The first steamship in Russia appeared less than 10 years after its invention in the USA, and by 1914 the country was ahead of England and Germany in the number of steamships

In October 1890, a tall thirty-year-old passenger with a small beard and a slightly puffy face boarded the steamship Petersburg, moored at the pier of the Korsakov post on Sakhalin. Ahead of him lay a 52-day voyage to Odessa, which became one of the most famous in the history of Russian literature. The passenger was Anton Chekhov, who described the journey in his letters. But what seemed exotic to his friends and family was not at all so for the hundreds of thousands of Russians who used this route in the same or opposite direction at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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The 19th century was the century not only of railways and telegraphs, but also of steamships. Together they form a unique triad of human technological achievements that have played a decisive role in transforming the world in this century.

While steam locomotives helped link together national economies within individual countries, shipping enabled the development of a global economy, bringing continents, metropolises and colonies closer together.

Without it, the migration of millions of Europeans to America, Australia and other parts of the world would have been impossible.

Russia has traditionally been considered a land power, but at the end of the 19th century it also entered the sea thanks to steamships, as evidenced by the appearance of the figure of a sailor in the social and cultural life of Russia. Suffice it to recall numerous works about them, starting with folk songs like “The Sea Spreads Wide”, ending with the stories of seascape writers Novikov-Priboy, Sokolov-Mikitov, Nikandrov, Zhitkov, etc. And “themselves” Chekhov, Bunin and Kuprin did not bypass the sea subject side. Sailors have become, if not a respected, then a familiar profession. Hundreds of thousands of Russian people from the outback discovered not just sea spaces, but also a different way of life.

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After the defeat in the Crimean War, the country not only lost its naval forces on the Black Sea, but also suffered heavy losses of the few steamships it had in the region. But as has happened more than once in Russia, the lost war became an incentive for the development of the civilian economy.

The ink on the paper of the Paris Peace Treaty had barely dried when in August 1856, by the highest decree, the joint-stock company “Russian Society of Shipping and Trade” (ROSiT) was established with headquarters in Odessa. The founding fathers of the company were captain 1st rank Nikolai Arkas and official Nikolai Novoselsky. From the very beginning the society had two goals. The first was the development of a merchant shipping company in the South of Russia, the second (unspoken) was the maintenance of a reserve base (crews, ships, ports) to recreate the Black Sea Fleet at a favorable moment.

Having the support of the government (loans, exemption from customs duties), ROPiT placed orders for the purchase of steamships in England and France and by 1858 had a fleet of 35 steamships serving twelve lines. That year, 123,000 passengers, 4 million pounds of cargo were transported and a profit of 746,000 rubles was made. Ten years later, ROPiT already had 63 steamships and 38 barges. By 1869, the company maintained regular flights to twenty destinations, including six overseas, including Egypt and France. In trade with Turkey, ROPiT took a predominant position, exporting kerosene, grain, alcohol, metal products, fabrics and much more through the Odessa port to Istanbul. In the opposite direction there were coffee, tobacco, raisins, nuts, and exotic goods. Among domestic flights, ROPiT supported the important crossing between Kerch and Taman.

The successes of ROPiT were based on many factors. Government subsidies (a common phenomenon in Europe at that time) were mutually beneficial and not free of charge. The company's ships transported government mail, couriers, and sometimes troops. More important was the organizational and commercial spirit of the ROPiT leadership. It not only did not miss a single opportunity to receive an order, but was also actively involved in advertising. In 1869, ROPiT sent two steamships to the opening of the Suez Canal with PR goals, as they would say today - so that the Russian flag would fly among the flags of other powers and to present its brand at this magnificent event.

In 1910, ROPiT made another non-standard PR move - on the most modern steamship "Emperor Nicholas II" a "Floating Exhibition of Russian-made Items" was organized, in which 135 Russian companies participated. In two months the ship visited Varna, Burgas, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Suez, Alexandria, Port Said, Jaffa, Beirut, Tripoli, Trebizond and other ports. But first, the exhibition went to Yalta, where Nicholas II, who was on vacation in Livadia, visited it and “blessed” it.

ROPiT also played an exceptional role in establishing pilgrimage tourism from Russia to Palestine to holy places. Transporting pilgrims was the most important source of income for the company.

