with the paintings.

Tretyakov Gallery 1910-1913
Donated to the city in 1892, the museum was called the City Gallery of the brothers P. and S. Tretyakov. After Alexander III visited the gallery, Pavel Mikhailovich refused the proposed nobility and said that he would die as a merchant (and his brother, who had managed to achieve the rank of full-time state councilor, would probably have gladly accepted). In addition to the gallery, schools for the deaf and dumb, a home for widows and orphans of Russian artists (Pavel Tretyakov supported the living by buying and commissioning paintings), the Moscow Conservatory and the School of Painting, the brothers, with their own money, built a passage - to improve transport links in the city center - on their own site land. The name “Tretyakovsky” was preserved in the name of the gallery and the passage laid by the brothers, which is a rare case in our history.

6. Merchant Savva Ivanovich Mamontov (1841-1918). It is difficult to calculate his fortune: two houses in Moscow, the Abramtsevo estate, land on the Black Sea, about 3 million, plus roads and factories. It is also impossible to calculate actual donations, since Savva Mamontov was not just a philanthropist, but a “builder of Russian cultural life”

Ilya Efimovich Repin
Portrait of Savva Ivanovich Mamontov

Born into the family of a wine farmer who headed the Moscow-Yaroslavl Railway Society. He made large capital in railway construction: he built a road from Yaroslavl to Arkhangelsk and further to Murmansk. We owe him the Murmansk port and the road that connected the center of Russia with the North: this saved the country twice, first during the First and then the Second World War, because almost all Lend-Lease, with the exception of airplanes, went through Murmansk.

He was a good sculptor (the sculptor Matvey Antokolsky recognized his talent), and could well have become a singer (he had an excellent bass and even made his debut at the Milanese opera). He didn’t get into the stage or the academy, but he earned so much money that he was able to set up a home theater and establish the first private opera in Russia, where he himself directed, conducted, provided the voices for the actors and made the scenery. He also bought the Abramtsevo estate, where all those who were part of the famous “Mamontov circle” spent their days and nights. Chaliapin learned to play his piano, Vrubel wrote “The Demon” in his office, and further on the list of members of the circle. Savva the Magnificent turned Abramtsevo near Moscow into an art colony, built workshops, trained the surrounding peasants and began to instill the “Russian style” in furniture and ceramics, believing that “it is necessary to accustom the eyes of the people to the beautiful” both at the station, and in the temple, and on the streets. He gave money to the magazine “World of Art” and to the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Savva Ivanovich Mamontov (1841-1918)

But even such a brilliant capitalist managed to get into debt (he received a rich “state order” for the construction of another railway and took out huge loans against shares), was arrested and imprisoned in the Tagansk prison, since he could not get 5 million in bail. The artists turned their backs on him, and in order to pay off their debts, the paintings and sculptures he had once bought were sold at auction for next to nothing. The old man settled at a ceramic workshop behind Butyrskaya Zastava, where he died. Recently, a monument was erected to him in Sergiev Posad, where the Mamontovs laid the first short line to transport pilgrims to the Lavra. There are four more in line - in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, on the Donetsk Railway and on Teatralnaya Square in Moscow.

7. Merchant's wife Varvara Alekseevna Morozova (1850-1917), née Khludova, mother of collectors Mikhail and Ivan Morozov. Net worth over 10 million. Donated over a million

Varvara Alekseevna Morozova
Portrait by K. Makovsky

The wife of Abram Abramovich Morozov, at the age of 34, inherited from him the Tver Manufactory Partnership. She buried her husband and began to help the unfortunate. Of the half a million allocated to her by her husband “for benefits to the poor, the establishment and maintenance of schools, almshouses and contributions to the church,” she donated 150 thousand rubles to a clinic for the mentally ill ( Residential psychiatric facility them. A. A. Morozova under the new government received the name of the psychiatrist Sergei Korsakov), another 150 thousand to the Vocational School for the Poor, the rest in small things: 10 thousand to the Rogozhsky Women's Primary School, separate amounts for zemstvo and rural schools, a shelter for nervous patients, the Cancer Institute Morozov on Devichye Pole, charitable institutions in Tver and a sanatorium in Gagra for workers suffering from tuberculosis.

Varvara Alekseevna Morozova

Varvara Morozova was a member of various institutions. Primary schools and vocational schools, hospitals, maternity hospitals and almshouses in Tver and Moscow were named after her. It was engraved on the pediment of the Chemical Institute of the People's University (given 50 thousand). Morozova paid for the three-story building of the Prechistensky courses for workers in Kursovoy Lane and the relocation of the Doukhobors to Canada. She financed the construction of the building, and then the purchase of books for the first free library-reading room in Russia named after I. S. Turgenev, opened in 1885 on the square near the Myasnitsky Gate (demolished in the 1970s). The final chord was her will.

Varvara Alekseevna Morozova

Factory owner Morozova, whom Soviet propaganda loved to present as an exemplary example of capitalist acquisitiveness, ordered the transfer of all her assets into securities, placing them in a bank, and transferring the funds received from this operation to her workers. The new owners of the Proletarsky Trud factory did not have time to appreciate the unheard-of generosity of the former owner, who died a month before the October revolution.

8. Merchant Savva Timofeevich Morozov (1862-1905). Donated over half a million

Valentin Serov
Portrait of Savva Morozov

He studied chemistry in Cambridge, textile production in Manchester and Liverpool. Returning to his homeland, he headed the Partnership of the Nikolskaya Manufactory “Savva Morozov’s Son and Co.”, the managing director of which remained his mother Maria Feodorovna (the main shareholder, net worth 30 million).

