Russian-German industrialist with definition

Naa photo by Gustav Albers.
Kunst & Albers was a partnership founded by Hamburg Germans Gustav Kunst (1836–1905) and Gustav Albers (1838–1911) in the Far East of the Russian Empire and lasted until the 1930s.
The companions met in Shanghai and, deciding that it was difficult to compete in trade with the French and British in China, went to Vladivostok, which was a military settlement with a hundred inhabitants. Kunst had already traveled through Siberia and settled in Shanghai, and Albers served as navigator and was shipwrecked on the shores of Manchuria.[5]
In 1864, the main division was founded in Vladivostok.
For the majority of Germans who arrived in the Russian Far East from Germany, isolation and corporatism were characteristic. They tried to preserve their national environment and communicated with each other in their native language[6]. At the same time, large sums were spent on charity. For the acquisition of land, they accepted citizenship and Orthodoxy, in connection with which a law was introduced in Germany imposing a ban on dual citizenship [3].
The company chartered ships to deliver goods from China to Vladivostok, and exported cargoes of seaweed and sea cucumber. Purchases were made a year in advance, but the goods left faster. Activity from year to year gained momentum, and regular flights of ships of the Volunteer Fleet to Vladivostok, which began in the early 1880s, opened up new opportunities for trading companies. This was facilitated by the growth of the population of Vladivostok by the mid-1870s to 8 thousand inhabitants [1].
In 1884, in Vladivostok, at the corner of Svetlanskaya and Suifunskaya streets, the first department store of Kunst and Albers was opened [7].
In 1886, the German Adolf Vasilyevich Dattan, who had previously worked in it as a procurator (accountant) [8] [9], entered the business.
In the early 1890s, prices in the local market were two to three times higher than in European Russia [10]. According to the statement of the manager of the Control Chamber V. I. Kapustin in 1892: "The consumer on the Amur is still poor, and poor consumers always overpay. Trade always takes a large percentage where it can, and this is very natural, because capital is not a benefactor"[11].
Advertisement for Kunst & Albers, 1903
A. V. Dattan justified the state of affairs by the fact that trade costs in the Far East were too high compared to sales, most of the margin was "eaten up" by overhead costs. In addition, the financial risk here was higher than in European Russia, but the profit was also higher, otherwise no one would have engaged in such a laborious and long-term business[12].
Kunst & Albers Trading House in Vladivostok
(Partnership Management)
Sculptural group at the trading house "Kunst and Albers", Khabarovsk
The middle figure held a sword in his hand, the right figure held a scale. Over the years, the items have been lost
In 1888, the first department store was opened in Nikolsk-Ussuriysk, in 1893 - in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, in 1894 - in Aleksandrovsk on Sakhalin, in 1895 - in Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk, in 1900 - in Harbin and, finally, in 1913 - in Obluchye. Moreover, the opening even in small villages (Posiet, Slavyanka, Razdolnoye, Anuchino, etc.) has always been dictated by trade and economic prospects[3].
The partnership "Kunst and Albers" focused on serving the educated and wealthy elite of the officers and administration and built its department stores in the most prestigious places, positioning them as zones of "prestigious consumption" [13]. Hired merchants were discharged from Hamburg.
In 1913, the annual turnover of the company was 16 million rubles.
By 1914, Kunst & Albers owned 32 branches in the Amur region and offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Riga, Warsaw, Kobe and Nagasaki. Starting with wholesale trade from China, the company has grown to supply agricultural machinery, transportation and insurance. Opened in 1893, the store in Vladivostok had its own steam generator. After Kunst left the firm in 1888 and Albers in 1910, Albers' son, Vincent Alfred (1877-1960) and Dattan (Kunst had no children), took over the business and led them until the First World War. With its beginning, an article was published in the metropolitan press, and then a book, in which the trading house was characterized as the center of German espionage. As a result of the actions of competitors, Dattan was arrested and soon sent into exile in the Tomsk region, despite the rank of state councilor and the title of hereditary nobleman. The managers transferred movable property to the Harbin branch of the Russian-Asian Bank, and real estate to the management of Churin & Co.; Karl Richter served in the latter and managed the property until the armistice.[8][9]
Liquidation campaign
In 1914-1916, the writer Ferdinand Ossendowski, who published under various pseudonyms, launched a campaign of newspaper slander, blackmail and extortion against the largest trading house in the Far East, Kunst and Albers [14]. As the American diplomat and historian D. F. Kennan noted, "in the history of journalism one can hardly find another example of such a fierce and long personal vendetta" [15]. Ossendowski, under the pseudonym Mark Chertvan, wrote the story "Peaceful Conquerors". And then there was a newspaper article, most likely fictional by Ossendowski himself, announcing preparations for the filming of a film based on the story.