By 1910, ROPiT already had 76 steamships and more than 140 auxiliary watercraft with a total cost of about 24.5 million rubles. The tonnage of its fleet accounted for 20% of the total tonnage of the Russian merchant and passenger fleet. The company's shares were listed on the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange back in the 1860s.

ROPiT has become a well-known “forge of personnel.” Nikolai Novoselsky then raised shipping companies on the Caspian and Volga, built railways in the south of Russia, developed the resorts of the Caucasian Mineral Waters, and from 1867 to 1878 he was elected mayor of Odessa, famous for the construction of water supply and sewerage systems in the city. And Admiral Nikolai Chikhachev, who managed ROPiT from 1862 to 1876, subsequently served as Minister of Maritime for a long time - the experience of managing a shipping company was assessed as irreplaceable.

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The next big war - the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 - brought regular ocean shipping to Russia. Immediately after its end, the threat of war with England loomed over the country, and in order to confront the mistress of the seas, a committee was established to “organize the Voluntary Fleet.” The essence of the idea was to use public donations to purchase several high-speed ships that could be used as raiders to fight enemy shipping. Merchants and other Russian people donated willingly - in a few months they managed to “raise” more than 3 million rubles, which were used to buy four cargo-passenger ships and guns for them in Germany.

In 1879, when the military threat had passed, it was decided to use the ships for their intended purpose. The Dobroflot society was established under the control of the Ministry of Finance. His main task was to establish direct communication with the Far East. This newly acquired region was in no way connected to European Russia by land: neither by ordinary roads nor by railways. In addition to geopolitical risks, this meant economic obstacles to the development of the region.

A pound of flour in the metropolis cost 2 rubles 80 kopecks, and in Vladivostok - 10 rubles, sugar, respectively - 4 rubles and 20 rubles.

Regular Dobroflot flights to Primorye from Odessa began in 1880. He offered a lower freight rate than foreign shipowners - 90 kopecks per pood of cargo, compared to their two rubles. His ships intercepted the delivery of tea from Japan and China to Russia from the British. At the same time, Dobroflot not only transported cargo and passengers - military personnel, business travelers, traders - but also those who were destined to populate the uninhabited region. It was his ships that brought migrant peasants to the Far East. In 1883-1906, Dobroflot transported more than 90,000 new settlers, mainly immigrants from the south of Russia. He also had a more “piquant” task - delivering exiled settlers and convicts to Sakhalin. By the way, Chekhov, Bunin, and the nameless fireman from the above-mentioned song - they all sailed on Dobroflot ships. At the same time, Dobroflot has always remained a strategic reserve of naval forces, as proven by the events of two wars - the Russo-Japanese and the First World War.

By 1914, he had only 32 large-capacity steamships. After the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway (in the construction of which Dobroflot played a crucial role, delivering rails and wagons), its importance as a carrier between the Center and the far outskirts decreased, but Dobroflot found a niche in flights between Vladivostok and Japan, China, as well as Kamchatka and ports on the Sea of Okhotsk.

The events of 1917-1920 put an end to the domestic shipping company for many years. Many ships were irretrievably lost, and flights to foreign ports were suspended. Everything had to be created anew.

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River shipping played an equally important role in the Russian economy. In terms of their importance for the country's economy, the Volga and Kama were comparable only to the Mississippi and Missouri, glorified by the former pilot Mark Twain. Both great continental powers, the United States and Russia, relied heavily on the waterways given to them by nature - the great rivers.

Repin’s painting “Barge Haulers on the Volga,” completed in 1873, depicted a passing nature (like Nekrasov’s lines “Go to the Volga : whose groan is heard / Over the great Russian river? / We call this groan a song - / Then the barge haulers go on a towline! " ), for the golden age of the Volga barge haulers was far behind by that time. If at the beginning of the 19th century there were up to 600,000 barge haulers in Russia, then by the middle of the century there were less than 150,000 of them left. Moreover, it was not steam engines that first began to displace them, but horses. Horse-drawn ships were the first attempt to replace humans as draft power.

By the 40s of the 19th century, more than 200 ships of this type were sailing along the Volga. On them, several dozen horses turned the capstan, pulling the ship towards an anchor thrown a mile ahead. They moved slowly - no more than 15 miles per day. Therefore, horse-drawn ships were only suitable for transporting non-urgent cargo.