Believing that thanks to a revolutionary leap, Russia would certainly catch up with Europe, he drew up a program of socio-political reforms that called for the establishment of constitutional government. At the same time, he insured himself for 100 thousand, transferring the bearer policy to his beloved actress M.F. Andreeva, and she, in turn, gave most of the money to the Bolshevik Party. Largely because of his love for Andreeva, he supported the Art Theater, renting space for 12 years for it in Kamergersky Lane. His contribution was equal to the contribution of the main shareholders, including the owner of the gold and wire manufactory Alekseev, aka Stanislavsky. The reconstruction of the building cost Morozov 300 thousand rubles, a huge sum for those times (this despite the fact that the architect Fyodor Shekhtel, who, by the way, invented the well-known Moscow Art Theater emblem - the seagull, completed the theater project completely free of charge). The most modern equipment for the stage was ordered abroad with Morozov's money (lighting equipment in the domestic theater first appeared here). As a result, Savva Morozov spent about half a million rubles on the Moscow Art Theater building with a bronze bas-relief on the facade in the form of a drowning swimmer.

Savva Timofeevich Morozov (1862-1905)

He sympathized with the revolutionaries: he was friends with Maxim Gorky, hid Nikolai Bauman in his palace on Spiridonovka, helped deliver illegal literature to the factory where (with his knowledge) the future People's Commissar Leonid Krasin served as an engineer. After the mass strikes of 1905, he demanded that the factories be transferred to his complete control. The mother, under the threat of establishing guardianship over her son, achieved his removal from business and sent him to the Cote d'Azur, accompanied by his wife and personal doctor, where Savva Morozov committed suicide. “The merchant does not dare to get carried away. He must be true to his element of endurance and calculation,” V. N. Nemirovich-Danchenko, one of the founding fathers of the Moscow Art Theater, remarked about him.

9. Princess Maria Klavdievna Tenisheva (1867-1928)

Portrait of the Russian princess M.K. Tenisheva by I.E. Repin

The origin is shrouded in mystery. One of the legends calls her the father of Emperor Alexander II himself. Having made several unsuccessful attempts to “find myself” - early marriage, the birth of a daughter, singing lessons, the desire to get on the professional stage, drawing - she made charity the meaning and purpose of her life. She divorced and married the prince and major businessman Vyacheslav Nikolaevich Tenishev, nicknamed the “Russian American.” In part, it was a marriage of convenience: it gave the illegitimate girl a strong position in society who grew up in an aristocratic family.

Having become the wife of one of the richest Russian industrialists, but especially after the death of the prince (the founder of the famous Tenishevsky School in St. Petersburg fundamentally helped improve exclusively the “cultural strata of society”) she was able to devote herself to philanthropy. During her husband’s life, she organized drawing classes in St. Petersburg (where Ilya Repin taught) and, at the same time, a drawing school in Smolensk.

In her Talashkino estate she created an “ideological estate”: she established an agricultural school (where she raised “ideal farmers”), and trained masters of decorative and applied arts in handicraft workshops (under the leadership of Sergei Malyutin and others). She opened Russia's first museum of ethnography and Russian decorative and applied arts (“Russian Antiquity”), for which a special building was built in Smolensk.

The peasants, favored by the princess, repaid her with black ingratitude: the prince’s body, embalmed for a hundred years, buried in three coffins, was thrown into a pit in 1923. Tenisheva, who together with Savva Mamontov subsidized the publication of the magazine “World of Art”, sponsored Diaghilev and Benois, lived last years in exile in France, engaged in enamel art.

10. Margarita Kirillovna Morozova (1873-1958), née Mamontova. Net worth about 5 million

Margarita Kirillovna Morozova

Margarita Kirillovna with children against the background of a portrait of M.A. Morozova

The daughter of Savva Mamontov’s cousin and Pavel Tretyakov’s brother-in-law, she was considered the first beauty of Moscow. At the age of 18 she married Mikhail Morozov (son of V.A. Morozova), at 30 she was widowed, being pregnant with her fourth child. She was never involved in the affairs of the factory, of which her husband was a co-owner. She took music lessons from the composer Alexander Scriabin, whom she supported financially for many years (just like the widow of the railway magnate Nadezhda Von Meck - Tchaikovsky) so that he could create without being distracted by anything.

In 1910, she donated the collection of her late husband to the Tretyakov Gallery - 83 paintings (two Gauguins, Van Gogh, Bonnard, C. Monet and E. Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch and Renoir’s masterpiece “Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary”; Perov, Kramskoy, Repin, Somov, A. Benois, Levitan, Golovin and K. Korovin). She financed the publishing house "Path", which managed to publish fifty books before 1919, mainly of religious and philosophical content, as well as the magazine "Questions of Philosophy and Psychology" and the socio-political newspaper "Moscow Weekly". She transferred the land on her Mikhailovskoye estate in the Kaluga province to the ascetic teacher S.T. Shatsky, who organized the first children's colony here, which she financially supported. During the First World War, she set up an infirmary for the wounded in her house.

Bodarevsky Nikolai Kornilievich
Portrait of Margarita Kirillovna Morozova, (1897)
canvas, oil
Memorial apartment Andrey Bely)

After the revolution, she lost three children (one died, two ended up in exile), and lived in complete poverty at a summer dacha in Lianozovo, near Moscow. Personal pensioner Margarita Kirillovna Morozova received a room in a new building only in the early 1950s.

And also a group of friends

Merchant Pyotr Ivanovich Shchukin (1853-1912), co-owner of the company “Ivan Shchukin with his sons.” In 1905 he bequeathed the Museum of Russian Antiquity on Malaya Gruzinskaya Moscow.

Merchant Alexey Alexandrovich Bakhrushin (1865-1929), owner of tanneries. In 1913 he gave his Theater Museum Academy of Sciences, was awarded an audience with the king.

Merchant Nikolai Lazarevich Tarasov (1882-1910), owner of the Baku oil fields. Nephew of the French writer Henri Troyat (Lev Tarasov) and great-uncle of one of the first post-Soviet millionaires Artem Tarasov. He sponsored the Moscow Art Theater, which was threatened with ruin after the death of Savva Morozov. Creator and sponsor of the cabaret theater " Bat", for which he himself wrote sketches. Caught up in a confusing love triangle and at the age of 28 he shot himself.