The company "Kunst and Albers" was transparently encrypted in the book as "Artig and Weiss", and its leaders A. Dattan and A. Albers, respectively, under the names "Wotan" and "Alfred Weiss". Ossendowski, attributing the action to the era of the Russo-Japanese War, drew the widest network of German espionage that swept Russia. The company "Artig and Weiss" and all its employees are directly subordinate to the German military and naval department and supply Berlin and Japan with intelligence information. In the story, other, equally transparently encrypted German "spy nests" are named: "Arthur Rodpel", "Hilmans", "Dangelider", "Witmann-Bauernamer", "Dimmens" - that is, companies and trading houses "Arthur Koppel", "E. Tillmans and Co.", "I. Langelitier and Co.", "Geitman-Aurnhammer", "Siemens", etc. The "spy network" was described in the broadest way:
German colonists inhabiting almost the entire border strip of the Kingdom of Poland and further to Bessarabia and to the Baltic Sea < ... > engineers, manufacturers, clerks of various German firms < ... > German colonists who settled along the Volga < ... > in the Urals < ... > buyers of timber and mining enterprises, and beyond the Urals, from Kurgan to Omsk, < ... > large buyers of Siberian oil.
The campaign against "Kunst and Albers" was inspired and paid for by its main competitor - the firm "Churin and Co." under the command of A. Kasyanov, the newspaper "Evening Time", and, as Ossendowski later wrote in a letter to the Ministry of Finance of the Kolchak government, in his "struggle with the Germans in all branches of our life" he used the funds provided by the largest banker and entrepreneur N. Vtorov, Chairman of the Central Military-Industrial Committee A. Guchkov and "Polish figures" [16].
Having found out the background of the smear campaign, Kunst and Albers filed a lawsuit against Ossendowski, Kasyanov and the editor-publisher of Vecherniy Vremya B. Suvorin[17], which caused a scandal in the press.
Since the autumn of 1914, the systematic defeat of Kunst and Albers began. Although the searches did not provide evidence of espionage, the German and Austrian employees of the firm were exiled to Siberia; A. Dattan, who had been arrested twice, was also exiled; government inspectors were appointed to the head enterprise in Vladivostok and large branches to oversee the finances [18] and finally, with the conscription of A. Albers into the army, the trading house was actually beheaded. At the end of 1916, the "Extraordinary Commission for Combating German Domination" came to the conclusion that it was necessary to liquidate the Kunst and Albers. Despite the protests of the city Duma of Vladivostok and the city authorities of Khabarovsk and Nikolsk-Ussuriysk, the Council of Ministers in early January 1917 supported the decision of the commission, ordering the appointment of a temporary administration to liquidate the company, which was prevented by the revolution.
After the February Revolution, Ossendowski, with the participation of his colleague E. Semyonov, fabricated a number of documents designed to prove the ties of the Bolshevik leadership with the German government. These papers, sold to the American envoy E. Sisson, became known as the "Sisson Papers". A. Albers also sought to expose Ossendowski and upon his return to Germany, as established by V. Burya, turned to the director of the Khabarovsk Museum of Local Lore V. K. Arsenyev, who wrote in a response letter dated May 21, 1925 [19]:
Your kind letter with permission to use the materials about Ossendowski, who blackmailed your company in the mountains. Vladivostok in 1914-1916 - I received. <... > Ossendowski is currently in Germany and has turned from a Germanophobe into a Germanophile. He scolds the Russians at all intersections and smokes incense at the address of the German people. The price of this incense is the same as its blackmail of your company in the past. <... > Mr. Ossendowski must be brought to clean water.
In 1923-1925, the Soviet authorities took away more than two dozen buildings from the company, some of which were handed over to the previous owners, and by the end of the 1920s they imposed unbearable taxes on Kunst and Albers. The firm's activities in Russia ended with the seizure of accounts in 1930; the Chinese branches of Kunst and Albers existed until World War II.[14]
At the end of the 1920s, many firms were nationalized or subject to liquidation. The Khabarovsk branch lasted longer than others - until 1930. The document of the Khabarovsk Regional Committee says:
As a result of repeated mobilizations, many trading firms of the region were forced to cease their activities, of the large firms only the competing Churin and Co. and Kunst and Albers remained. The elimination of one of them means the transformation of the other into a monopolist, which is unacceptable in the current difficult times[9].
Two of Dattan's sons died fighting on the side of the tsarist army, and the third managed affairs until 1960 in China. After 6 years of exile, Dattan was able to reach his family in Naumburg. Dattan collected a significant collection of ethnographic values of the indigenous inhabitants of the Amur region, which are now stored in the Ethnological Museum in Vienna [9].

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