Aleksey Alchevskiy Ukrainian entrepreneur, creator of Russia's first joint-stock mortgage bank and financial and industrial group. Country: Ukraine

Biography of Alexei Alchevsky

Alexei Alchevsky was a Ukrainian entrepreneur, industrialist, patron of the arts, and advisor to commerce. He was the creator of the first joint-stock mortgage bank and financial-industrial group in Russia. Born into a family of small merchants who traded in groceries and colonial goods, Alchevsky completed his education at the Sumy District School before moving to Kharkiv in 1862.

In his youth, Alchevsky was influenced by left-populist ideas and the poetry of Taras Shevchenko. He actively participated in the Ukrainian national movement and led the Kharkiv Hromada, a circle of Ukrainian intellectuals. While running a tea shop, he dedicated all his free time to self-education.

During the "banking fever" of the late 1860s and early 1870s, Alchevsky became the initiator of the establishment of the Kharkiv Society of Mutual Credit in 1866. He then founded the Kharkiv Commercial Bank in 1868, with a capital of 500,000 rubles, making it the third institution of joint-stock commercial credit in Russia after the St. Petersburg Private and Moscow Merchant Banks. In 1871, he initiated the creation of the first joint-stock mortgage bank in the country, the Kharkiv Land Bank, which had a capital of 1 million rubles. Alchevsky served as its director until his death in 1901. The bank's charter was written jointly with I. V. Vernadsky, the father of V. I. Vernadsky.

In 1879, Alchevsky founded the Alexeevskoye Mining Society, which owned rich anthracite deposits in the Slavyanoserbsk District of the Yekaterinoslav Governorate. By 1900, the company had extracted 45 million poods of coal, ranking third in volume of production among similar enterprises in the Donbass region. Alchevsky also initiated the construction of metallurgical plants for the Donetsk-Yurevsky Society (1895) and the Russian Providence Society in Mariupol (now the Mariupol Metallurgical Plant named after Ilyich).

Aside from his business ventures, Alchevsky was actively involved in public and cultural activities. He personally funded the construction of churches, hospitals, and schools. As a private individual, he initiated the construction of the first monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kharkiv in 1899.

Alchevsky's wife, Christina Danilovna Alchevskaya (Zhuravleva), was an educator and the founder of a literacy training method for adults. They had several children, including Dmitry (1866-1920), an entrepreneur who was executed by the Bolsheviks in Crimea; Grigory (1866-1920), a popular composer; Anna (1868-1931), the wife of academician A. N. Beketov; Nikolai (1872-1942), a theater critic and author of the first Soviet Ukrainian primer for adults; Ivan (1876-1917), a renowned tenor and soloist at the Mariinsky Opera Theater; Christina (1882-1931), a Ukrainian poet, translator, and educator.

Alchevsky's tragic suicide on May 7, 1901, by throwing himself under a train at the Tsarskoye Selo Station in St. Petersburg, marked the beginning of the "Kharkiv Crash," the peak of the economic crisis in the 1900s. In honor of Alchevsky, the city of Alchevsk in Ukraine was named in 1903 at the request of Russian industrialists.

In 2005, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a coin as part of the series "Prominent Personalities of Ukraine" dedicated to Alexei Alchevsky. The coin commemorated the 170th anniversary of the birth of the renowned industrialist and entrepreneur. The coin had a circulation of 20,000 copies and a face value of 18 hryvnias.

A monument to Alexei Alchevsky, a gift from the city of Alchevsk, was erected in Kharkiv in 2004.