Abstract

This article refutes the stereotype that 19th-century Russian jointstock commercial banks were primarily for merchants and industrialists. The banks did indeed serve the commercial and industrial elite in the industrial regions and in the centres of national and international capital markets like Saint Petersburg and Moscow. However, in agricultural regions, the landowners, engaged in the production and sale of agricultural products, managed the joint-stock commercial banks together with the merchants. This phenomenon is analysed via the case of the Oryol Commercial Bank (1872-1908), which was a member of the Moscow banker Lazar Polyakov’s group. The bank operated in agricultural regions; it operated originally in the Oryol province in the Central Black Earth Region, but in the 1890s it spread to the twelve provinces of central, south and west European Russia. Biographical information about the bank’s leaders was collected from fragmented published and archival sources, and their business and family ties were reconstructed. The article concludes that the bank operating in the agricultural region was controlled by a coalition of merchants, landowners, provincial officials and zemstvo figures. Deep integration into the regional elite was one of the factors of the bank’s stability, because it connected the most solid regional customers with the bank. It helped the bank to survive in the second half of the 1870s and in the 1880s during an economically unfavourable period for the Central Black Earth Region. Another factor of the bank’s stability was its interregional connections - that is, access to the Moscow financial market via the Polyakovs’ banking group. This market far exceeded any regional Russian market. From the 1870s to the 1890s, membership in the group increased the bank’s opportunities to raise additional resources, but in the 1900s it negatively affected the bank because of the Polyakovs’ bankruptcy. The influential local coalition around the Oryol commercial bank helped to retain the bank inside the United Bank, which was created from the former Polyakov banks in 1908.