Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934

Myroslav Shkandrij is an associate professor of Slavic studies at the
University of Manitoba.

This is an account of the career of Ivan Sytin, a rags-to-riches story
that describes how a shrewd villager became the most powerful force in
Russian publishing.

It is more than a case history in entrepreneurial development:
Sytin’s publishing company and his Moscow daily both responded to and
shaped popular taste. In a sense the book is also a study of the Russian
readership. One man’s astute grasp of the reader’s needs helped him
make millions; at the same time his publishing successes and failures
tracked the public’s reponse.

Finally, the description of Sytin’s struggles with the censors, along
with the appendixes (which list titles, copies, revenue, and costs),
provides insights into political and sociological trends.

The book is based on archival research conducted in the Soviet Union.
It investigates in a scholarly, conscientiously argued, somewhat
dispassionate way Sytin’s contacts with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Blok,
Bunin, Merezhkovsky, and other writers—who, for the most part,
considered him a scoundrel, but a useful ally. Some, like Gorky, did
well financially from knowing him. The publisher for his part, played
the largely disingenuous role of the former peasant concerned with
popular enlightenment.

Sytin lost his enterprises after the Bolshevik takeover and died in
obscurity in 1934. This book recognizes his remarkable career and
contributes to the growing Western interest in the prerevolutionary
Russian mass reader. The picture of both publisher and reader that
emerges is a mixture of the shrewd and naive. An added topical
dimension, and an undercurrent that can be sensed in the book, is the
present Soviet fascination with business acumen and the desire within
many circles to reproduce the “Sytin phenomenon” in contemporary
Russia.