A philanthropist is a person who contributes on a voluntary and free basis to the development of science and art, providing them with material assistance from personal funds. The name comes from the name of the Egyptian Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who was a patron of the arts under Emperor Augustus.

“His name became a household name for a reason - for the first time in history, a powerful state policy was implemented, the conductor of which was Maecenas. With the support of the emperor, Maecenas directed a significant portion of the finances accumulated by the Roman Empire to encourage and support the creative industries. This is how a system of state financial support for culture or the world of art was created.

With the help of investments in art, the political problems of great Rome were solved, strengthening the position and power of the Roman Empire and its power. Therefore, one cannot assume that a philanthropist is a disinterested person who does good to people for free. A patron is someone who, by supporting art, develops the spirituality of society as a necessary condition for the implementation of the tasks facing it.” (Magazine "World of Arts")

In the old days, the word “charity” meant compassion for one’s neighbor, mercy. Various charitable institutions were built for those in need - hospitals, shelters, schools, colleges, almshouses. Charity was one of the main virtues of Christianity.

IN pre-revolutionary Russia Charity was not usually included in government programs to help the poor, but was carried out by private individuals and societies for helping the needy. State aid was designated by the term “charity” (public charity). Charity was widespread in the state and public life of Russia.

The 19th century was the heyday of charity in Russia. The rapid growth of the economy has led to the emergence of a large number of rich people. Among them were those who had not only a lot of money, but also amazing spiritual qualities - generosity, a sense of compassion and, at the same time, an understanding of beauty.

Who are they - the most famous philanthropists in the history of Russia?

In modern Russia, the same names are always heard: Tretyakov, Mamontov, Morozov. But there were other philanthropists and philanthropists, whose names have been undeservedly forgotten. This article is dedicated to them.

Sergei Grigorievich Stroganov

Sergei Stroganov (1794–1882) – count, statesman, archaeologist, general, Moscow governor.

All his life he was in military service, showed considerable courage in the Battle of Borodino, and took part in the Crimean War. However, his most striking and fruitful activities were in the purely civilian field. Russian enlightenment owes him a lot. On top of everything, Sergei Grigorievich was also a great philanthropist.

Despite the fact that he held the rank of adjutant general and held high positions, Stroganov was indifferent to his career. He was distinguished by a strong and independent character, able to firmly defend his convictions, even if they contradicted the opinions of senior officials in the state.

Thanks to his spiritual qualities and deep education, Sergei Grigorievich was chosen as the teacher of the emperor’s sons, Grand Dukes Nicholas, Alexander, Vladimir and Alexei Alexandrovich.

He managed to do a lot for his homeland. He founded the first free drawing school in Russia. It was available to all talented children, regardless of their class origin. The “School of Drawing in Relation to Arts and Crafts” (now the S.G. Stroganov Moscow State Art Academy) was opened in Moscow on October 31, 1825. The Stroganov family continued to finance the school until 1917.

From 1835 to 1847 he was a trustee of the Moscow educational district and Moscow University. Contemporaries called this period the “Stroganov time.” In 1840, Stroganov showed all his characteristic strength of character and progressive thinking, sharply protesting against a secret government circular that recommended limiting access to university education for representatives of the lower classes.

For more than 37 years, Count S. G. Stroganov was the chairman of the Moscow Society of Russian History and Antiquities, founded at Moscow University. Every year he equipped scientific archaeological expeditions to the south of Russia with his own money. The result of these excavations in Crimea were rich Kerch treasures and “Scythian gold”, now stored in the Hermitage.

In 1859 he founded the Moscow Archaeological Society. He was the chairman of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, located in his St. Petersburg palace for 23 years. On the highest order, the count supervised the multi-volume publication of Antiquities Russian state", published in 1837-1874. Demetrius Cathedral in Vladimir was restored at the expense of the count. Stroganov was the author of a number of published works on history ancient Russian architecture and archaeology.

He was a member of the commission for the construction of the Cathedral of the Savior in Moscow.

He studied numismatics and left rich collections of Russian coins and ancient icons.

Sergei Grigorievich's son, Alexander Sergeevich Stroganov, was also interested in history and archeology, was a member of the St. Petersburg Archaeological Society and was a famous numismatist. His collection of 35,000 medieval European coins is today in the Hermitage. And the breeding stud farm he founded still operates and is known as the “Pskov Stud Farm”.

Unfortunately, fate prepared a bitter fate for this noble and illustrious family. Today there is no one left from the Stroganov family except Helen Stroganova. Baroness Helene de Ludinghausen is the only representative of this glorious and ancient family. She is the great-grandniece of Count Sergei Grigorievich Stroganov.

Hélène was born on August 20, 1942 in Paris. Her grandmother, Princess Sofya Vasilchikova (daughter of Olga Stroganova, granddaughter of Sergei Grigorievich) left Russia at the end of 1917 along with her four daughters. In 1942, one of the daughters of Ksenia and Baron Andrei de Ludinghausen, a descendant of the Russified Germans (who lived in Russia in the 16th century), had a daughter, Helen.

For many years she worked for Yves Saint Laurent as the director of his fashion house. Now retired. Lives in France, in Paris. Engaged in extensive social and charitable activities.

Alexander Ludvigovich Stieglitz

Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz at various times held senior positions in the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire.

Talented financier, banker, entrepreneur, Baron A.L. Schtiglitz was the richest man in Russia at the end of the 19th century, one of the founders of the Main Society of Russian Railways, as well as director of the State Bank. The baron built the Nikolaev, Peterhof and Baltic railways.

He inherited capital and the title of court banker from his father, through whose mediation Nicholas I concluded agreements on foreign loans for more than 300 million rubles, for which the Russified German received the title of baron. Having an annual income of 3 million, he remained just as uncommunicative (the hairdresser who cut his hair for a quarter of a century never heard the voice of his client) and painfully modest.

