Merchant Moscow

With the collapse of the Soviet system, the long-neglected history of the early capitalists is being recovered and rewritten. Once regarded as the losers in the Russian Revolution, these merchants can now be seen as early pioneers in Russia's transformation to a free market economy. This history of Russian entrepreneurship aims to put a human face on early Russian capitalism. It pairs thematic groupings of historic photographs with commentaries by contemporary Russian and American historians. The pictures provide a wide-ranging visual portrait of Imperial Russia's most influential entrepreneurial elite, the Moscow merchantry, whilst the accompanying articles interpret the photographs and place them in the larger cultural context of pre-revolutionary Russia.