Merchants stimulated sales through deception by creating the most favorable trading conditions

At the beginning of the era of the revival of private business, many in Russia remembered the old Russian merchants as an example to follow. The merchants, they say, took each other’s word for it, were exemplary members of society, religious people, philanthropists and patrons of the arts. However, in reality, the leading people of pre-revolutionary commerce made their initial capital through crimes, selling alcohol, and were not averse to seizing church property. Their behavior was the subject of constant ridicule from the press and society, and they often engaged in charity work at the expense of others.

"Those are scammers!"

Myths about ourselves and loved ones have been created by all peoples of the world and at all times. Moreover, legends about people of the same profession, composed in lands separated from each other, are sometimes similar, as if composed by the same storyteller. Take, for example, stories about princely warriors or knights. After all, both the Russian principalities and the European kingdoms groaned equally from their pleasures in peacetime. But in oral and written legends, these bloodthirsty fighters of internecine wars appear filled with exceptional nobility. And envious and evil peasants turned into hospitable and good-natured villagers. However, merchants for many centuries, especially in our country, stood apart in this row. In Rus', although they were respectfully called “your degree,” they were not particularly favored by all levels of society. Actually, nothing else could have happened in the country where the saying “if you don’t cheat, you don’t sell” was born. And they deceived everywhere, always and as soon as they could.

For centuries, in Moscow and other Russian cities there were intermediaries who bought goods from peasants who came on market days for resale at a profit. And if the coming profit did not please them with its size, they without any hesitation resorted to various tricks. In “Notes of a Detective” Mikhail Maksimov talked about them like this:

“In Moscow live men who sell bread, oats, cereals, firewood and hay; for some reason they are called kulaks by some, Khlynovites by others.

Only Moscow craftsmen could turn three cartloads of oats into four and sell the tea they had already drunk

Their industry essentially lies in the fact that, when they buy bread, oats and cereals from visiting steppe peasants in the winter, they scatter it all on their carts, making three out of four, and out of five into seven. And when they buy from them, they shamelessly deceive.

Logs are placed in carts with hay for weight, or during weighing one or two of them, clinging to the back or side of the cart, increase the weight in an imperceptible way.

When stacking firewood on their carts, they make the middle empty or place it discreetly in knots and rarely sell it by fathom, but always by cartload.

When measuring oats and cereals, if you don’t inspect them, they will pour three or four measures onto the bottom. They are in business with coachmen and janitors.

They strictly consider each buyer and, if they see the impossibility of deception, they will never sell.

One of my acquaintances, out of ignorance, bought ten carts of firewood from these kulaks. In terms of price and the extent of the carts, the deal seemed very profitable to him. It was late in the evening, and all the wood was left in the barn for him, without being put back in place. The next day, talking with the cook, he told her:

“Now we have enough firewood, it seems, until spring.” I believe that there will be about five fathoms here.

- And what are there, sir, five fathoms! “There’s hardly even three here,” the cook told him. “If you please, look at what you bought—most of the knots, not the logs.”

A rich man, a miser, had the habit of buying at the outpost at well-known markets everything that he found profitable for himself, and therefore constantly wandered there to buy various supplies at a cheap price.

The kulaks had known this man for a long time, but they could not find a way to deceive him.

In the bitter cold, they saw him at the market near the carts with the coachman buying oats for their horses, they immediately, having agreed with the coachman, got down to business.

One of these Khlynovites, approaching the miser, offered him to buy 20 cartloads of oats, announcing a decisive price, the most profitable. In these carts there was chaff at the very bottom. Having looked at the oats and finding them quite good, the miser began to bargain with them for a few more kopecks, in which he succeeded.

But later, when he saw in his bin that the oats were half chaff, he said to himself: “How did I overlook that I fell for the kulaks?” What swindlers!'"

