Shipping Company on the Lake Baikal: From the First Idea to the Implementation of the Plan

Abstract

The article discusses the formation of steamship communication on the lake. Baikal. Based on a corpus of sources from the collections of the Russian State Historical Archive and the Russian Navy Archive, the process of establishing a shipping company on Lake Baikal is studied in detail. An attempt is made to trace the relationship between the dissolution of the Irkutsk Admiralty and the granting of the privilege to open steamship routes along the Siberian rivers to the richest Siberian gold miner N.F. Myasnikov, whose petition, although it was far from the first, but given the confluence of circumstances, turned out to be submitted very timely. Proposals about the possibility of starting voyages through Baikal on steamships were received repeatedly back in the 1820s. and, although they were expressed by naval officers who were serving on Lake Baikal at that time and who saw the advantages of using steam ships, all their ideas were recognized by the state as premature. First of all, this was due to the costs that the state would have to bear if a decision was made on the need to organize steamship routes through Baikal. Request from N.F. Myas­nikova’s proposal to grant the privilege of steamship communication on the Siberian rivers received considerable sympathy in the highest echelons of power, and a positive decision was made on it very quickly. Archival material containing correspondence between the Main Directorate of Eastern Siberia and the Main Directorate of Communications and Public Buildings made it possible to trace how the process of implementing N.F. Myasnikov’s plan went, what difficulties the entrepreneur had to face during the construction of steamships and the opening of permanent steamship routes across Baikal. Only the presence of solid capital could allow the first owners of shipping companies to carry out their plans without going bankrupt, given that the income from the shipping company, as a rule, did not significantly exceed the costs of its maintenance.