ELDERLY PAWNBROKERS

Background. The microfinance system has an important, although not always positively perceived by society, importance in the modern economy and public life. It inherits the traditions of the most ancient phenomenon – usury, unofficial lending. The history of usury in the Russian Empire, due to its shadow nature, has practically not been studied in scientific literature, there is only graphic evidence of it in fiction. The services of usurers were used primarily by the ordinary population, but entrepreneurs also often turned to them, especially in the first post-reform decades, when the banking system was only at the stage of formation. The purpose of the work is to study this hidden socio-economic phenomenon on the example of Ufa. Materials and methods. The sources of this study are two types of documents: publications in the “Senatskie obyavleniya” (when real estate was registered as collateral for large borrowings), as well as information from the Ufa branch of the Volzhsko-Kamsky Commercial Bank, which was used by usurers. The modernization concept does not imply a simple linear formation of the banking services market; in the process of gradual folding of the modern financing system, archaic forms of economic life persist for a long time. Results. Although the article provides information on the city of Ufa, this is one of the first concrete studies of the usury mechanism in Russian historiography. The approximate personal composition of the Ufa “community” of private, unofficial creditors is revealed, the objective conditions of provincial economic life are shown, which retained the need of the local business community for non-bank financing, the approximate scale of usury in Ufa is presented. Conclusions. The data presented in the article indicate that in the conditions of the transition from a traditional to a market economy, archaic forms of lending persisted for a long time. Only since the 1880s we can talk about the gradual ousting of usury from the financial market of Ufa, local entrepreneurs are switching to modern forms of lending, the services of usurers are used mainly by the ordinary population for consumer purposes.