Chizhov millions: philanthropist Fedor Chizhov and Kostroma

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Fedor Vasilyevich Chizhov was born in Kostroma on February 27, 1811.

The family of his father, a descendant of the spiritual class and a teacher of the Kostroma gymnasium, was poor.

“Born in 1811, in an insufficient noble family of the Kostroma province, he passed a difficult school of labor and poverty,” wrote writer Ivan Aksakov about Chizhov’s childhood.

The boy showed remarkable abilities in mathematics. The family moved to the capital, where Fedor entered the mathematics department of the university, which he graduated brilliantly in 1832.

“Always existing on meager means, more earnings from lessons, he had no opportunity to accumulate anything for himself by the end of the course in order to equip himself with his own means, and at the first lecture assigned to him, in order to avoid reproach for negligence from the first step, he was forced to appear in student uniform. The prestige of the professorship was threatened by embarrassment, and the professors immediately gathered among themselves the necessary funds for his uniform before the advance was issued, Arkady Cherokov wrote about the first appearance of a new adjunct at the department.

In 1838, Fyodor Chizhov published a work on steam engines for the first time in Russia, and then he took great care of the development of the railway network. For him, the railway will remain a symbol of progress and prosperity of Russia. They say that we owe his Slavophile predilections to the fact that it was Moscow that became the intersection of the main railway tracks, the “heart” of Russian industry.

He advocated the development of metallurgy and mechanical engineering, the creation of joint-stock banks, the opening of a large number of educational institutions of technical profile. All this was much more important in that period than just the development of the economy: it influenced the formation of national consciousness, the political independence of the state.

Fyodor Chizhov developed a complex financial operation in order to buy the Moscow-Kursk railway from foreign capitalists. Only 18 years later, having invested virtually all the cash capital in bank stocks, Chizhov and his associates had to make a profit. This meant that he was no longer destined to see income in life. These are the capitals he bequeathed for the opening of educational and medical institutions in his homeland, in the Kostroma province.

With this money, schools were created in Kostroma and in county cities - Kologriv, Makariev, Chukhlom. In 1902, a school of midwives, that is, midwives, was opened in the provincial center. Graduates were given a bag with a set of necessary tools and a sufficient number of medicines for the first time.

Fyodor Chizhov returned to his hometown after his death. It happened on November 26, 1877 in Moscow. God sent him an easy ending - he died in the arms of friends from an aortic aneurysm.

The name of Fedor Chizhov is immortalized on a memorial plaque on the Avenue of Recognition, which is included in the red route of author’s excursions."Kostroma at 15:15.".

According to the materials of the scientific consultant of the project “Kostroma at 15:15” candidate of cultural studies Larisa Sizintseva.