Stroganov family

The House of Stroganov or Strogonov (Russian: Стро́гановы, Стро́гоновы), French spelling: Stroganoff, was a Russian noble family of highly successful Russian merchants, industrialists, landowners, and statesmen. From the time of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1533–1584) they were the richest businessmen in the Tsardom of Russia. They financed the Russian conquest of Siberia (1580 onwards) and Prince Pozharsky's 1612 reconquest of Moscow from the Poles. The Stroganov school of icon-painting (late 16th and 17th centuries) takes its name from them. The most recent common ancestor of the family was Fyodor Lukich Stroganov (died 1497), a salt industrialist. His elder son, Vladimir, became the founder of a branch whose members eventually became state peasants; this lineage continues. The lineage from Fyodor Lukich Stroganov's youngest son, Anikey (1488–1570), died out in 1923. Anikey's descendants became members of the high Russian nobility under the first Romanovs (tsars from 1613 onwards).

There are several theories of the family's origins. It was formerly believed that the family's progenitor was a merchant in Veliky Novgorod.^{[by whom?]} However, the historian Andrey Vvedensky concluded in his research on the family's genealogy, that they must have originated from wealthy Pomor peasants (i.e. Russians from Russia's subarctic north, in the region of the White Sea).

The family's earliest known ancestor was named Spiridon; he lived during the rule of Duke Dmitry Donskoy and was mentioned in the 1390s. His grandson, Luka Kuzmich Stroganov, was a renter of royal properties in the region of the Northern Dvina; he is claimed to have redeemed Duke Vasily II of Moscow from Tatar imprisonment in 1445.

His son, Fyodor Lukich Stroganov (d. 1497), the latest common ancestor of the family, settled in Solvychegodsk (also in the Russian north). He was a local salt industrialist and owner of properties in town, which he passed down to his elder son, Vladimir. He had two brothers, Semyon and Ivan, whose descendants are unknown. He also had six sons: Stefan, Joseph (Osip), Vladimir, Ivan nicknamed Vyshnyak, Afanasy and Anikey, and a daughter named Maura.

In 1517, the three oldest brothers, Stefan, Joseph and Vladimir Stroganov, received a wood and a salt mine in Ustyug district. Vladimir Stroganov's lineage continues in the direct male line. However, his descendants became state peasants.^{[citation needed]}

His youngest son, Anikey Fyodorovich Stroganov (1488–1570) was the progenitor of the ennobled lineage of the Stroganov family. This lineage is now extinct. He opened the salterns in 1515, which would later become a huge industry. In 1558, Ivan the Terrible granted to Anikey Stroganov and his successors large estates in what was at the time the eastern edge of Russian settlement, along the Kama and Chusovaya Rivers.^{[citation needed]}

In 1566, at their own request, their lands were included in the "oprichnina", the territory within Russia under the direct authority of Ivan the Terrible. Seizing lands from the local population by conquest and colonizing them with incoming Russian peasants, the Stroganovs developed farming, hunting, saltworks, fishing, and ore mining in these areas. They built towns and fortresses and, at the same time, suppressed local unrest with the help of a small private army (such private units were known as "druzhinas"), and annexed new lands in the Urals and Siberia in favor of Russia.^{[citation needed]}

Yakov Anikeevich Stroganov (1528–1577) made Ivan the Terrible forbid the English to trade near Solvychegodsk; he, alongside his brothers, received the right to organize military attacks on Siberian tribes and rulers. He was a provider to the tsar of luxuries, including sable fur. In 1574, together with brother Grigory, he was granted large lands in Siberia, along the Ob River. In 1577, he was granted iron bogs and a forest in Sodrolinskaya volost with the right to establish ironworks there.