SYTIN, IVAN DMITRIEVICH

(1851–1934), Russia's leading pre-Revolution publisher of books, magazines, and the top daily newspaper, Russian Word (Russkoye slovo ).

Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin, had literate but poor peasant parents and only two years of schooling in his native village of Gnezdnikovo, Kostroma Province. Venturing first to the Nizhny Novgorod Fair at fourteen as helper to a fur-trading uncle, he apprenticed at fifteen to a Moscow printer-merchant who helped him start a business in 1876, the year of his marriage to a cook's daughter who would be vital to his success.

Like his mentor, Sytin issued calendars, posters, and tales that itinerant peddlers sold to peasants throughout the countryside. When in 1884 Leo Tolstoy needed a publisher for his simple books (the Mediator series) meant to edify the same readership, his choice of Sytin raised this unknown to respected status among intellectuals. Sytin then began to publish for well-educated readers and branched into schoolbooks, children's books, and encyclopedias by investing in the new mass-production German presses that cut per-unit costs. His rise as an entrepreneur who exploited the latest technology led contemporaries to tag him "American" in method.

Sytin claimed that he became a newspaper publisher in 1894 at Anton Chekhov's urging, and he hired able editors and journalists who made his Russian Word the most-read liberal daily in Russia. Lessening censorship and rapid industrialization in the last decades of the tsarist regime helped Sytin add to his publishing ventures and kept him a millionaire through the economic disruption of World War I. After the 1917 Revolution, Sytin received assurances from Vladimir Lenin that he could publish for the Bolshevik regime, only to be cast off as a capitalist after Lenin died in 1924. The final decade of his life was marked by gloom, austerity, and obscurity, offset only by his church attendance and his writing of memoirs (published in the USSR in 1960 in a shortened edition). His downtown Moscow apartment is today an exhibition center in his honor.

See also: journalism

bibliography

Lindstrom, Thaïs. (1957). "From Chapbooks to Classics: The Story of Intermediary." American Slavic and East European Review 16:190–201.

Ruud, Charles A. (1990). Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851–1934. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Watstein, J. (1971). "Ivan Sytin—An Old Russian Success Story." Russian Review 30:43–53.

Charles A. Ruud