Kunst and Albers

On September 16, 1864, Gustav Albers (1838-1911), the son of a Hamburg jeweller, arrived in Vladivostok on board the schooner "Meta". He unloaded a cargo of food staples and building materials. Shortly before that, he had met the Hamburg merchant Gustav Kunst (1836-1905) in Shanghai and they decided to go into business together. At the time, the town of Vladivostok consisted of 44 wooden buildings.

The first store, constructed of wood, was built in 1865. In 1875, Adolph Dattan (1854-1924), a young man from Rudersdorf, Thuringia, who had worked as a bookkeeper for Albers' brother in Hamburg, joined the firm. In 1884, the store moved to a new stone building. Apart from the bricks, all the building materials used in the store had come by boat from Hamburg. The new store had 18 departments and the company was also to offer banking services.

The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, heading west from Vladivostok, began in 1891, and this meant an economic boom for the city and the department store. Gustav Kunst left the company in 1898, taking up residence in Hawaii and Samoa. Dattan became a partner and, in 1914, was elevated to the Russian nobility for his contributions to the development of the Primorye region.

During his many business trips, Dattan amassed extensive collections which he donated to various European museums, including a large ethnological collection given to the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, Austria and a zoological collection donated to the Naturhistorisches Museum, Braunschweig, Germany.

In 1907, the German architect Georg Junghändel, who also designed St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Vladivostok, built a new department store on Svetlanskaya Ulitsa in the Art Nouveau style. It now houses the GUM department store. Junghändel also built an elegant house in the villa style for Dattan, opposite the department store.