His father, a millionaire and a zealot of education, intended his son to pursue an academic career, to which he felt inclined. Having received an excellent classical education at home, Stieglitz graduated from the University of Dorpat, where he showed great ability in science. He was interested in ancient languages, painting, and literature. After graduating from university, the young man traveled a lot around Europe, and upon returning to Russia, he entered the civil service in the Ministry of Finance.

Alexander Ludvigovich studied all his life financial matters, but understanding the problems of ordinary people was not alien to him. During the Crimean War, he donated large sums for the needs of the Russian army: in 1853 - in favor of the Chesme military almshouse and in 1855 - in favor of naval officials who lost their property in Sevastopol. Considerable funds were spent on education, on the maintenance of students of educational institutions, on maintaining an orphanage in Kolomna, founded by his father.

On January 1 (13), 1853, on the day of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stieglitz and Co. trading house, the young owner of the company generously rewarded and provided for the future of all his employees, and no one was forgotten, including the artel workers and watchmen.

In 1858, simultaneously with a donation for the construction of a monument to Emperor Nicholas I in the exchange hall, Stieglitz contributed a significant amount for the maintenance of students in educational institutions of the capital in memory of the late emperor.

After assuming the post of manager of the State Bank, Stieglitz became concerned with the needs of his colleagues. With his closest assistance, in 1862, a savings and loan bank for employees in the State Bank was established, then for 3 years he supported the funds of the cash desk with donations (leaving part of his salary in its favor). In the 1880s, the deputy meeting of the treasury gave this amount the name “capital named after Baron A. L. Stieglitz.” From its interest, benefits were annually issued to widows and orphans of members of the fund.

In addition to the listed institutions, many others were benefited by Stieglitz at different times, including the continued existence of orphanage in Kolomna, founded by his father.

“Russia will be happy when merchants donate money for teaching and educational purposes without the hope of receiving a medal on their neck,” said A. A. Polovtsov, State Secretary of Emperor Alexander III.

In 1876, the baron presented his most valuable gift to St. Petersburg and Russia, giving 1 million rubles. to create a school of industrial design in his hometown - the Central School of Technical Drawing (St. Petersburg State Academy of Arts and Industry named after A.L. Stieglitz, from 1953 to 1994 the institute was called the Leningrad Higher Art and Industry School named after V.I. Mukhina, "Mukhinsky School"). This is how a building in the neo-Renaissance style appeared in Solyany Lane, erected according to the design of architects R.A. Gedike and A.I. Krakau, which in itself was already a work of art.

An integral part of the St. Petersburg State Academy of Arts and Industry is the Museum of Applied Arts. The halls of the museum became the cultural, educational, training and exhibition center of the academy.

The fact is that the industrialist Stieglitz gathered in these halls best samples applied arts from all over the world, on which he spent a fortune. Antique furniture, household items, and tapestries were bought at auctions throughout Europe. The baron exhibited all the masterpieces in the halls of the museum so that future artists could study only the best examples of art of all times and peoples, thus adopting experience recognized masters. Almost all historical eras and styles are reflected in the artistic decoration of the thirty-two halls of the museum.

Now the St. Petersburg State Academy of Arts and Industry named after. A.L. Stieglitz is one of the most famous art universities in the country. The Academy graduated from many artists who made significant contributions to the art and culture of Russia and other countries. Among the famous graduates are Adrian Vladimirovich Kaplun, Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin.

Until the end of his days, Baron Stieglitz regularly allocated funds for the maintenance of the school and after his death bequeathed it for its needs a large sum money, which contributed to its further development.

On October 24 (November 5), 1884, Stieglitz died of pneumonia and was buried, of his own free will, in Ivangorod in the Church of the Holy Trinity, which he personally built over the grave of his wife, for the spiritual needs of the local factory population.

The will left by Stieglitz generally represents an example of caring for the institutions he created and the persons who were in any more or less close relationship with him.

Thus, by the way, 30,000 rubles were bequeathed to them in favor of the employees of the State Bank; His personal employees were not forgotten either: his favorite valet, for example, received 5,000 rubles. The total amount distributed according to Stieglitz's will among various persons and institutions was rumored to reach 100 million rubles (not counting real estate), but in reality it was more modest - about 38 million rubles.

It is interesting to note that, being a completely independent person, whose capital was readily accepted in all countries, Stieglitz placed his enormous fortune almost exclusively in Russian funds and, in response to the skeptical remark of one financier about the imprudence of such trust in Russian finance, he once remarked:

“My father and I made our entire fortune in Russia; if she turns out to be insolvent, then I am ready to lose all my fortune along with her.”

Solodovnikov Gavrila Gavrilovich

Gavrila Gavrilovich Solodovnikov (1826, Serpukhov - May 21, 1901, Moscow) - one of the richest Moscow merchants and homeowners, a multimillionaire, owner of a store and theater in Moscow, philanthropist; donated more than 20 million rubles to charity. With his funds, a theater on Bolshaya Dmitrovka (later the Moscow Operetta Theater), a clinic at the Faculty of Medicine of Moscow State University, a number of houses for the poor in Moscow, an orphanage, and several schools in four provinces of Russia were built.

The son of a paper goods merchant, due to lack of time, he poorly learned to write and express his thoughts coherently. At 20 he became a merchant of the first guild, at 40 he became a millionaire. He was famous for his frugality and prudence (he ate yesterday's buckwheat and rode in a carriage with only the rear wheels shod in rubber). He did not always conduct his affairs honestly, but he made up for this with his will, devoting almost all of his millions to charity.

During these same years, Gavrila Gavrilovich decided to become a nobleman. For a person with the condition that Solodovnikov had, this was not difficult. Everyone knew perfectly well how it was done. Anyone interested came to the city government and directly asked how he could help the city. He was given a task, he carried it out, and the city wrote a petition to the highest name, and this petition was usually granted. So did Solodovnikov.

