Demidov, Nikita Nikitich

Nikita Nikitich was born in 1688. There is no information about his childhood and youth.

In 1711 (separate recording of March 23 ), Nikita was separated from his household by his father, transferring Nikita to the ownership of the Tula court in the Armory settlement on the bank of the Upa River, several shops near him and in the trade rows of Perevinsky (or Pereveda) wineries.

Despite the lack of support from his father, Nikita decided to devote himself, like him, to industrial entrepreneurship. In 1716 or 1717, he bought 1000 rubles from his father and brother Gregory Dugnensky (Upper) blast furnace and molotovy plant on the Dugne River in the Aleksin district . Since he was in a state of disrepair, he rebuilt it again (with a transfer down the river) and launched it in February 1718 . A year later, however, due to damage to the dam, the plant stopped. Only in January 1720 the blast furnace was blown out again. The plant expanded: the owner built a second blast furnace, received permission to build a third one. In the 1720s, it produced iron of various grades (strip, plank, cobbled, connected) and household products, mainly iron castings . Merchants from Moscow , St. Petersburg , Tula and other cities of Russia acted as trading partners who purchased products. Products were sent to Moscow, Smolensk , Bakhmut , Astrakhan , Petersburg, Velikiye Luki and other cities.

Nikita Nikitich differed steep temper, and in his villages and factories often peasant riots broke out.

Not always remaining a submissive son, Nikita Nikitich was a diligent student of his father. He made considerable efforts to follow the road to the Urals after him. In 1720, his father even filed a petition to the authorities, in which, interpreting the actions of his younger sons as machinations against him, he asked to stop them, otherwise he would scare the disobedient with his father’s curse. It is significant that although the document refers to two sons, only the youngest are charged with specific charges. Nikita Nikitich managed to establish himself in the Urals only in the early 1930s, after his father’s death.

Service at the Berg College

On December 23, 1723, the Berg-Collegium proposed to its Moscow branch to collect tax and fines (for delays) to send a special clerk with soldiers to the factories. And some time later - Nikita Nikitich Demidov entrusted collecting tithes, handing the clerk with the soldiers directly at his disposal.

The exact date of Nikita Nikitich Demidov's arrival at the Berg-Collegium is found at the disposal of the Berg-Collegium of the Tula Voivode Mikhail Shepelev of February 4, 1729 . Both the date and the main goal of attracting a breeder are named in it: “and in the past 726 February, 23 days, by definition, the Berg-Collegium ordered the aforementioned nobleman Demidov to be at Tula near the tithe from the campaign factory of Zbor, as a veteran and to show faithful service to His Imperial Majesty .

Nikita Nikitich Demidov knew the technical side of production, in practice he knew his economy, he was personally acquainted with the overwhelming majority of industrialists (of all levels) who were interested in the Berg-Collegium, knew the history and composition of their industrial farms. That this was exactly the case, says, in particular, electing him as the “first and senior” in the annual service for 1722 in a group of seven gunsmiths “to go to the Armory settlement of secular people for their own affairs, and between them every kind of thing as wardens, as kissing men, and in this service for weapons and state affairs. ”

The position of Ober-Tsegentner (tax collector) was already present in the preliminary staff of the Moscow Ober-Berg-Amta developed by the Berg-Collegium.

His brother Akinfiy in the year of his father’s death (1725) had 7 factories (one in Tula and six in the Urals). Nikita Nikitich has only one, Dugnensky, bought, as already mentioned, in 1717, rebuilt and started up in 1718. On February 4, 1726, the Berg-Collegium gave permission for the construction of a second blast furnace on it. She had not exhausted the plans of the manufacturer in relation to the Dugnensky plant: one document from 1727 says that “according to the decree issued from the Berg College in the past 726, it was ordered to build a third house by the formerly established plants in the Dougna River”. It is not known whether it was possible to realize this intention, but about the assignment of ore extraction for the third blast furnace of the site in the Crimson notch of Demidov in the next 1727, he was very energetic. In February 1726, Demidov received permission to build a new conversion plant (on the Bryn River). The latter was launched around 1728.

Overcoming the resistance of the elder father who replaced him, Nikita Nikitich stubbornly continued to make his way to the Urals. The result of the struggle was the amicable section of several promising factory locations recorded earlier for Akinfiy alone. Nikita got one thing - on the river Shaytanka . On July 9, 1730, the Berg-Collegium gave him permission to build a plant here, begun next year and completed with the start of the blast furnace on December 1, 1732. So, Demidov had a Shaytansky (or Nizhnayshaitsky) plant. In 1731, Demidov attempted to master the copper-smelting production: Davydovsky plant on the Davydovka river in Kazan district acquired DI Tryapitsyn's Davydovka plant. The experience was not very successful: after about three years the plant had to be stopped.

