Do you know how the government should extinguish the financial crisis that it itself organized? Intervention in European affairs has usually been quite costly for Russia. Her assistance to Austria in suppressing the Hungarian revolution of 1848 was no exception. The costs of the campaign of Russian troops in Hungary were so great that the treasury had a shortage of funds for the most pressing state needs.

To cover it, with the consent of Emperor Nicholas I, in 1849-1850, unsecured credit notes were issued for a significant amount - 4 million rubles. Since all this was done secretly, and the emperor himself did not know how to keep secrets, rumors about the secret printing of money spread widely throughout the country.

Frightened bank depositors decided that another trouble was coming, similar to what happened in 1840, when, after another crop failure, landowners left without income began to demand their deposits, and the government ordered banks to refuse to issue money under plausible pretexts.

Therefore, depositors again began sending requests to banks for payment of money, and in specie - gold and silver, and not in banknotes. The demand of a Polish landowner from the part of Poland that belonged to the Russian Empire, due to the huge amount (100 thousand rubles), was reported to Nicholas I himself. The Emperor ordered the landowner’s demand to be fulfilled. But send him the entire amount in copper nickels, which required a small convoy. Moreover, the payment for delivery from St. Petersburg to the estate was assigned to the investor himself. Contemporaries claimed that after this the number of demands for payment of deposits decreased sharply.

And this is not the only story about the soldier emperor that we want to tell you. A new issue of Kommersant History is about him and many other interesting things that happened in the past.

Evgeny Zhirnov, head of the historical and archival service of the Kommersant Publishing House

Kommersant-History No. 4