On the history of private loans in Russia. (From my student abstracts)

As a student, he wrote notes to the financial law. Do not believe me? - Please proof: "... More Grand Prince Vasily the Dark borrowed from Moscow" guests "and hundreds of cloth merchants in A Time of Troubles period SHUISKI a mortgage of jewelry was trying to get a loan from." Guests ", he took a loan at the Trinity-Sergius Laura and Solovetsky monastery. Later, in May 1613, with a request for money to loan to the Government of famous merchants and industrialists Stroganov addressed recently came to the throne of tsar Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov.

Usurious loan is conservative in its essence: contributing in a traditional society the accumulation of treasures and the concentration in the hands of the means of production, it does not create significant preconditions for the development of capitalist relations. However, unlike previous centuries, influenced the growth of commodity-money relations and expansion proposal, the natural form of usury increasingly gave way to the money. This process was accompanied by some and lowering interest rates, in particular, for loans, which are issued to the monasteries.



Overall loan in Russia was expensive. His most devastating forms are considered "vengeance", ie a loan at 60 percent per annum and above, which are generally used specifically for large landowners "attachment" to their land still formally possessed the personal freedom of the peasants.

It should be said that as a borrower has acted not only to natural persons: a loan resorted parish and settlement, and the suburbs, which the maintenance chiefs and judges, deacons and barmen, huts and prisons, numerous gifts in Moscow's orders and the sent out detectives and magistrates did not have enough conventional means - income from self-taxation.

Aware of the many negative consequences of usurious activities and especially its negative impact on the tax potential tax the population, the authorities have made repeatedly by torture to restrict and even eradicate usury. Thus, Article 255 Council Code generally prohibited, following the Christian dogma, issuing loans at interest. However, this and similar bans is relatively easy to overcome with the help of different tricks. Widely practiced issuance of loans from which the relevant interest deducted in advance. Another common way is that issued by the borrower the loan was interest-free formal, but by agreement of the parties was set very short, almost unreal life of its return. For delay in payment is not prohibited by the law stipulates the high interest rates, which ultimately gave the loan usurious character.

Named article Code is kept valid for over a century, more precisely to the manifesto of the Empress Elizabeth of 13 May 1754 which, inter alia, to establish "ukaznoy percentage", ie the maximum amount of loan rate of 6 per cent. "