Nikolai von Meck

Nikolai Karlovich von Meck (1863–1929) was a Russian engineer and entrepreneur involved in the development of the Russian railways during the first part of the twentieth century. He was put on trial as part of the Shakhty Trial and executed in 1929.

Nikolai was the sixth son of Karl Otto Georg von Meck who came from an old Baltic-German noble family originally from Silesia and Nadezhda von Meck out of eleven children in total. His father Karl was among Russia’s first railroad-builders after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War motivated the tsar to make with the modernizing. Karl died suddenly in 1876. His mother inherited a substantial fortune and became a patron of the arts. Alongside her intense but platonic relationship with Pyotr Tchaikovsky, she also brought Nikolai into contact with such people as Claude Debussy, who stayed with the family as a young man. Nikolai recorded that Debussy acquired the family nickname "le boulliant Achille".

In 1883 Nikolai married Anna Davydova, the niece of Tchaikovsky.

He entered the Imperial College of Law in St. Petersburg. Deciding to give up a career lawyer and devote himself exclusively to the railway business, he asked his mother permission to leave school without receiving his degree. Lack of higher education did not stop him, he started his career with the development of the foundations, having worked at the depot fireman, engineer, clerk Nikolaev railway. Since 1884 a candidate member of the Board of the Moscow-Ryazan railway, and on November 1, 1890 a Member of the Board. In 1891 he was appointed to run the Moscow-Kazan railway.

More than a quarter-century, up to the nationalization in 1918, his name was linked to actively expand the company and its involvement in the development of the Russian transport system. For the first nine years of his management of the length of the lines of the Moscow-Kazan railway increased from 233 kilometers to 2.1 thousand kilometers. Achievements of the company were due to von Meck conducted technical policy to ensure the professionalism of staff, modernization of technical equipment, the thoroughness of the design and survey works. He enjoyed a well-deserved reputation not only for its own employees and business partners, but also in government circles and among members of the ruling house. The composition of the Company's shareholders included major banks of Russia.

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