Appearing at the council in 1894, he stated that he would like to build some useful institution for the city. The council was filled with people with a sense of humor. They explained to the merchant that the city now needs nothing more than a venereal hospital. The subtlety of the situation was that, according to the tradition of that time, an object donated to the city was given the name of the donor. Consequently, the hospital built by Gavrila Gavrilovich should have been called "Clinic of skin and venereal diseases of the merchant Solodovnikov." The millionaire immediately understood where the fun was and refused the offer. He contacted the council three more times, and each time he was offered the same thing.

It ended up being that the desire to become an aristocracy won out. The clinic was built and equipped with the latest state-of-the-art science and technology. In return, Gavrila Gavrilovich graciously asked the authorities not to assign his name to the hospital. The authorities agreed.

After some time, Solodovnikov received an order around his neck for a gift to the city and was registered in the nobility register. Nowadays it is the Clinic of Skin and Venereal Diseases at the 1st Moscow Medical Institute; since 1990, the institute has a different status and a different name - Moscow Medical Academy named after I.M. Sechenov. Since nothing else was built in all subsequent years, the case of Gavrila Gavrilovich Solodovnikov exists to this day.

He died on May 21, 1901, after a long illness. After the death of the richest of Russian millionaires at the beginning of the last century and after the announcement of his will, artist Mikhail Lentovsky recalled: “I asked him: “Well, where are you going to spend your millions, old man?” What will you do with them?” And he told me: “When I die, Moscow will find out who Gavrila Gavrilovich Solodovnikov was!” The whole empire will talk about me."

At the time of his death, his fortune was estimated at 20,977,700 rubles. Of these, he bequeathed 830,000 rubles to his relatives.

The eldest son and executor, member of the board of directors of the Nizhny Novgorod-Samara Land Bank Pyotr Gavrilovich received the most, 300,000, and the least amount was the dress and underwear of the deceased - younger son, ensign of the tsarist army Andrei. This is how the father punished his son for refusing to follow the “commercial line.”

It is worth saying that the merchant did not forget about anyone in his will. Sister Lyudmila was allocated 50,000 rubles, cousin Lyubov Shapirova - 20,000, her daughters - 50,000 each, Passage artel worker Stepan Rodionov - 10,000, and the same amount for clerk Mikhail Vladchenko. In addition, the will mentioned a huge number of relatives, friends, acquaintances and even just fellow countrymen of the merchant, and each was marked with a rather large sum.

However, the real sensation was the second part of the will. According to it, the remaining 20,147,700 rubles (about 200 million dollars according to today’s accounts) Gavrila Gavrilovich ordered to be divided into three equal parts. He ordered the first part to be spent on “the establishment of zemstvo women’s schools in the Tver, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Vyatka provinces.”

The second - “to be given to the establishment of vocational schools in the Serpukhov district for the education of children of all classes and... to the establishment and maintenance of a shelter for homeless children there.” The third part should have been allocated “for the construction of cheap apartment buildings for poor people, single and married.” Solodovnikov wrote in his will: “The majority of these poor people are the working class, living by honest labor and having the inalienable right to be protected from the injustice of fate.”

The eldest son, Pyotr Gavrilovich Solodovnikov, was appointed manager.

The Moscow city government took up the task of fulfilling the will of the deceased. Houses for the lonely and poor gradually began to be built - in the area of 2nd Meshchanskaya. The first home for singles, called the Freeman, opened on May 5, 1909, followed two days later by the home for families, the Red Diamond.

House of cheap apartments named after. Solodovnikov “Free Citizen”

The first had 1,152 apartments, the second - 183. The houses were a complete example of a commune: each of them had a developed infrastructure with a store, a dining room, a bathhouse, a laundry, a library, and an outdoor shower. In the family house, a nursery and kindergarten were located on the ground floor. All rooms were already furnished. Both houses were illuminated with electricity, which residents had the right to use until 11 pm.

Moreover, the houses had elevators, which at that time was considered almost fantastic. And housing was truly incredibly cheap: a one-room apartment in “Grazhdanin” cost 1 ruble 25 kopecks a week, and in “Romb” - 2 rubles 50 kopecks. This is despite the fact that the average Moscow worker then earned 1 ruble 48 kopecks a day.

The Solodovnikovsky House for families had 183 pre-furnished one-room apartments, each with an area of 16 to 21 square meters; on the floor there were 4 kitchens with cold and hot water, with separate tables for each family, with cold pantries, a Russian stove, rooms for drying outer clothes, as well as a room for servants who cleaned the house; residents used a common library, a nursery, and a consumer shop.

It is known that, in accordance with Russian tradition, officials were the first to move into the “houses for the poor.” True, quite soon it was the turn of ordinary people - working people: workers, teachers, etc.

It must be said that Pyotr Gavrilovich himself was in no hurry and did not show zeal to say goodbye to his father’s millions. His polite correspondence with the Moscow authorities regarding the inheritance he left was long, many years and did not stop until 1917.

In 1918, houses and bank accounts were nationalized and Solodovnikov’s charitable millions disappeared into the general money supply of the young revolutionary state. Soviet and public organizations. In the 30s, “Red Diamond” was occupied by “Rospotrebsoyuz”. There was a very cheap and high-quality canteen there, but ordinary people were not allowed into it.

Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov

Portrait of Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsev. 1885 Artist Kramskoy II

Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov (October 11 (23), 1834 - 1913) - Russian philanthropist, manufacturer, diplomat, owner of glass factories, honorable Sir city of Vladimir (1901), honorary member of the Moscow Archaeological Society, honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1902). Civil rank - Privy Councilor.

In 1880, at the age of 49, Yu. S. Nechaev received an inheritance from his uncle Ivan Sergeevich Maltsov (1807-1880), which included several factories and factories in various provinces of Russia, the largest of which was the Gusev Crystal Factory in Vladimir region. Entering into inheritance rights, Yu. S. Nechaev also took the surname of his uncle (mother’s brother) and became Nechaev-Maltsov.