A very common trick in Moscow and St. Petersburg was the sale of drunken tea. Merchants bought used tea leaves from taverns and restaurants, dried it, packaged it and sold it at an extremely attractive price for the buyer. Naturally, in order to avoid trouble, the “special product” was sold mainly to visiting peasants who were going home the next day.

Not only small merchants and shopkeepers indulged in such tricks, but also quite respectable merchants of the first guild. And not only during the time of Tsar Gorokh, but also at the beginning of the 20th century. The Russian military agent, military attache in Denmark, Count Alexey Ignatiev, recalled his inspection of the Danish capital together with the Russian diplomat Bibikov:

“Looking out of curiosity at the port of Copenhagen, I just saw how barrels with a large label depicting a cow on a green field were loaded onto English steamships with their colorful red and blue flag.

“Look, this is our native Siberian oil,” explains Bibikov. “You see the barrels in dirty matting under this canopy?” Here the oil is transferred into Danish barrels, which is really necessary because of the cobblestones found in it - you know, for the weight. Siberian oil is turned into Danish oil and sent to this all-consuming London."

Russian newspapers were full of similar information. For example, in February 1903, they published a message from the Russian Telegraph Agency from Copenhagen: “In the steamship cargo of Siberian oil that arrived yesterday from Russia, addressed to the local company Sund and Petersen, there were again several barrels filled with stones, earth and ice instead of oil.”

But the bad reputation earned in such ways in foreign markets did not in the least prevent representatives of domestic business from creating beautiful legends about themselves for internal use.

Cups on blood

Dirty alcohol capitals were refined by investing in the purest oil

One of the most common objects of mythologization was the history of the accumulation of initial capital. Almost every self-respecting merchant dynasty had an ancestor who came in bast shoes from godforsaken places to work in St. Petersburg, Moscow or other places. Then this nugget, through hard labor, paying the rent to the master, earned money for ransom from serfdom and unfolded into the full breadth of his new, now merchant soul.

In some cases, such stories were almost true. For example, the Kuznetsov dynasty, known before the revolution and not forgotten to this day, owned porcelain factories, controlled a large part of the Russian tableware market, their company was even awarded the title of court supplier. Their ancestor was the blacksmith Yakov Kuznetsov, who, according to the legend, which was entirely true, moved from shoeing horses to producing cups and bowls. True, it was not mentioned in pre-revolutionary publications how much money he spent on the first production. The answer was found and published already in the Soviet years:

“On the high road between the villages of Rechitsa and Novokharitonovo there stood a good-quality log house. Nearby there was a forge. The owner of the forge, Yakov Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, and his sons Terenty and Anisim forged horses, made axles for carts, made scythes, pitchforks, axes, rakes. It cannot be used on any peasant farm.

Yakov Vasilyevich did not disdain anything in order to get money and accumulate capital. He sold sawn timber and let passersby stay. He fed, watered, provided lodging for the night and charged for everything. But not everyone he met was welcomed and allowed into the house. Money rings in your pockets - get shelter and hospitality, if you don’t have a penny to your name - roll on by.

On a rainy autumn evening, a rich, tipsy merchant drove up to the blacksmith’s house and stopped for a while. No one knows when the merchant left. Only after some time had passed, Kuznetsov began cutting down a large log house on the outskirts of the village, on the right bank of the Dorka River. Following the carpenters, an artel of masons came to the construction site. And then carts with quartz, spar, and clay reached the new building. Soon the chimneys of two forges of the porcelain factory burst into flames.

This was in 1810. Then a rumor spread throughout the village that the rich merchant did not go home, but disappeared without a trace, and that Yakov Vasilyevich was to blame for this incident. They say he put the money into the factory for the merchants.”

