The Bashkirovs were one of the largest family-owned flour-milling firms in the Volga Region, based in Nizhny Novgorod.
The founder was Yemelyan Bashkirov, a peasant from the village of Kopnino in Balakhninsky Uyezd.
He began by purchasing a stall at the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka to trade in grain. Then he moved into grain processing and began building mills. He built the first one on the Linda River near the village of Mys. It was a water mill. Then he built the giant steam mill "Slobodskaya" in Kanavino. The steam mill in the Blagoveshchenskaya Sloboda was built to a design by the architect Robert Kilevein, who in 1869 produced the first plan of the two-story building and supervised the construction; since Emelyan Grigoryevich was illiterate, the paperwork for the mill was handled by his eldest son Nikolay.[2] His sons grew up to be reliable helpers: Nikolay, Yakov, and Matvey.
In 1871 the family firm "Trading House of Emelyan Bashkirov and Sons" was registered. By the 1880s Emelyan Bashkirov had a fleet of tugboats for transporting flour, grain, and oil, as well as more than 20,000 desyatinas of land in the Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, and Astrakhan Governorates.[2] According to some sources, the trading house was officially founded in 1885; Emelyan Grigoryevich was known for extreme thrift: he spent little on himself, preferring to buy up land as cheaply as possible for later leasing and for building mills.[2]
In 1887 the founder of the firm died. His sons and heirs continued their father's business together for four years, and did so quite successfully. By 1890 they had built a powerful steam mill in the Samara Governorate on land their father had bought, which saved them the cost of delivering raw materials. Construction of this mill in Samara had begun as early as 1883: the city served as a transit point between the southern grain-producing governorates and Nizhny Novgorod, where grain was brought for milling and from where flour was shipped along the Volga.[2] At the peak of the family's success, in 1891, the brothers split up. The eldest, Nikolay, received the largest mill — the Samara one — and ten barges with a tugboat.
The middle brother, Yakov, took the Nizhny Novgorod mills and a tugboat with ten barges. The youngest brother, Matvey, got no mills, but the brothers made up for the shortfall by giving him a larger share of the cash capital. And Matvey Emelyanovich, in a short time, by 1895, built in Nizhny Novgorod, on the right bank of the Oka, beneath Grebeshok, behind the Blagoveshchensky Monastery, a powerful steam mill that let him match his brothers in the milling trade, and in wealth and public influence he even surpassed them. He was more generous than his brothers in charitable work.
When the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute was evacuated to Nizhny Novgorod in 1916, M. E. Bashkirov handed the institute's rector a check for half a million rubles to help it get established in its new location.
The October Revolution took everything from the Bashkirovs: mills, tugboats, barges, houses, money, and turned rich people into paupers.
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Prof. A. V. Sedov The Nizhny Novgorod Land: Facts, Events, People. Nizhny Novgorod, 1997. Makarov I. The Bashkirovs, Nizhny Novgorod, 1997, No. 7.
His father Grigory was a serf of the widow of Major General Vera Nikolayevna Levashova; of Grigory's three sons, two went into business — Emelyan and Matvey, both of whom bought their freedom in the summer of 1847: Matvey paid 4,000 rubles for himself, Emelyan 8,000.[2]
Emelyan built his first mill on the Linda River in the late 1850s, and he bought the stone stall at the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka only after the mill had begun to bring in a steady income.[2]
Sources
- Open Nizhny — Emelyan's father, Grigory, was a serf of the widow of Major General Vera Nikolayevna Levashova and lived in the village of Kopnino. Of Grigory's three sons, business
- Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — Emelyan Bashkirov began his business by trading hay; after accumulating his initial capital, he bought a small house on the outskirts of Nizhny Novgorod, to which he moved his family, and only then (archive)