Uncle diplomat Ivan Maltsov was the only one who survived the massacre committed at the Russian embassy in Tehran, during which the diplomat-poet Alexander Griboyedov died. Having hated diplomacy, diplomat Maltsov continued the family business, setting up glass factories in the town of Gus: he brought the secret of colored glass from Europe and began producing profitable window glass. This entire crystal and glass empire, along with two mansions in the capital, painted by Vasnetsov and Aivazovsky, was received by the middle-aged bachelor official Nechaev.

The years lived in poverty left their mark: Nechaev-Maltsov was unusually stingy, but at the same time a terrible gourmet and gastronome. Professor Ivan Tsvetaev (Marina Tsvetaeva’s father) struck up a friendship with him (while eating delicacies at receptions, he sadly calculated how many building materials he could buy with the money spent on lunch), and then finally convinced him to give about 3 million, which was missing for the completion of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin) By the way - a million royal rubles - a little less than one and a half billion modern dollars!

Yu.S. Nechaev-Maltsov, I.I. Rerberg, R.I. Klein and I.V. Tsvetaev at the construction of the museum. August 2, 1901

Fourteen years of construction and orders for casts in different countries were a true epic in the life of I.V. Tsvetaev and his like-minded person - a major entrepreneur and philanthropist Yu.S. Nechaev-Maltsov, who paid all the expenses: for stone, for Italian and Russian workers, for the transportation of expensive casts from Europe to Russia. Suffice it to say that for cladding the walls of the museum building, Ural white marble, Italian marble from Carrara, dark pink marble from Hungary, light green marble from Belgium, black Norwegian marble, Finnish granite and other valuable colored stones were used, extraction and delivery which were paid for without complaint by Yu.S. Nechaev-Maltsov.

“...It was mainly masters from Italy who worked on marble. For granite - ours from Tver. I imagine this Babylon. Light, heavenly-colored eyes, so you can drown, residents of Tver, Vladimir, and dark-skinned Italians with black eyes...” Valeria Tsvetaeva.

In 1901 alone, 90 wagons of marble were delivered from the Urals to Moscow, and another 100 wagons were supposed to be sent from the same place the following year. Glass manufacturer, wealthy donor to the museum, Yu.S. Nechaev-Maltsov, unbeknownst to himself, became the main builder of the museum and supplier of expensive casts to the museum. Today it's real role in the creation of the museum is clarified from the published extensive correspondence with I.V. Tsvetaev. Without Yu.S. Nechaev-Maltsov, the museum would have remained an empty dream of university professor I.V. Tsvetaev.

Surprisingly, the completion of the museum’s construction was also the beginning of the end for its creators: in September 1913, I.V. Tsvetaev died, and forty days after him, Yu.S. Nechaev-Maltsov. Having fulfilled their life's duty, they summed up an entire era, when the idea, barely born, found its real embodiment in the grandiose museum building that decorated Moscow.

Grand opening museum. Nicholas II with his family. 1912

“...And there was a quiet celebration of joy: it’s not dad who’s being given something now the mighty of the world this, and he gives everyone who is here now, all of Russia, the museum he created!..” (A. Tsvetaeva).

Not counting the museum (for which the sponsor received the title of Chief Chamberlain and the Order of Alexander Nevsky with diamonds), with the money of the “glass king” the Technical School named after I. S. Maltsov was founded - one of the best in Europe in terms of technical equipment (now the Vladimir Aviation Mechanical College ).

When constructing a building Historical Museum in Vladimir he donated glass for making museum display cases.

He erected the majestic Church of St. George in the center of the city of Goose, which became known under him as Goose-Crystal, and in the village of Berezovka - the Church of Dmitry of Thessalonica in memory of the soldiers who died in the Battle of Kulikovo. The temples were painted by V. M. Vasnetsov. Following the temple-monuments in Gus-Khrustalny, an almshouse named after I. S. Maltsov was built, and in Moscow, on Shabolovka 33, in 1906 a complex of a noble almshouse named after Y. S. Nechaev-Maltsov was built.

In St. Petersburg, Yuri Stepanovich was a trustee of the Maritime Charitable Society, the Nikolaev Women's Hospital, the Sergius Orthodox Brotherhood, helped the House of Charity and Craft Education for Poor Children, and from 1910 was a trustee of the School of the Imperial Women's Patriotic Society named after Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna.

For a long time he was a member of the Trustee Committee for the Sisters of the Red Cross, on the basis of which in 1893, under the patronage of Princess E. M. of Oldenburg, the Community of Sisters of Charity of St. Eugenia arose. Having become vice-president of the Community, he donated money for the construction under its auspices of two hospital pavilions and the building of the Shelter for Elderly Sisters of Mercy named after Emperor Alexander III. Financed the activities of medical institutions.

Nechaev-Maltsov was vice-chairman of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and subsidized the magazine “Artistic Treasures of Russia”, whose editors were Alexander Benois and Adrian Prakhov. Currently, the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Northwestern Federal District is located in the St. Petersburg house of Yu. S. Nechaev-Maltsov.

According to the will of the childless Yu. S. Nechaev, his fortune in 1914 passed to his distant relative, Count P. N. Ignatiev. In 1918, the enterprises were nationalized.

Soldatenkov Kozma Terentievich

Kozma Soldatenkov is an entrepreneur and one of the largest Russian philanthropists. According to official data, he donated more than 5 million rubles.

Soldatenkov belonged to a dynasty of textile manufacturers, natives of the village of Prokunino, Kolomensky (then Bogorodsky) district of the Moscow province.

