The vast majority come from the peasant class, and within one or two generations they built the Russian industry and the trade and financial system of the great state. Not everyone has become a leader in domestic entrepreneurship: trading is a risky business. However, started by some, it multiplied and flourished through the efforts of others.
"The merchant is coming!" - that's what the editorials of Russian newspapers said at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead of a merchant, a huge figure of a Bolshevik is coming at us from a painting by Kustodiev from 1920. For about ten years, these events are separated by times, as if a century-old shadow had already covered entrepreneurial Russia. The remaining years of the dreadful century seemed to have erased the last traces of these knights of enterprise, who modestly called themselves "archers." And yet, the descendants who miraculously survived the repressions brought to us the tablet memory of those people in whose destinies, as in the surface of the secret Kitezh lake, the fate of true Russia is reflected.
Like a novel of chivalry, the chapters of this book devoted to merchant families follow one another as steps into a bright and uncluttered past...