Samuel Polyakov

Origins and early life

Samuel Solomonovich Polyakov was born in 1837 at Dubrovno, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, into a family of Jewish small traders, and he remained a professing Jew; a claim that he converted appears in one online reference marked as doubtful by that source itself, and no reliable evidence supports it.

Work and career

He began by leasing a post station and a distillery, moved into railway contracting in the 1860s under the patronage of Count Ivan Tolstoy, and built line after line: the Kozlov-Voronezh, the Kursk-Kharkov-Azov, the Orel-Griazi and the Fastov railways, some fourteen lines in all, amounting to roughly a quarter of the rail network then laid in the empire, and he was called the railway king. During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and 1878 he built the Bender-Galati military line at extraordinary speed to supply the army.

He was among the richest men in Russia, was ennobled, and endowed technical and vocational schools, a hostel for students in Saint Petersburg, and the mining institute; the terms he obtained from the state and the quality of some of his construction were criticised in his lifetime, and the fiche notes that plainly. He also used his access to the court to plead for Jewish civil rights, and in 1880 he was one of the founders, with Baron Horace Guenzburg and Nikolai Bakst, of ORT, the society for the promotion of trades and agriculture among the Jews of Russia, which still operates worldwide. He died in Saint Petersburg on 7 April 1888.