The House of Stroganov or Strogonov, French spelling: Stroganoff, was a Russian noble family of highly successful Russian merchants, industrialists, landowners, and statesmen. From the time of Ivan the Terrible they were the richest businessmen in the Tsardom of Russia. They financed the Russian conquest of Siberia and Prince Pozharsky's 1612 reconquest of Moscow from the Poles. The Stroganov School of icon-painting takes its name from them. The most recent common ancestor of the family was Fyodor Lukich Stroganov, a salt industrialist. His elder son, Vladimir, became the founder of a branch whose members eventually became state peasants; this lineage continues. The lineage from Fyodor Lukich Stroganov's youngest son, Anikey (1488–1570), died out in 1923. Anikey's descendants became members of the high Russian nobility under the first Romanovs.
Anikey Stroganov, progenitor of the ennobled branch
17th century Stroganov country house in Solvychegodsk
The Stroganov Palace on Nevsky Avenue in St Petersburg was designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli
The Baroque Church of the Synaxis of the Mother of God in Nizhny Novgorod underwritten by the Stroganovs in 1697
Ivan IV Vasilyevich, commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, was Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia from 1533, and Tsar of all Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584. He was the first Russian monarch to be crowned as tsar.
Forensic facial reconstruction of Ivan IV by Mikhail Gerasimov
16th century portrait of Ivan by Hans Weigel
Portrait of Ivan IV by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1897 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
The Oprichniki by Nikolai Nevrev (1888). The painting shows the last minutes of boyarin Feodorov, who was arrested for treason. To mock his alleged ambitions on the tsar's title, the nobleman was given tsar's regalia before his execution.
