Alchevsky, Alexey Kirillovich

From the family of a small merchant , a grocery and colonial merchant. He graduated from the Sumy district school , in 1862 he moved to Kharkov .

He kept a tea shop, devoted all his free time to self-education.

During the “banking fever” of the late 1860s - early 1870s, he initiated the creation of the Kharkov Mutual Credit Society ( 1866 ), then in 1868 he was one of the founders of the Kharkov Trade Bank as a merchant of the 2nd Guild ^[2] (fixed capital - 500 thousand rubles), which became the third in Russia institution of joint-stock commercial credit after the St. Petersburg private commercial and Moscow merchant banks. In 1871, as a merchant of the 1st guild, he acts as one of the founders of the country's first joint-stock mortgage bank - the Kharkov Land ^[3] , open with a capital of 1 million rubles, whose board was headed until his death in 1901 (the bank’s charter was written jointly with I.V. Vernadsky , father of V.I. Vernadsky ).

In 1879, A.K. Alchevsky established the Alekseevsky Mining Society (capital of 2 million rubles), which owned the richest deposits of anthracite in the Slavianoserbsky district of the Yekaterinoslav province . In 1900, the company mined 45 million pounds of coal, taking third place among the homogeneous enterprises of the Donbass in terms of production volume. He initiated the construction of metallurgical plants of the Donetsk-Yuryev Metallurgical Society (DUMO, 1895 , fixed capital of 8 million rubles) near the Yuryevka station (now Alchevsk , Alchevsk Metallurgical Plant OJSC) and the Russian Providence company in Mariupol (now Mariupol Metallurgical OJSC Ilyich plant "). Chairman of the Kharkov Exchange Committee . Personal condition by 1900 - up to 30 million rubles.

In the context of the economic crisis of 1899-1902 , having been refused help from the Ministry of Finance, on May 7, 1901, he committed suicide under a train at Tsarskoye Selo Station in St. Petersburg (according to another version, he was killed ^[4] ; Alexey also says against the version of suicide Kirillovich was buried inside the fence of the cemetery).

The death of Alchevsky served as the beginning of the so-called. " Kharkov collapse " - the peak of the economic crisis in the early 1900s .

In addition to participating in the Ukrainian national movement, he headed the circle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia “Gromada” in Kharkov , which was engaged in broad public and cultural-educational activities. At his own expense he built churches, hospitals, schools. As a private individual, he paid for the construction of the world's first monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kharkov in 1899. In those days, it was impossible to officially open the monument to the Ukrainian poet, so the monument was placed in a garden on the territory of the Alchevsky estate in Kharkov, built in 1893 (Mironositsky Lane; in Soviet times, the Dzerzhinsky Club, now the Palace of Culture of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). The author of the monument was the sculptor Beklemishev ; the monument was not particularly monumental, but was made of expensive white marble . After the bankruptcy of Alexei Alchevsky, the estate was soon sold, and the further fate of the monument is unknown.

The wife of A.K. Alchevsky - Khristina Danilovna Alchevskaya (Zhuravleva) - an educator, the founder of the method of teaching adult literacy.

Children:

In honor of A.K. Alchevsky, the city of Alchevsk was named - at the request of Russian industrialists, in 1903 .

In 2005, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a coin from the series “Special Features of Ukraine”, which is dedicated to Alexey Alchevsky. The coin is dedicated to the 170th anniversary of the famous industrialist and entrepreneur.

Monuments to A.K. Alchevsky were erected in the cities of Alchevsk (near the city council building on Sovetskaya Square and near the metallurgical plant) and Kharkov (a gift from the city of Alchevsk , 2004 ).

• Petrov Yu. A. The collapse of Alchevsky and the Ryabushinsky firm // Domestic history . 1995. No. 4. - S. 52-75.
• Bokhanov A.N. The Big Bourgeoisie of Russia (end of the 19th century - 1914) - M., 1992.
• Potkina I.V. History of Russian Entrepreneurship. - M., 1997.
• The newspaper "Donbass". N 131 (20510), July 17, 2003.
• "The death of the oligarch." Ukrainian business weekly "Contracts". No. 42 dated 17-10-2005.
• Belikov Yu. A., Petrov Yu. A. Alchevsky Alexey Kirillovich // Economic history of Russia from ancient times to 1917: Encyclopedia. M.: ROSSPEN, 2008. Volume 1: AM. S. 81-83.
• Saltan A.N. The history of the oligarchs. The triumph and tragedy of Alexei Alchevsky

• A.K. Alchevsky: Donetsk: history, events, facts

• Alchevsky, Alexei Kirillovich at the Rodovod . Tree of ancestors and descendants