Kozma Soldatenkov began his charitable activities in the 1850s. By his order, in the village of Prokunino, benefits began to be issued in memory of his grandfather and grandmother: until 1917, each girl who got married and each recruit received 50 rubles. With this money, a rural girl could arrange a wedding for 20 people and prepare a dowry: a bed, bed linen, three or four dresses. And the soldier’s family, in the absence of their breadwinner son, had the opportunity to spend the allowance on material needs - repairing a hut, buying a horse or cow.

In 1866, the Almshouse of Commerce of Advisor K.T. opened in Moscow. Soldatenkov in memory of February 19, 1861. Being a descendant of serfs who bought their freedom, Soldatenkov immortalized the most important thing in the name of the almshouse historical event- the day of the abolition of serfdom. The merchant built the establishment with personal funds and maintained it for 30 years. In a two-story stone building (construction cost 60 thousand rubles) 100 people found shelter. Preference, according to the Charter, was given “permanent residents of the city and visitors of all classes and confessions, but mainly from former courtyard people.” Soldatenkov bequeathed 285 thousand rubles for the maintenance of the establishment.

Almshouse of Commerce Advisor K.T. Soldatenkov in memory of February 19, 1861

In 1870–1882, Soldatenkov donated 1000 rubles annually. for the maintenance of the Nikolaev charity home for widows and orphans of the merchant class. With this money, residents were provided with improved food: poultry, game, veal, and red fish. In 1889–1900, he donated 10 thousand rubles. for the construction of the Alekseevskaya psychiatric hospital and 5 thousand rubles. for the construction of an almshouse for the city care of the poor in the Yauza part.

Soldatenkov is known not only as a businessman, but also as a book publisher. Over 45 years, more than 200 historical and works of art. Newspaper " Russian word"(dated May 20, 1901) noted that the merchant "spent a lot of money on the publication of major works."

Soldatenkov's great passion was collecting paintings. His collection consisted of 269 paintings by Russian and European artists, among them paintings by Vasily Tropinin, Alexander Ivanov, Nikolai Ge, Sylvester Shchedrin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Pavel Fedotov. The merchant bequeathed the collection to the Rumyantsev Museum with the condition that it be placed “in a separate room with the name ... “Soldatenkovskaya”.” For decades, the generous philanthropist invested in the development of the Rumyantsev Museum and Moscow University.

Kozma Soldatenkov died in 1901. The newspaper “Russkoe Slovo” wrote: “The whole of Moscow knew the good-natured figure of an old man as white as a harrier with softly glowing intelligent eyes.”

From the Kuntsevo estate (in the 1860s, Soldatenkov bought it from the Naryshkins) to the Rogozhskoye cemetery, the coffin was carried in the hands of peasants, covering a distance of ten kilometers. The funeral service was attended by Moscow University professors Ivan Tsvetaev and Sergei Muromtsev, editor of Russian Vedomosti Vasily Sobolevsky, deputies of the Moscow City Duma from the eminent merchant class Savva Morozov, Pyotr Botkin, Vladimir Sapozhnikov. The weekly Iskra noted:

“The deceased was known as an ideological publisher, an outstanding financier and, most of all, as a person of remarkable moral qualities.”

The philanthropist bequeathed a significant part of his fortune to charitable purposes. So, 1.3 million rubles. Soldatenkov left to Moskovsky merchant society to create a vocational school “for free training therein for male children, without distinction of their condition or religion, in various crafts related to technical production.” 300 thousand went to the construction of the building, and 1 million rubles. amounted to untouchable capital, the interest from which supported the educational institution.

The school with electrical engineering and foundry departments for 320 students opened on November 1, 1909 in a three-story mansion on Donskaya Street (now the faculty building is chemical technology and ecology of the Moscow State Textile Institute named after A.N. Kosygin). The duration of study was five years: the first two years taught general education subjects, the next three – special ones.

More than 2 million rubles. Soldatenkov donated to the establishment of a free hospital for the poor “without distinction of rank, class and religion.” Soldatenkovskaya Hospital, as Muscovites called it, was opened on December 23, 1910.

The benefactor also left 100 thousand rubles. To the almshouse at the Rogozhskoe cemetery, 20 thousand rubles. Arnoldovsky School of the Deaf and Mutes, 85 thousand rubles. for scholarships and tuition fees for poor students at Moscow University, 40 thousand rubles. for scholarships for students of Moscow gymnasiums, 20 thousand rubles. for scientific prizes Russian Academy Sci. In total, the will mentions about 20 charitable, educational and medical institutions - recipients of assistance. The amount of donations amounted to 600 thousand rubles.

He was buried at the Rogozhskoe cemetery. IN Soviet years The grave of Kozma Terentyevich Soldatenkov, as well as the large tomb of the Old Believers merchants Soldatenkov, were destroyed.

In 1901, according to Soldatenkov’s will, his library (8 thousand volumes of books and 15 thousand copies of magazines), as well as a collection of Russian paintings (258 paintings and 17 sculptures) passed to the Rumyantsev Museum and how National treasure was kept in a separate room with the name “Soldatenkovskaya”. After the closure of the Rumyantsev Museum in 1924, they replenished the funds of the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum. Some of the icons from his collection were bequeathed to the Intercession Cathedral of the Rogozhsky cemetery.

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Charity and patronage

Russian entrepreneurs ......................................................................3

Chapter 2: XIX - early XX centuries .................6 Chapter 3:

Root reasons for the development of charity………………………..12

3.1.High morality, awareness of social

debt of entrepreneurs and philanthropists…………………………….13

3.2. Religious motives……………………………………………...14

3.3. Patriotism of Russian business people………………………………….15

3.4. Desire for social benefits, privileges…………………17

3.5. Interests of business……………………………….18

Chapter 4:

Patrons are not born……………………………………………..…19

Conclusion................................................. ........................................................ ......21 Bibliography................................................ ...........................................23

Introduction.

The difficult times Russia is going through today are characterized by a number of processes and trends. Culture is in distress, without which the real revival of the country is simply impossible. Theaters and libraries are burning, museums, even the most reputable and reputable ones, are in dire need of support. The consistent reduction in the number of readers and the volume of literature read must be recognized as an objective reality.