Other methods of acquiring capital were also practiced. Fictitious bankruptcy was considered one of the most reliable. And therefore it was used quite widely throughout the 19th century. As a rule, the technology of this process in those days was simple and artless. The merchant collected goods on credit, then sold or hid them, drawing up fictitious papers about unsuccessful sales and enormous losses. According to experts, according to the practice that existed at that time, the victim managed to come to an agreement with creditors to return 25 kopecks from the ruble, after which he promised to return the rest as soon as things got better, and again took goods from them on credit. And only after that he announced his complete failure. The success of the further process depended entirely on its proper preparation. For a bribe, the imaginary bankrupt sought the appointment of a bankruptcy trustee, a bankruptcy trustee, who was in the case with him, and then lined up a queue of fictitious creditors, whose demands the bankruptcy trustee satisfied first. So the real creditors ended up with nothing. But the most curious thing was that most of the merchants conducted in this way were not offended by their fraudulent colleague. After all, each of them either used such a trick or could resort to it in the future. In his notes, Maksimov cited the words of an experienced competition participant who spoke about a manufacturer who went bankrupt three times with his help:

“You never know by what means people acquire capital! With every trade turnover there is a kind of fraud. You need to be able to handle the business and be able to bury the loose ends. You point to the manufacturer and, perhaps, wonder: how, they say, did he handle all this? And so He was a sober, active man. He prepared bills in his name from some people in advance, and bought bills from some for the dead, paying 5 kopecks per ruble. Then he began to prepare for insolvency, gradually complaining about non-payment. he got some money. And then he persuaded some creditors to agree to a deal at 60 kopecks per ruble. Then, having borrowed money from them again, he offered them a secondary deal, which they also didn’t refuse. And the creditors had nothing to do, because he had nothing to do. cleverly managed to confuse everyone. That’s why they agreed to the deals he proposed. After all, as soon as you deal with strong people - there’s nothing to talk about - they will inevitably agree, even though they learned about his tricks, there was nothing left to take: they only bowed to him and shook his hand in a friendly manner. Of course, only the rich did this, and those whom he made beggars sent him eternal damnation, but he thought little about it - he was already rich and happy.

A friend of mine recently told me that some factory owner... came up with the idea, having insured his factory for a considerable amount, to burn it down. And if this is true, then it’s a useful invention and an easy way to make money: don’t bother with creditors and don’t bow to anyone - the office will give you the money.”

True, during imaginary bankruptcies there were also affronts. The competitor or one of the imaginary creditors could violate the agreement and turn the matter to his advantage - not return the money to the merchant pretending to be bankrupt. But this did not change the essence of the matter, it was just that the initial capital was earned not from one’s own, but from someone else’s bankruptcy.

However, neither murders nor bankruptcies created the largest capital in Russia. 40% of state income came from the alcohol trade, and those who managed to nestle near the financial flows from the grain wine trade became fabulously rich people in a matter of years. True, few people dared to call this money righteous. The tax farmer's clerks and the innkeepers who depended on them did everything to turn the inhabitants of the territories nourished by their vodka into chronic alcoholics. After all, only the presence of regular and dependent clients brought a stable income. It was common practice to assign planned targets to taverns and taverns. The tax farmer determined how much grain wine a particular drinking establishment should buy by paying in advance. How exactly the vodka would be sold was the concern of the innkeeper. There were also unwritten rules for changing the tax farmer. If he was removed for any reason, the new owner of the farm-out paid compensation to his predecessor. If the newcomer refused the “tax,” the overthrown tax farmer immediately sold his vodka reserves at dumping prices to rich peasants. And for several months in the villages there was a trade in cheap grain wine, and the new tax farmer either suffered huge losses or went completely bankrupt.

In the Russian court, it was not the one who had more manufactures that was right, but the one who had more influential defenders

The tax farmer Vasily Aleksandrovich Kokorev, who became one of the first richest people in the Russian Empire, as contemporaries claimed, for a long time shared his profits with the “roof” - the Kazan governor S.P. Shipov. But what he had left was enough to organize trade with Persia, and then invest money in the most profitable projects of that era - the construction of railways. As a partner, he attracted another large tax farmer - Ivan Mamontov, the father of the famous merchant and philanthropist Savva Mamontov. And then Kokorev’s instinct suggested a new profitable investment opportunity - the oil fields in Baku. By the middle of the 19th century, his fortune reached colossal proportions for that time - 30 million rubles. But the ways in which he made this money, oddly enough, worried the public, who cared about the people and the purity of morals, quite little. After all, Kokorev often donated heavily to various projects proposed by the intelligentsia, who in most cases received Kokorev’s subsidies. For example, in 1856, he gave 200 thousand rubles for celebrations dedicated to the meeting in Moscow of the heroes of the defense of Sevastopol - the most prominent people of that time spent it on organizing performances.