The first steam-powered ship in Russia appeared less than 10 years after Fulton’s invention - in 1815. And already in 1823, the “Steam Shipping Company on the Volga, Kama and Caspian Sea” was formed by the Yaroslavl merchant Evreinov. But the first pancake came to nothing - the company soon went bankrupt, and we had to wait another 20 years before regular shipping was established on Mother Volga.

In 1843, a steamship company on shares “Along the Volga” was formed in St. Petersburg. Its founders were the “foreign guest” Kayley, the St. Petersburg merchant of the 1st guild Kirillov and the Kalyazin merchant of the 1st guild Polezhaev. The initial capital of 225,000 silver rubles was divided into 150 shares of 1,500 rubles each. In the general meeting, each participant had one vote, and the holder of ten or more shares had two votes.

On September 7, 1843, the charter of the society was approved by the highest, and permission to sail along the Volga was received. But the first transport operations began in 1846, when three tugboats were purchased abroad. And although the company used the only tugboat Volga during the navigation of 1846, which transported 429,000 pounds of grain, it earned 13,000 rubles in net profit.

The success of “Along the Volga” was largely due to the selfless activity of the engineer (and future Minister of Railways) Pavel Melnikov, whom we have already written about as one of the authors of the Nikolaev Railway project. In 1839-1841, while studying railway business in the USA, he simultaneously observed the local shipping company. Therefore, when the authorities, upon returning to Russia, sent an engineer to the Volga, he was depressed by what he saw on the great transport artery in comparison with the American rivers. Melnikov reported to St. Petersburg: “The moment has come for a radical change in this order of things, and ... the results of the transformation may be all the more striking because the most improved means: namely, river ships and steamships of America, not used in Europe, and little known. This last circumstance is explained by the fact that, on the one hand, the Americans, since the time of Fulton, have most persistently pursued the improvement of river vessels and steamboats, in order to take advantage of the natural paths with which nature has endowed them in the vast system of rivers and lakes, and on the other hand, that in In Europe, very few rivers are capable of large-scale navigation... Russia, on the contrary, can entirely apply to its rivers, and mainly to the Volga, the excellent river steamships that have brought such noble fruits in America.” (This and subsequent information about Melnikov was collected by Ivan Kurilla).

Melnikov appealed not only to officials in the capital, but also to the Volga merchants, speaking to them with his proposals in Rybinsk, but was disappointed: “I... expected from these gentlemen complete sympathy and even assistance in this domestic cause, but instead to extreme To my surprise and disappointment, my enthusiastic speech was received very unfriendly: the merchants found that my project was a pipe dream, that towing ships on the Volga were impossible due to the high speed of the current, that the water on the Volga was too heavy.”

However, the energetic engineer and enlightened bureaucrat did not give up and lobbied for the adoption of the law of July 2, 1843, which marked the beginning of private steamship navigation on the rivers of Russia (before that, there were various kinds of privileges that limited competition).

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Other entrepreneurs followed the example of “Along the Volga”. Shipping companies began to grow like mushrooms. In 1848, at the suggestion of Melnikov (and with his participation in the share capital), capital entrepreneurs Zherebtsov and Skripitsyn submitted a petition to organize a joint-stock company of the express shipping company "Mercury" to work on the Volga reach of Nizhny Novgorod - Astrakhan. Since 1850, it began regular shipping, specializing mainly in transport transportation. In 1858, the chairman of the board of Mercury, Novoselsky, organized a new company, Caucasus, to work in the Caspian Sea, and both companies were merged into the joint company Caucasus and Mercury. The condition of the government permit was the obligation to create a fleet in the Caspian Sea of at least fifteen steamships and a corresponding number of barges, which were built at its own plant in Spassky Zaton.

In 1853, two Baltic Germans - retired captain von Glasenap and titular councilor von Adlerskron - created the Samolet steamship company, which was primarily engaged in passenger transportation.

These three companies are known as the "big three" of Volga shipping companies. Later they were joined (in terms of transported volumes) by two purely cargo companies - the Nobel Brothers Partnership (mainly transportation of oil and petroleum products) and the Eastern Society of Trading Warehouses (VOTS).

