Bobrinskys in Business
Aleksey's son Count Aleksey Alekseyevich Bobrinsky (1800–1868) is remembered as the founder of the sugar-processing industry in Imperial Russia. After brief and uneventful career at the royal court, he retired from service and settled in Bogoroditsk, establishing one of the first Russian sugar refineries there. Later, he moved his operations to the Ukraine, making various agricultural activities the chief source of his family income. It was thanks to him that Russia stopped importing sugar from abroad. He also published a treatise on economic theory and set up a society for development of railways, which financed the construction of the first railway in Russia. Bobrinsky's contributions to the national economics were commemorated by a bronze statue in Kiev.
Unlike many other Russian nobles, the Bobrinskys continued as prosperous businessmen after the 1861 emancipation of serfs, starting coal-mining in their estates near Tula and helping to build railways all over Russia. Unsurprisingly, Aleksey Alekseyevich's second son Count Vladimir Alekseyevich Bobrinsky (1824–98) served as Minister of Transportation in 1868-71, succeeded in this post by his cousin, Count Aleksey Pavlovich Bobrinsky (1826–1894).
Read more about this topic: Bobrinsky
Famous quotes containing the word business:
“This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person who I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)