Kokorev’s junior partner and his father, Savva Ivanovich Mamontov, has progressed much further in mastering the technology of buying public opinion.

My own philanthropist

The fame of the richest man in Russia and the largest and most reliable patron of the arts allowed Savva Mamontov to do whatever he wanted. But the prosecutor and the judge who offended the trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, about whose good deeds the newspapers were constantly writing, would hardly have been given a hand in a decent society. That is why the case of the Church of the Deposition of the Robe in the village of Leonov against the board of the Society of the Moscow-Yaroslavl-Arkhangelsk Railway, which was headed by Mamontov, dragged on indefinitely. Its essence was extremely simple. The good Christian Mamontov ordered a clearing to be cut in the forest on church land without the consent of the owners or payment. And when the church made claims, it refused to recognize them and pay compensation. Moreover, the courts to which the priests appealed invariably refused to satisfy their claim against a famous public figure. The matter reached the emperor, who in 1898 ordered the matter to be reviewed again. But it only got off the ground in 1899, when Savva Mamontov was arrested on charges of fraud and abuse of public funds.

Here is how a contemporary described this process:

“For a whole week, within the walls of the Moscow District Court, a long epic was heard about how commerce adviser Savva Ivanovich Mamontov with his children and household heroically fought against the fatal circumstances that ruined his broad commercial plans and enterprises, and how this struggle gradually and systematically led to the entire this venerable company to the dock...

One of these witnesses (Mr. Mikhailovsky) reads a whole panegyric to Savva Ivanovich at the trial, conveying with pathos how greatly he was amazed to learn about the arrest of Mr. Mamontov, who, in the opinion of the witness, is an outstanding Russian person, an “industrial genius”, possessing a heart, 'able to embrace the great' (?!), and, moreover, a 'true admirer' of art, 'loved and respected by all!'

The same panegyric is sung by another witness (engineer Mr. Losev), who once served on the railroad, where the defendant was the main tycoon. And according to this witness, Savva Ivanovich is the type of railway builder who pursues not narrowly selfish goals, but “national” ones!

Mrs. Winter also sent her words of praise to S.I. Mamontov, praising him as a philanthropist. And in this respect, the defendant turned out to be above all praise. During the All-Russian exhibition, S.I. approached her (Ms. Winter) with a proposal to organize an opera for us, and gave her all the theatrical property remaining from the Italian opera. It was of little use to her, because she staged exclusively Russian operas. Ms. Winter suffered a loss of 20 thousand rubles, and S.I. reimbursed her for this amount (?!). Then she ran the Russian opera in Moscow. Savva Ivanovich headed the artistic part of the production here, was, so to speak, the main director, in which the artists of the Polenov, Vasnetsov, etc. helped him. The love of art was sometimes in his hobby, and Ms. Winter had to restrain him. Season 1891-1892 Again, he entailed a loss of 20 thousand rubles, which Savva Ivanovich covered again (!!).

Well, is it not an honorary patronage? True, it now turns out that all these losses by Savvo Ivanovich were not covered from his personal, but from a public, not belonging to him,

Savva Ivanovich Mamontov, this 'industrial genius', pursuing some kind of “national goals”, began to dispose of public capital at his sole discretion and as a wide Russian nature in the amount of loans and handouts was not embarrassed. This needs a million - if you please; Another needs two - order to receive. And the obedient relatives and strangers' from business', certified by receiving a good salary in supposedly collective rule, barely manage to consolidate the sole disposal of their leader with their signatures - to “give out 'and“ issue ”...