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“We were bothered by the whistles of the Volga steamships. They stretched from the distant depths of the night, like threads: some thin and trembling, like a hair in a light bulb, others thick and tight, like the bass string in a piano. And at the end of each thread hung somewhere in the damp Volga region a steamship. We knew the alphabet of steamship sayings by heart. We read the beeps like a book. Here is the velvety, solemn, high-flying and slowly descending “approach” whistle of the steamship of the “Rus” society. Somewhere a husky tug harnessed to a heavy barge scolded the unwary boat. Here are two short, polite whistles: “Airplane” met “Caucasus-and-Mercury”. We even know that “Airplane” goes up to Nizhny, and “Caucasus and Mercury” goes down to Astrakhan, for “Mercury,” observing river etiquette, said hello first,” wrote Lev Kassil, recalling his childhood in the Volga region the town of Pokrovsk on the eve of the First World War.

The Volga steamships are the setting for many classic works, from Ostrovsky's dramas to Bunin's stories. One of the heroes of Solzhenitsyn’s epic “The Red Wheel” was the Volga steamboatman Gordey Polshchikov.

But before Volga shipping gained a central place in the economic life of the country, domestic entrepreneurship had to go a long way.

The engine of progress, no matter how trite it may sound, was fierce competition.

The first Volga (wheeled) steamships were completely primitive by today's standards: wooden hulls, just one deck on which there were four cabins - two common for men and women for the 1st and 2nd class. The third class rode under the open sky right on the deck. There was cargo in the hold. The steam engine was heated with wood, which was unsafe, as sparks scattered throughout the ship. The steamship operators received their main income from transporting grain and other goods.

In 1870 there was a drought and, as a result, transport volumes fell sharply. The shipowners went bankrupt one after another. But, as often happens, the crisis was the reason for the rise of an energetic person. This became the experienced sailor, and then the Volga captain Alphonse Zeweke. He realized that the key to solving the problem lay in switching to new ships, like those that had been sailing the Mississippi since the 1860s.

He managed to convince his masters, the owners of the Kama-Volga Shipping Company, to undertake a bold experiment. At the Sormovsky plant in Nizhny Novgorod, under his supervision and according to drawings issued from abroad, three steamships of a new type were ordered and built. The first to be launched in 1871 was the double-decker “Coup”. On the second floor of the superstructure there were cabins of all three classes (for the first time, the III class received separate comfortable rooms). The ship carried 810 passengers and 500 tons of cargo. In the higher spheres, the name (the naive shipowners had in mind a technical revolution) did not like the name, and the ship was eventually renamed the exotic Orinoco.

The competing “Caucasus and Mercury” had previously launched the passenger two-deck steamer “Emperor Alexander II” onto the Volga, decorated with special luxury - the cabins and salons of the 1st and 2nd classes were decorated with varnish, mahogany, bronze, carpets, mirrors and inlays. However, operation revealed the unprofitability of a purely passenger ship. For the Volga, the simultaneous transportation of people and cargo turned out to be optimal, so subsequent ships of this type were built as cargo-passenger ships.

Another of Zeveke’s innovations was the introduction of rear-wheel and shallow-draft vessels for operation on the Upper Volga shallow waters.

The resourceful Baltic German bought all the ships from the bankrupt owners, organizing his own business - the “Society of Shipping and Trade under the company of A.A. Zeveke.” Inexhaustible for innovations, he was always ahead of his competitors, for example, he increased the salaries of the captains of passenger ships by one and a half times, and, on the contrary, he transferred the dockside agents from a fixed salary to a percentage of the proceeds, so that they would more actively look for passengers and customers. He introduced return tickets for first and second class travelers with a 10% discount, and for the poor he organized fourth class for literally a penny. Seeweke's passengers received the right to interrupt their journey at intermediate piers - competitors did not have such a service. In the first year of running his own business, he made a profit of 33,000 rubles, and since then he has never worked at a loss.

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Simultaneously with the increase in oil production, the problem of its transportation arose. From Baku, a fast-growing oil center, it was transported by schooners across the Caspian Sea to the Volga, and further along the river by barge. The main containers were barrels. They often beat, leaked, and quickly became unusable. Something new was needed.

The shipowners, the Artemyev brothers, on the advice of Mendeleev, were the first to build an oil-loading sailboat. But the real technological breakthrough was achieved by the Nobel brothers, who were dissatisfied with their dependence on unreliable methods of transportation. Thanks to their efforts, in 1878, the world's first steam-powered tanker, Zoroaster, began sailing in the Caspian and Volga. The Nobel Partnership became not only the largest oil producing and oil refining enterprise in Russia, but also the owner of an entire flotilla of tankers, oil barges and tractor-steamers, becoming one of the main ship-owning companies.