Nikita Nikitich Demidov during his service at the Berg-Collegium was an energetic, fast-developing entrepreneur, seeking to close the gap with his brother who overtook him. His economy is in its infancy; in it, apparently, the lion's share of profit is also invested. Perhaps this is evidenced by the episode mentioned in the documents of Tula (in the Armory settlement) of the court of Nikita Nikitich Demidov: the soldier sent to him in the autumn of 1724, not finding Demidov, decided, according to the instructions, to take with him to the office of any of his people , there were no such people in the house: the breeder's wife, who spoke with the messenger, said that there was no one other than the only girl in the house. It can be seen that Nikita’s Tula’s mansions were not great, the courtyard who lived in them was not numerous, if from time to time they were almost completely empty (or, without going beyond the limits of plausibility, it could be argued that they were empty).

On the behavior of Demidov in a number of episodes it is clear how far he has come off Tula arms settlement. He, living among gunsmiths, is no longer afraid to go in defiance of them, acting as a conduit for change, in the settlement of the disadvantageous ones, which she literally faces hostility. In disputes with a small producer, N. N. Demidov consistently pursued a pro-government line, objectively aimed at closing off one of the channels to plunder the region’s natural wealth.

Summing up the activities of Nikita Nikitich Demidov at the Berg-Collegium, it can be noted: the tasks that were set for him, in those cases where it was possible, were solved and solved by Demidov quite successfully. The separation of Demidov with the Berg-College was due to no complaints about the performance of his main duties. The preservation of the historically established privileged regime for a small private producer in the conditions of a progressive depletion of natural resources was contrary to both economic realities and common sense. Office, in the service in which stood Demidov, tried to eliminate this anachronism . The agency in charge of the gunsmiths, interested in maximizing their support, quite successfully sabotaged these efforts. It was not Demidov’s fault that he was unable to overcome the resistance of the Tula arms firm, ultimately the artillery department.

Realizing this, the Berg-Collegium for quite a long time evaluated the activity of Nikita Nikitich Demidov quite positively. The industrialists of the Tula Arms Settlement, consolidated and well defended by the support of the iron affairs department that controlled them, turned out to be the only “tough” nuts for him - he coped with other industrialists quite successfully. Moreover, in situations where claims from other departments arose against Demidov, the Berg-Collegium tried to protect its employee as much as possible. In the departure of Demidov from the Berg-Collegium, non-service omissions played a role. Observing the state interest, the Demidovs (N. N. among them) did not forget about their own. Sometimes - balancing on the verge of a law. So it turned out that in terms of the tithe collection to his own and foreign plants, Demidov applied significantly different standards.

The turning point for the relationship between NN Demidov and the Berg College was the turn of the decade. In 1729, after the board moved to Moscow, it was decided to send its representatives to the areas of greatest development of the private metal industry. In fact, it was the first attempt to verify on the ground the accuracy of the information communicated to her by the breeders. President of the collegium Zybin and assessor Telepnev went to the Tula province. They managed to catch in the deception of N. N. Demidov and Meller. In particular, the first year when the Dugnensky plant began its work (the date important for determining the time to start tax calculation) reported did not coincide with the information in the fairy tales of the surveyed artisans. The data on the plants of the Mellers were not confirmed. The investigation, however, was not completed due to the liquidation of the Berg-Collegium a year later.

In 1733, the plants of Nikita Nikitich Demidov came under a new, this time a general inspection carried out by the forces of the Commerce College. N. N. Demidov turned out to be an assessor V. Vasiliev among those who were caught investigating enterprises of the Central Metallurgical District. There is no doubt that for some positions the claims of the auditor were unfounded. But equally obvious is his other charges. Although Demidov managed to justify himself on most points, he was removed from office. The role played by the fact that checking by the same commission of tax payment by small producers showed that metallurgists from among the Tula gunsmiths, as they did not pay the tithes and customs duties, did not continue to pay them in 1734 either. Demidov with expendable and receipt books was summoned to the office of the Commerce College to hand over cases to a new tithe collector Ensign Merkul Filisov. In the future, the Tula office of the tithe collection was led by officers of the artillery department.

