Appendix E: Biographies
Bobrinskii
Count Aleksei Alekseevich Bobrinskii (Bobrinskoi) (St. Petersburg 6/18 January 1800 – Smela, Government [Province] of Kiev 4/16 October 1868; buried in the Church of the Annunciation, Alexander Nevsky Monastery; see Image 86) was the eldest surviving son of Count Aleksei Grigorievich Bobrinskii (Winter Palace, St. Petersburg 11/23 April 1762 – Bogoroditsk 20 June/2 July 1813; buried at Bobriki; see Image 87) and Anna Dorothea von Ungern-Sternberg (Reval 9/20 January 1769 – St. Petersburg 28 March/9 April 1846; buried at Bobriki).1 His father was the illegitimate son of Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great), born Princess Sophie-Augusta-Friederike of Anhalt-Zerbst (Stettin 21 April / 2 May 1729 – St. Petersburg 6/17 November 1796; see Image 414), and Prince Grigorii Grigorievich Orlov (Liutkino, Tver’ Province 6/17 October 1734 – Neskuchnoe 13/24 April 1783; see Image 312).2 “The name Bobrinskoi is derived from that of the country place of Bobriki, which Catherine the Great bestowed upon her son; but a more fanciful derivation is that the first Count was smuggled out of the Winter Palace hidden in a beaver muff, the Russian word for beaver being bobr.”3
Count Aleksei Alekseevich was a “Lieutenant in the Regiment of Hussars of the Guard 15/27 October 1817; transferred to the Chevaliers Guardes Regiment 1818; retired from military service with the rank of Captain and was appointed Equerry to the Imperial Court 17/29 April 1824; entered the Department of Crown Lands 21 January/2 February 1827; transferred to the Ministry of Finance 31 October/12 November 1827; built the first Russian sugar mill on his estate at Smela 1838; Privy Counsellor 17/29 October 1841; built the first Russian railway between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoie-Selo [1838]; Actual Privy Counsellor 25 April / 7 May 1845; Master of the Horse 9/21 April 1854; Knight of the Orders of St. Stanislas (1st class) 30 June/12 July 1846, St. Anne (1st class) 6/18 December 1848, St. Vladimir (2nd class) 17/29 April 1863, and the White Eagle (1st class) 31 October/12 November 1865; his statue in bronze by Schroeder was erected at Kiev in 1872 by public subscription as a tribute to a great pioneer of Russian industry.”4
He married at St. Petersburg on 27 April/9 May 1821, Sofia Aleksandrovna Samoilova (4/15 October 1799 – Paris 11/23 November 1866; buried in the Church of the Annunciation, Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery), daughter of Count Aleksandr Nikolaevich Samoilov and Princess Ekaterina Sergeevna (Trubetskaia) Samoilova. Sofia Aleksandrovna was maid of honor to empresses Maria Fyodorovna (see Images 415–416), wife of Paul I (see Image 417), and Elizaveta Alekseevna (see Image 419), wife of Alexander I (see Image 418), and “a close personal friend of the Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna, consort of the Emperor Nikolai I, and Zhukovskii dedicated several of his poems to her.”5 They had three surviving sons: Aleksandr Alekseevich (1823–1903), Vladimir Alekseevich (1824–1898), and Lev Alekseevich (1831–1915).6
Although he possessed enormous capital and was very close to the Court, Bobrinskii was not at all ambitious and always preferred useful labors to court life.7 He was “an enlightened landowner” with an interest in scientific and technological advances.8 He was always ready to make those material and moral expenditures that he thought could be useful to the prosperity of Russia and mankind.9 He was “a millionaire, owning up to twelve thousand serfs.”10 He “had large landholdings in Tula and Kiev provinces,” for example, “forty thousand desiatinas of land (1 d. = 2.7 acres) in Tula Province.”11 “On his estates in Kiev Province he had introduced sugar refining factories”12 with much success. He was one of the best Russian agronomists, and other branches of agriculture on his estates were also in model condition: the improvement of agricultural machinery; deep cultivation and rational fertilization of fields; model cultivation of grains in general according to the climatic conditions of that part of the country; artificial meadows and the sowing of grasses.13
In addition to sugar refining, his interests lay in the development of Russian industry, specifically, in exploration for coal deposits and the building of railroads. Given the high cost of firewood, he explored for and found on his estates both peat and lignite and, subsequently, in Tula Province, coal, for running his factories.14 He also sought publication of his book O primenenii sistem okhranitel’noi i svobodnoi torgovli k Rossii i o znachitel’nom ponizhenii tamozhennogo dokhoda po vvedenii tarifa 1857 goda [Concerning the Application of Systems of Protective and Free Trade to Russia and Concerning the Significant Decrease in Customs Income After the Introduction of the Tariff of 1857], which appeared in July 1868, a few months before his death.15
