Aleksei Putilov

Putilov was born on 24 June (6 July New Style) in Novgorod Governorate, the son of the privy councilor Ivan Pavlovich Putilov (1839-1916) and grandnephew of the entrepreneur Nikolai Ivanovich Putilov (1820-1880). He graduated from St. Petersburg University with a law degree in 1889 and, declining an offer of training to become a professor at the university, he entered the Ministry of Finance in 1890 as an assistant to the Ministry's legal adviser.

In 1896 he was initiated as a freemason in the French Cosmos Lodge.

He was appointed a clerk in the General Office of the Ministry of Finance in 1898. Putilov was made Acting Director of the General Office in 1900 and full Director of the General Office in 1902. On 28 October (9 November) 1905 he was named Deputy Minister of Finance, in which capacity he headed the Nobility State Land Bank and the State Peasant's Land Bank.

In 1905 Putilov drew up a plan for the expansion of the peasants' freeholding, under which the landowners would sell a part of their estates. When Tsar Nicholas II rejected this scheme, Putilov resigned from government service on 24 April (7 May) 1906.

Putilov and his family owned Château La Martinette, an estate in Provence, France.

In the private sector, Putilov became a member of the board of the Russo-Chinese Bank in 1906 and managing director in 1908. This bank was the largest shareholder of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Upon the merger in 1910 of the Russo-Chinese Bank with the Northern Bank to form the Russo-Asiatic Bank, he was elected chairman of the new institution, which soon became the largest private-sector bank in Russia.

During the 1910-14 period Putilov organized the largest monopolies in Russia, including the Military Industrial Concern ("Russian Society for the Manufacture of Shells and Military Supplies"), the Russian Tobacco Trust, and the Russian General Oil Company, organized in 1912 to control all Russian oil production outside of the Nobel and Shell groups.

Putilov was a member of the Board of Industry and Commerce, and during the First World War he was a member of the Special Supply Meeting of the Ministry of War.

Putilov married Vera Alexandrovna Zeyfart (German: Wera Seyfert), daughter of Lieutenant-General Alexander Alexandrovich Zeyfart (1835-1918). They were the parents of four children:

Ekaterina (married name Rosalion-Soshalskaya)

Sergei

Maria (died 12 (25) May 1912, having taken a fatal dose of arsenic after her father disapproved of the man she loved; her beloved shot himself near the home of the Putilov family on Mytninskaya Embankment)

Ivan (12 (25) December 1902 - 18 May 1977)