The most brilliant achievement of the Nobels was the construction of the world's first motor ship "Vandal", also known as the world's first diesel-electric ship, at their order at the Sormovo plant. This tanker opened a new era in the history of shipping.

By 1914, about two hundred motor ships were already operating in Russia, and it was ahead of even Great Britain and Germany in terms of their number.

And in 1884, “Caucasus and Mercury” was the first to use oil as fuel for steam engines.

If in 1890 there were 1015 steamships on the Volga, then by the beginning of the 1900s there were already 1586 units. Most of them were made in Russia itself. The shipping company became a strong incentive for the development of shipbuilding. In many respects, such giants as the Sormovsky and Kolomensky factories grew up on orders from river shipowners. The first, which built almost 500 ships before 1917, became the basis of the “empire” of industrial magnate Dmitry Benardaki. And Russian shipbuilding has put forward a figure of world significance - academician Alexei Krylov.

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If during the navigation of 1856 577 ships passed along the Volga, with a total cargo value of more than 6 million rubles, then by 1917 the volumes of shipping and trade turnover on the middle reaches of the river alone amounted to: 6,490 ships per navigation, 9,664,023 pounds of cargo worth 1 RUR 498,112 43 kopecks

Since the 1860s, the main rival of river shipping (in Russia - almost exclusively of the Volga-Kama) has been the fast-growing railways. In 1861, the length of the railway lines was about 16.5 thousand km, and by 1890 it reached 28.3 thousand km. Already in 1868, the share of railway transportation in the country's total freight turnover was 56%. Compared to shipping, railroads offered greater speed, independence from seasonal factors (winter freeze-up on rivers), and ease of delivery. No attempts by the steamship operators to slow down the development of their rival (petitions that the new railway line would “kill the shipping company on the Volga and Kama... ruin entire companies of shareholders...") helped, and they had to sharply reduce freight rates. Regular crop failures (and the main cargo was grain), when the volume of transportation along the river sharply decreased, finally finished off the weak companies.

Competing with each other and with the railroads, the strongest survived. The already mentioned “Society for Shipping and Trade under the firm of A. A. Zeweke” went bankrupt after the death of its founder. “Caucasus and Mercury” and “Samolet” actively adopted his innovations, updated the fleet faster and dumped. In addition, the son of Zeweke Sr., Alexander, turned out to be not so resourceful, he was more interested in bicycle racing and sailing regattas, and in 1899 the company was sold for 2.87 million rubles.

But the heirs of the railway magnate Pavel von Derwis (see my previous article ), on the contrary, increased capital through diversification, organizing in 1893 the shipping “Eastern Society of Commodity Warehouses and Transportation of Goods with the Issuance of Loans” (VOTS), connecting the flights of the shipping company he created with network of railways, which provided them with enormous profits.

The result of ruthless competition was the phenomenon of “steamboat races”, when ships of rival companies staged real speed competitions among themselves, which sometimes led to accidents. In order not to go down the drain, trends toward unification prevailed in river transport. The first step towards this was the conclusion of price agreements and cartels. In 1896, the “Big Three” - “Caucasus and Mercury”, “Airplane” and “Along the Volga” - concluded the so-called “convention” on the unification of passenger and goods tariffs and the coordination of schedules. There was an agreement between the signatories of the convention on the distribution of cargo between them.

In 1906, the lobbying organization “Congresses of Shipowners of the Volga Basin” was created. And in 1903-1906 there was a “Volga Syndicate” consisting of “Caucasus and Mercury” and VOTS, which established a relative monopoly on certain types of transportation along the Lower Volga and Caspian Sea. And in 1913, these same two companies created the united company “KaMVO” and merged into it the shipping company of the famous Marya Kashina (the prototype of Vassa Zheleznova), which they bought. The result was the largest river shipping trust in Russia (it also included companies transporting along the Danube and northern rivers).

There were similar trends in shipbuilding - the competition between the Sormovo and Kolomna factories was put an end to their acquisition by the International Commercial Bank, which united the factories into the Kolomna-Sormovo concern.

Steamships of the land empire: how the fleet developed the Russian economy