At the beginning of the twentieth century, the richest merchantsThere were about twenty-five families in Moscow: seven of them under the name Morozov. The most famous of all metropolitan merchants was Savva Morozov, whose biography is not drawn to us by a rich man-tyrant, a spiritless nouveau riche, but by an enlightened person striving for spirituality.
The exact size of this family's capital is nonefor certain does not know. Manufactory partnership, where Savva Morozov, whose biography we now have under the magnifying glass, was not even the owner, stood in the top three most profitable cases in the country. He was the director. The salary was not just big, it was huge. Savva Timofeevich Morozov received two hundred and fifty thousand rubles a year. Biography began with a strong blow to fate. The Minister of Finance in the same years was paid exactly ten times less, but in this amount the king added a lot from his pocket, so that Witte would not be offended.
The founders of the case of the Morozovs are the grandfathers of Savva and the father- did not have a small part of the remarkable European education that Savva received. They had no other interests than production, and they had no idea about artistic tastes. They did not share it with anyone. Rather, on the contrary, the nobles were meringues. But the production was raised to envy. But the biography of Savva Morozova turned out different. He could earn money (and he did), and social issues did not worry him at all.
Savva Vasilievich was born serf inVladimir province. A very long and difficult road was ahead of him to the largest textile magnate. The peasant was with a business-like mint: he got an almost useless machine, laced his lace and ribbons with his own hands, alone, and then went to Moscow on foot for a hundred miles from time to time to sell his goods to buyers. Gradually, the production expanded, went over to cloth and cotton.
I did not get acquainted with the artists, I did not study to read, butmoney saved up. He was accompanied by a happy fate, even when the army of Napoleon ruined half of Russia and burned Moscow. The factories burned down, the customs gave good, and the cotton industry of Russia began its formation. Nobles Rumina gave Savva Vasilyevich a free one for seventeen thousand rubles (if you buy a manor for this money, it will not be so small, it's huge, unthinkable for those times money). And very quickly, Sawa's grandfather became a merchant of the first guild.
The elder Morozov, even in his deep old agesuperbly led business, from which did not depart for a day. He never learned a single letter, he could not read. However, this did not stop him from acquiring the largest in the country Nicholas manufactory. He thought about the descendants: from the first step he cared for the last.
Where now in Moscow the Enthusiasts Highway (formerlyVolodymyrsky tract), in the nineteenth century a settlement of the Old Believers was formed. Savva Morozov, the elder, also all his life adhered to the old faith and believed earnestly, in a peasant way. Therefore, at the Old Believers' Rogozhskoe cemetery, he bought a place for himself and his descendants.
Old Believers were rarely poor people, butrich - often. Rogozhsky Old Believers especially, among them there were many manufacturers and merchants. Money for the temples, and there were two of them at the cemetery, they did not regret: on church books, on old icons of Stroganov's and Rublev's letters, on the sacristy. And the candles before the icons were not simple, they were up to twelve kilograms in weight. Savva Vasilyevich bought a place in this cemetery, where four generations of merchants Morozovs now rest. That's how the senior Savva Morozov was so motivated. The biography is short, but very instructive.
Savvy's little son, especiallydelighted the parent. After the forties of the nineteenth century, admitted to the affairs of the manufactory, he brought many useful things into production. Heir is a rebellious, clever, clever, like Odysseus, Timothy Savvich has picked up the entire cycle of factory work. He bought land in Central Asia along with cotton fields and ceased to depend on imports, modernized equipment, learned his own specialists in the Technical Imperial College and drove expensive Englishmen into the neck.
The capital of his father multiplied, for which he gainedhuge authority in business circles of the highest level. State manufactory adviser, public in the Moscow City Duma, chairman in the exchange committee and the Merchant Bank. Moreover, a member of the board of the Kursk railway. Universities did not finish any, but I already knew the diploma. The bloodsucker from him turned out no worse than his grandfather: in the manufactories the work was hellish, the workers were crushed with fines, the salary was rarely and not fully paid. With all this, Timofey Savvich gave a bad example to his son: he donated not only to churches, but also to universities and publishers he gave a lot.
