Georg von Cancrin
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Count Yegor Frantsevich Kankrin (16 November 1774 - 10 September 1845) was German-Russian politician and economist.
He was born Ludwig Daniel von Cancrin in Hanau.
He accompanied his father, the mineralogist Franz Ludwig von Cancrin, to Russia in 1797, joining the imperial service and changing his name to Georg. In 1823, he was appointed Minister of Finance and held the office for 21 years. As a politician, Cancrin was an archconservative who vociferated against the construction of railways and the emancipation of the serfs. His policies often sought to maintain the status quo due to the limitations of the Russian government in carrying out large scale economic reform. Because of his conservatism, he advanced loans to the gentry class in order to preserve, in the words of the historian Walter Pintner, "the social status quo." In order to limit state expenditure, he refused to credit the Russian industry, thus eliminating the budget deficits that plagued the Russian economy for decades. Private banks were forbidden, and every step was taken to stymie the development of capitalism. His major achievement was the monetary reform of 1839-43 which sanitized the Russian fiscal system.
Kankrin died in Pavlovsk. Among his writings, The Military Economy (published in German) is the best regarded.