He was chosen by Nicholas I (see 420–423) to serve on the Construction Committee of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway “because he was an enthusiastic supporter of railways.”16 Although he “had little knowledge of the technological aspects of railways, … he had … considerable experience in economic and financial matters” and had exhibited outstanding ability in his service since 1832 in the credit division of the Ministry of Finance, where “he continued to report to Count Kankrin,” the Minister.17 He had helped provide the private financial backing needed by Franz Anton von Gerstner, who built “the first railway in Russia except for factory and mine railways,” between St. Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo, and Pavlovsk, completed in April 1838, “an experiment to show the advantages of railways” for Russia.18 He gathered economic data and “was entrusted with calculating the potential costs of construction” of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway.19 He was one of the two men instrumental in the “eventual authorization of the railway in January 1842.”20
In posthumous testimonies to him at an extra-ordinary session of the Committee of Sugar Refiners in 1868, he was described as an excellent family man, good-humored, iron-willed, of an enquiring mind, patriotic, selflessly working for the good of his country, industrious, modest in the extreme and a fanatic about honesty. His trustfulness went so far that he seriously told a colleague he could not believe that an honorable person could ever tell a lie, a gullibility that sometimes cost him dearly.21
Note
1 David Geoffrey Williamson, comp., The Counts Bobrinskoi: A Genealogy, foreword by Count Bobrinskoi (Edgeware, UK: James V. Poate, 1962), pp. 17, 18, 28; Polovtsov, Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, vol. 3, pp. 112–113; Iu. M. Lotman, N.A. Makarenko, and E.V. Pavlova, Litsa Pushkinskoi èpokhi v risunkakh i akvareliakh Kamernyi portret pervoi poloviny deviatnadtsatogo veka [Personages of the Pushkin Era in Drawings and Watercolors: The Chamber Portrait in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2000), pp. 331–332, 347–348; G.I. Studenkin, “Grafy Bobrinksie. Rodoslovie” [“The Counts Bobrinksii: A Genealogy”], Russkaia starina 66 (April–June 1890): pp. 221–227.
2 Williamson, Counts Bobrinskoi, p. 17; Kuz’min, Rossiiskaia imperatorskaia familiia, p. 302.
A portrait of Count Aleksei Grigorievich (see Image 89) was painted when he was seven years old by Carl Ludwig Christineck. He was described at that age by I.I. Betskii (Betskoi) (1704–1795), president of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, as being “of weak body build, timid, shy, sensitive, meek and obedient.” He was under the tutelage of Betskii as of 1775, when he was thirteen. In 1782, at the age of about twenty, he graduated from the Land Cadet Corps and was entered as a member of the army with the rank of lieutenant. In 1785, he went to Paris and remained there until 1787 under the guardianship of M. Grimm, at the request of Catherine the Great. In 1788, when about twenty-six years old, he returned to Russia and lived in Revel’. He spent his later years in Bogoroditsk Tula Province, the place of his death, engaged in agriculture, mineralogy, and astronomy (Polovtsov, Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, p, 114).
3 Williamson, Counts Bobrinskoi, p. 17.
4 Williamson, p. 28. He bought 250 thousand rubles’ worth of shares in the Tsarskoe Selo Railway (Polovtsov, Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, vol. 3, p. 113).
5 Williamson, p. 28.
6 Williamson, pp. 28–30.
7 Moskovskoe o-vo sel’skogo khoziaistva [Moscow Agricultural Society]. Komitet sakharovarov [Committee of Sugar Refiners], Èkstraordinarnoe sobranie Komiteta g.g. sakharovarov v pamiat’ grafa Alekseia Alekseevicha Bobrinskogo: Protokol zasedaniia, vospominaniia S.A. Maslova, N.P. Shiskova i rechi M.D. Tolstogo, I.I. Polimistova, N.D. Bernadaki, S.A. Pakhomova [Extra-ordinary Meeting of the Committee of Sugar Refiners in Memory of Count Aleksei Alekseevich Bobrinskoi: Protocol of the Session, Recollections by S.A. Maslov and N.P. Shiskov and Speeches by M.D. Tolstoi, I.I. Polimistov, N.D. Bernadaki, and S.A. Pakhomov] (Moscow: V universitetskoi tipografii [Katkov], 1869); title on cover: Vospominaniia o grafe Aleksee Alekseeviche Bobrinskom (hereafter, Vospominaniia … sakharovarov), p. 24.
8 Haywood, Beginnings, p. 97.
9 Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, p. 24.
10 Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, p. 20.
11 Haywood, Beginnings, p. 97; Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, p. 20.
12 Haywood, Beginnings, p. 97.
13 Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, pp. 24–25.
14 Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, pp. 13–16.
15 Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, p. 13; Polovtsov, Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, vol. 3, p. 113.
16 Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, p. 18.
17 Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, p. 18.
18 Haywood, Beginnings, pp. 85, 102, 103, 108; Polovtsov, Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, vol. 3, p. 113.
19 Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, pp. 23, 60.
20 Haywood, Beginnings, p. 169.
21 Vospominaniia … sakharovarov, pp. 22, 35.
For a written assessment of Bobrinskii that corroborates the generally held opinion of Bobrinskii’s character, see Mel’nikov, Svedeniia, fols. 74v–76r and Mel’nikov’s biography in Appendix E.
