The admiral and the merchants: from the history of commercial and industrial development of the Pechora and Ob in the 1840s–1860s

Abstract

The article considers a little examined aspect of the history of Russian entrepreneurship associated with the risky nature of commercial and industrial development of the Russian imperial northern periphery. The central plot of the study is the business partnership of the famous navigator and scientist, Admiral P. I. Kruzenshtern and prominent figures of the Russian northern entrepreneurship of gold miners and merchants V. N. Latkin and M. K. Sidorov within the framework of the Pechora-Ob Company formed by them in 1858 for the development of industry, shipping and trade in the Northern Ocean along the Pechora and Ob rivers. Based on a detailed analysis of the company’s design, organizational and logistics activities, it is concluded that the reasons for its collapse in the mid-1860s cannot be explained only by objective factors noted in historiography such as insufficient support from the state, opposition from officials and competitors. The bankruptcy of the company was largely due to subjective reasons. Thus, the idea of the excessive wealth of natural resources of Russia’s North and the possibility of their easy extraction prevented P. I. Kruzenshtern, V. N. Latkin and M. K. Sidorov from adequately assessing the complexity of the organizational and logistical tasks facing them. The propensity of the partners to being visionary, their reliance on luck and mutual accusations of the failure of the enterprise without analyzing their own miscalculations are no less important part of the history of the Pechora-Ob company. Without taking account of such subjective factors in the implementation of innovative commercial projects, the enormous experience of domestic northern entrepreneurship cannot be analyzed comprehensively and used by the next generations of entrepreneurs in full measure. © 2023 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.