Morozov-average loved authoritarian stylemanagement. The manufactory was for him and his subordinates a specific princedom, even with his own police. In the office it was not allowed to sit with anyone except the host, no matter how long the meetings and reports took. In the new year of 1885, workers of the manufactory went up right on Christmas Day, staged a strike called in the textbooks the Morozov Strike and the first organized performance of the workers.
Two weeks of production were.Timofey Morozov was beside himself with indignation. The unrest of the people suppressed, the ringleaders were tried in a crowded room with an extremely heated atmosphere. The public was outraged not by the defendants, it came with righteous anger at the unscrupulousness of the manufacturers. And Timofey Morozov was called by a witness to this court.
The biography of Savva Timofeevich Morozov beganexactly then. With horror and terrible shame, he recalled to the end of his life, how his father went out to the witness place with shouts: “Bloodsucker! Fiend!”, How they looked at his father with binoculars, as they pointed at him with their fingers. And Timofey Savvich was probably confused for the first time in his life.
Fuss, faltered on a flat floor and crashedback of the head on the floor right in front of the dock. The noise in the hall was such that the meeting was suspended. A month later, Timofey Savvich just got up from bed already forever sick, jabbering, sharply growing old and angry. I didn’t want to hear about the factory anymore: to sell, to put money in the bank and forget about all this as soon as possible. The mother of Sawa Timofeevich did not give, she rewrote the manufactory to herself, made her son the director.
Savva Morozov, a brief biography can notto convey all the blows of fate, was brought up in religious asceticism and, perhaps, excessive severity. How else could a free-thinker be born in the future capitalist? In Trehsvyatitelsky Lane, there was the Morozovs 'house with a greenhouse, garden, flower gardens, with a prayer house only for the family, where Old Believers' priests from the Rogozhskaya community served every day. And the whole huge, out of twenty bedrooms, house not lit by electricity, was held tightly by one woman in her fist.
Mother of a secular and very free personSubsequently, Savva Morozov became, his personal biography was such that he would force a mother to faint if she knew beforehand that she was sometimes perfect self-fool and devout to the last degree. Always surrounded by hangers-on, she had no need to save anything, but an oddity. Children, even underwear was not enough. There were no newspapers, magazines and secular books in the house, she had never been to the theater, there was no music in the house, for besovstvo all of this according to Old Testament concepts. She did not use the bathroom either, but she loved colognes.
Despite all this, the changes of the Old Believerslife violated to the ground. All eight children of the Morozovs had tutors and governess with secular manners, with music and foreign languages. True, for any failure the children were mercilessly flogged with rods according to the good old Domostroi tradition. Here everything was chosen by such a determined man as Savva Morozov. Biography, personal life, his whole future became clear to him day by day. Initially, the boy was not obedient: he began to smoke and move away from God in the gymnasium.
At Moscow University he was interestedto study physics and mathematics, philosophy and history (Klyuchevsky’s lectures), so he continued his studies in England, in Cambridge. He wrote a thesis and studied textile business. After the Morozov strike, he returned home and took over production management at the age of twenty-five. The capitalist of it turned out just wonderful. Equipment was discharged from England, Sawa abolished fines, raised wages, built dormitories for workers. Timofey Savvich called his son a socialist and was afraid that he would break his neck with such an approach to factory business.
Товарищество Морозовых тем не менее процветало.Nikolskaya manufactory was already in third place in the whole country in terms of production profitability. Morozovskie fabrics were in great demand than the British, even abroad, even in China and Persia. Although Savva Morozov could not manage everything alone, the photo and biography suggest: he did manage it, he put his mother — the owner of the manufactory — in hindsight, but he didn’t do it more often. It was not with a factory that my son was astonished by his mother.