The Demidovs financial relationship with the treasury was extremely confused and remained so for decades. Each of the parties in this conflict, at times aggravated, sincerely considered itself right. Claims to the treasury (due to extraordinary forced deliveries, late payment of the products supplied, refusals to accept the ordered products) gave Demidov a moral right to act rather sharp, not fitting into the iconic images of successive state guards. The greatest scale of such conflicts reached in relations between the treasury and Akinfiy Demidov. His younger brother, as a civil servant, tried not to aggravate his own relations with state institutions. In addition, it was less associated with deliveries to the treasury than Akinfiy, who had been paying for several posts in the Nevyansky plant for decades, for decades.

The fact of assessing the state value of the activities of N. N. Demidov was the award to him of the rank of State Counselor . It took place in 1742 , when Brother Akinfiy, by that time already having this rank, was promoted to a rank a step higher: to real civil ones. Both Demidov grants of this year had the same motivation: "for the careful work and reproduction of iron and copper plants." By that time, eight years had passed since Nikita Nikitich left the service for the mining department, she was forgotten. Yes, and in the separation of Demidov with the state service were details that, perhaps, did not want to be reminded. Finally, the Berg College itself no longer existed for several years: at first it was poured into the Commerce College, after which the General-Berg-Directory was assigned to it.

After the Berg College

Leaving the Berg-Collegium, he again became an ordinary particular (private) metal industrialist. In the second third of the century, Nikita Nikitich built several more plants. In 1739, he bought the Romodanovsky parish, in which, on the River Vyrka, 7 versts from Kaluga , by permit of decree of March 1740, he launched a small conversion Vyrovsky factory. The August decree of 1754 on the liquidation of manufactories located in the 200-herald zone around Moscow, put at once two of his enterprises - the Dugnensky and Vyrovsky factories. Fearing unfavorable developments, Demidov built two new refinery factories in the European part of Russia: Lyudinovsky in the Bryansk district on the Lompad river (launched in November 1756) and Yesenkovsky in the Meshchovo district on the Senets river (started in 1757). But he also managed to save Dugnensky and Vyrovsky plants.

The exploitation of serfs employed in the household of Demidov was very difficult, and the measures to control them were brutal. Which repeatedly led to a number of disturbances among the workers.

Despite the resistance of his father and brother Akinfiy, Nikita Nikitich eventually managed to penetrate the Urals. The Shaytan plant , which was launched in 1732 or 1733, was followed by the Verkhneserginsky (1743) and Nizhneserginsky (1744) plants built by him. In 1751 from the Yekaterinburg merchant (a native of Tula) J. Korobkov he bought the iron Kasli factory (in the late 1950s it became copper-smelting). Later he built and in 1757 launched the Kyshtym plant in the Iset province. A total of Demidov built or acquired 11 factories. This result is more modest than that achieved by Akinfiy (18 plants), but as noted by N. I. Pavlenko, given that Nikita Nikitich "had to create the production base in the Urals himself and overcome the resistance of his close relatives, ... his successes should be recognized as significant".

Nikita Nikitich Demidov owned houses in Tula, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, at his Ural factories. Tula his house was in the Armory settlement, in the parish, apparently, Nikolo-Zaretskoy church.

In St. Petersburg, by decree of Anna Ioannovna in 1735, he was allotted a plot on the Promenade des Anglais, in connection with which he himself was ordered to build a house, after searching, to be sent to the capital. Subsequently, this house was sold several times within the family.

The house of Nikita Nikitich in the old capital in 1752 was located “beyond the Moscow River, at the Living Bridge, in the parish of the Church of God Sophia the Wisdom”. Of the several Moscow churches with such a dedication in this case, the only one - in the Middle Gardeners (on the Sofia Embankment).

Nikita Nikitich Demidov was married to a representative of the prominent in the Tula merchant family of the Postukhovs . He had five sons: Vasily (1707-1738?), Evdokim (1713-1782), Ivan (1725-1789), Nikita (1728-1804), Alexey (1729-1786). The closest assistant to the father in the management of the plants was Evdokim, from whom quite a few well-written documents remained.

• Chumakov V. Yu. Demidov. Five generations of metallurgists in Russia. - M .: ZAO "Business". - 2011. - 272 s. - (series “Great Russian Entrepreneurs”, volume 2) - ISBN 978-5-91663-088-6

• http://www.tsu.tula.ru/faculty/person/Yurkin/works/dem/chap2.htm