In Moscow, as in Rus' in general, charity as an organized social system began to take shape with the adoption of Christianity and the emergence of monasteries. It is significant that it was at the monasteries that the first almshouses and hospitals in Moscow began to be built, in the Novospassky, Novodevichy and Donskoy monasteries; eighteenth-century buildings that once housed hospitals have survived to this day.

Analysis of the sphere of charity in pre-revolutionary Russia allows us to connect the essence of charity with another well-known phenomenon - mercy. The scale, stages and trends of charity, kind and merciful deeds can be clearly seen in the history of Moscow. One cannot but agree with the fair conclusions of P.V. Vlasov: “The pre-revolutionary capital seemed to us a city with “forty forty churches”, numerous estates, apartment buildings and factories. Now it appears before us as an abode of mercy... Representatives different classes- the haves and the poor - gave to the needy what they had: some - fortune, others - strength and time. These were ascetics who received satisfaction from the consciousness of their own benefit, from serving their fatherland through philanthropy.”

1. Charity and patronage of Russian entrepreneurs

The term “philanthropist” is derived from the name of a nobleman who lived in Rome in the 1st century. BC e., Gaius Cilnius Maecenas - a noble and generous patron of the sciences and arts. The literal meaning of the word is charity - to do good. Charity is the voluntary allocation of material resources to help those in need, or for any public needs related to it.

The leading place in the history of charity and patronage of the arts in Russia was occupied by domestic entrepreneurs - owners of significant capital. They not only developed trade, industry, banking, saturated the market with goods, took care of economic prosperity, but also made an invaluable contribution to the development of society, science and culture of the country, leaving us a legacy of hospitals, educational establishments, theaters, art galleries, libraries. Philanthropic entrepreneurship in pre-revolutionary Russia and charity were an integral feature, a feature of domestic business people. In many ways, this quality was determined by the attitude of entrepreneurs to their business, which has always been special in Russia. For a Russian entrepreneur, being a philanthropist meant something more than just being generous or having the opportunity to receive privileges and break into the upper echelons of society - it was largely national trait Russians and had a religious basis. Unlike the West, there was no cult of rich people in Russia. They said about wealth in Rus': God gave it to man for use and will demand an account for it. This truth was accepted and carried through the centuries by many representatives of the domestic business world, and charity became in a certain sense historical tradition of Russian entrepreneurs. The origins of the charity of Russian business people go back centuries and are associated with the asceticism of the first Russian merchants, who were always guided in their activities in famous words from the “Teachings of Vladimir Monomakh”: “Do not forget the most wretched, but as far as you can, feed and serve the orphan, and justify the widow yourself, and do not let the strong destroy a person.” In the first half of the 19th century, the agents of charity were predominantly nobles. The construction of private hospitals, almshouses, and substantial monetary donations to “help the poor” were explained both by a patriotic impulse and by the desire of the rich noble nobility to “distinguish themselves” in the eyes of secular society with their generosity, nobility, and to amaze their contemporaries with the originality of their gifts. It is the latter circumstance that explains the fact that sometimes charitable institutions were built in the form of magnificent palaces. Unique examples of palace-type charitable institutions include the Sheremetev Hospital for Hospice, built in Moscow by famous architects G. Quarenghi and E. Nazarov, the Widow's House (architect I. Gilardi), Golitsyn Hospital (architect M. Kazakov) and many others.

From the second half of the 19th century with the development of capitalism leading place in Russian philanthropy passed to the bourgeoisie (industrialists, factory owners, bankers), as a rule, people from wealthy merchants, bourgeois nobles and enterprising peasants - the third or fourth generation of entrepreneurs who began their activities in the late 18th century early XIX century. By the end of the 19th century, these were already, for the most part, intelligent and highly moral people. Many of them had subtle artistic taste and high artistic demands. They were well aware that for the country and their own business to prosper in conditions of market competition it was necessary Active participation V social life society, in the development of science and culture, therefore they used the accumulated funds not only for the development of business and personal consumption, but also for charity, helping to solve many social problems. In particular, in conditions of extreme polarization of wealth and poverty in pre-revolutionary Russia, philanthropic entrepreneurship became a kind of “regulator” of social balance, a certain means of eliminating social injustice. Of course, it was impossible to eliminate poverty and backwardness through charity, and entrepreneurs were well aware of this, but they sought to at least somehow help “their neighbor” and thus “ease their souls.”

As a result of the wide and varied activities of domestic entrepreneurs, entire dynasties were born in the country, which for several generations maintained a reputation as prominent philanthropists: the Krestovnikovs, Boevs, Tarasovs, Kolesovs, Popovs and others. Researcher S. Martynov names the most generous Russian philanthropist, a major entrepreneur late XIX century Gavrila Gavrilovich Solodovnikov, who from the total inheritance of 21 million rubles. over 20 million rubles. bequeathed for public needs (for comparison: donations from the entire nobility, including the royal family, did not reach 100 thousand rubles in 20 years).

At the same time, the charity of entrepreneurs in pre-revolutionary Russia had its own characteristics. For many centuries business people traditionally invested primarily in the construction of churches. Churches continued to be built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but since the end of the last century, the main rivalry between wealthy entrepreneurs took place in the social sphere under the motto: “Who will do more for the people.”

Let's take a closer look at the most famous philanthropists of Russia.

2. The most prominent patrons of the late XIX - early XX centuries.

Patronage Savva Ivanovich Mamontov (1841-1918) was of a special kind: he invited his artist friends to Abramtsevo, often together with their families, conveniently located in the main house and outbuildings. All those who came, under the leadership of the owner, went into nature, to sketches. All this is very far from the usual examples of charity, when a philanthropist limits himself to donating a certain amount to a good cause. Mamontov acquired many works by members of the circle himself, and found customers for others.