On the love front, Sawa also confidently won.The Starovers Morozov never encountered such a scandal. He fell in love with a married woman, and even the wife of his relative. Divorce in Russia has always been nonsense, and the Old Believers could not tolerate such a thing at all, for them it was monstrous and unacceptable. However, this was exactly what the man was stubborn, like Savva Morozov, biography. The family was disgraced, and the wedding took place.
Morozov chose a woman by the type of mother:domineering, arrogant, vain, not ambitious and very intelligent. She loved luxury, and her husband indulged her in this. On the street Spiridonovka in the house number five, built specifically for the young wife, they settled. Now there does not shun to hold receptions the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, by the way. And then Zinaida Grigorievna arranged receptions. She, though hereditary, but still the merchant, was visited by persons of the imperial family and the most prominent people of the state. Although, on the whole, she never became a high-society lady. Savva Timofeevich Morozov, whose biography was based on merchant capital, did not always understand his wife’s aspirations, but he condoned all of her undertakings.
Убранство дома напоминало дорогую посудную лавку.Only Savva’s study and bedroom looked like a bachelor’s shelter, except for the bust of Ivan the Terrible from Antokolsky’s workshop, not a single decoration was there. But the spouse frolicked. For example, taking the imperial family at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, he received the remark that the train of his wife's dress is much longer than that of the queen, and this is a very big mistake with respect to tact and modesty. But by that time, Savva did not care what his wife was doing. This marriage did not save even the children of Savva Morozov. The biography does not put an end here, since the most interesting part of the most famous manufacturer is still ahead. And his wife, by the way, finally became a noblewoman after the death of Sawa.
Morozov strictly took into account each of his ruble, butI never regretted money for good deeds: publishing books, newspapers, helping the Red Cross and much more. But his main business, for which he will be remembered for a long time with gratitude, is the construction and arrangement of the Moscow Art Academic Theater, where Sawa spent more than three hundred thousand rubles only for construction - a huge fortune.
He formulated the main principlestheatrical activities: accessibility, reasonable prices for tickets, repertoire only interesting to society. And here appeared on the way the mother-in-law of Savva - Maria Fedorovna Andreeva. Yes, that same revolutionary, Lenina saw, was in a civil marriage with Gorky. Actress Moscow Art Theater and the most beautiful of all the actresses of the Russian scene. The romance was stormy.
Andreeva earned money for the Bolsheviks.Subsequently, the secret police will calculate that she managed to transfer several million rubles to the RSDLP. It is not even a state, but a budget of a small country. Lenin called Maria Feodorovna a comrade phenomenon. Russia's largest capitalist, Savva Morozov, whose biography is entirely connected with the oppression of the people, contained the Communist Party, the antagonists of capital.
It was for his money that Iskra was published, andnewspapers "Struggle" and "New Life" - both also Bolshevik. He personally carried the Iskra’s circulation across the border, in addition to typographic fonts, he hid valuable comrades who had illegally arrived from abroad and even distributed forbidden literature in his own factory, with which he was once caught. The Governor-General, Grand Duke Sergei, the uncle of the tsar, talked with Savva Morozov about this. And it's not good.
Morozov Savva Timofeevich, brief biographywhich speaks of close ties with illegal immigrants, was not a revolutionary. Old Believer way of life was killed by European education. Slavophilism and even populism seemed somewhat primitive. And then this great Masha with communist theories and a clever thick book called "Capital." More Maxim Gorky, who became his closest friend, the smartest, most talented.
The case with Savva Morozov ended badly.Having learned about the passion that arose between his best friend: a poor writer and his beloved woman, a little less impoverished actress - the manufacturer was simply killed. But he cared about Maria Fedorovna, who had already moved to Alexei Maksimovich, gave money to her, and Gorky, and the Social Democrats. Bequeathed Andreeva insurance policy for one hundred thousand rubles to bearer. Handed over and went to Cannes to shoot himself there. The whole story took place according to the laws of our Russian literature, and that is why the biography of Savva Timofeevich Morozov ended.
