Stroganovs

The Stroganovs or Strogonovs (Russian: Стро́гановы, Стро́гоновы), referred to in French as Stroganoffs, were a family of highly successful Russian merchants, industrialists, landowners, and statesmen. From the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century they were the richest businessmen in the Tsardom of Russia. They financed the Russian conquest of Siberia and Prince Pozharsky's reconquest of Moscow from the Poles. The Stroganov School of icon-painting takes its name from them. Peter the Great elevated the Stroganovs into the nobility as Barons of the Russian Empire. The last member of the family died in the Stroganov Palace in 1923.

The Stroganov family were originally rich Pomor peasants (i.e. from Russia's subarctic north, in the region of the White Sea). Feodor Lukich Stroganov, the progenitor of the family, settled in Solvychegodsk (also in the Russian north) in the late 15th century. Here, his son Anikey Fyodorovich Stroganov (1488–1570) opened the salterns in 1515, which would later become a huge industry. In 1558, Ivan the Terrible granted to Anikey Stroganov and his successors large estates in what was at the time the eastern edge of Russian settlement, along the Kama and Chusovaya Rivers

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