And these issues were not shy, especially if such issues were required in enterprises where the material interests of the mammoth family were involved. Several million were transferred from the sums of the Arkhangelsk Railway to maintain the Neva Plant, which belonged to members of the same Mamontov family; A significant amount was issued from the same source to the Northern Forestry Society, among the large shareholders of which the same Savva Ivanovich and his relatives were. Not content with these, so to speak, larger foods, Savva Ivanovich did not disdain, as can be seen from the matter, and with trifles. So, at the expense of the same ill-fated Moscow-Arkhangelsk road, theatrical scenery drove him to St. Petersburg, arranged a stage in Sokolniki, paid money for sewer pipes in the house of Mamontov and for bricks and the delivery of materials to his estate, for painting and roofing works, Alteration of the barn, etc.

What is the scope of wide Russian nature! On the one hand, millions of capital fly from the Cash desk of the Moscow-Arkhangelsk road, and on the other, two rubles with half a year to pay a shedschik on their estate are extracted from the same source! ”

But in the end, the reputation purchased at the expense of society helped Mamontov avoid a long imprisonment. The court admitted that there was no intent in his actions. However, he was declared an insolvent debtor and confiscated property. And the unfortunate church of the village of Leonov achieved justice until 1904, when she was finally paid for the damage caused by a great philanthropist.

Wolf hunt

If pre-revolutionary merchants were nevertheless visible to philanthropists, then they have never been a model for imitation, and the moral pillars of society. Newspapers and books of the late XIX - early XX centuries were full of stories about their tyranny and greed. One of the typical stories looked like this:

"The famous rich man I. Firsanov died in Moscow in the 80s. The first thing his heirs was to find the key to the casket with money and papers, who was in the bedroom of the deceased. But the key, despite all kinds of searches, could not be found anywhere. They said that they said that they said that they said The key was in the hands of the deceased, but where he went, no one knew. They looked very much - and he had a desired key to another life behind the cheek.

In 1911, a story was published about the hunting of prominent textile manufacturers and philanthropists of the Morozov brothers:

"Once the Morozov brothers hunted in their forests. The hunt was from unsuccessful ones, but they learned that wolves are covered in a neighboring forest adjacent to their forest and that hunters, members of the Imperial, have a minute for a minute for a minute. , Being the members of this society, they neglected its traditions and, bursting into someone else's possession, despite the protests of the forest guard, shot the whole flock and disappeared, taking the killed prey and learning about it, the outraged members returned to Moscow, where on the appointed emergency. The meetings of both brothers Morozov were excluded from the OK, which they were notified by the summons, demanding membership tickets. The side of the really offended, rejecting the ridiculous claims of the frost. "

Trains of the Arkhangelsk road dragged all the expenses of Savva Mamontov and his family

In mythologized stories about Russian merchants, an important place was occupied by an honest merchant word, under which transactions were made for colossal amounts without any papers. In a narrow circle of those who know each other, transactions were really practiced under honestly. What this led to, said on the eve of the revolution "Petrograd newspaper":

"The impudent 200 thousandth scam on the Kalashnikov Bread Exchange. A few time ago, Vitaliy Cottage, Vitaliy Vyurogov, dismissed a rumor that there were several wagons of flour-sneakers at his disposal, in which merchants feel a greater need. When the surrounding merchants appeared on the exchange of V. Varogov. Separately, to offer him the makings.

It is curious that no one in Petrograd could even have flour for such a colossal sum, least of all Tvorogov. Of course, none of those who handed Tvorogov the deposits of flour received it. T. himself disappeared into Finland. It is worthy of special attention that Vitaly T. did not give a receipt, because on the Kalashnikovsky exchange, large transactions are made 'on the merchant word' '.

SVETLANA KUZNETSOVA

Hunters of the first guild