Shustov

a family of large-scale 17th-century merchants and salt producers descended from court peasants of the village of Dedinovo in Kolomna District.

In the mid-17th century, the gost’ (privileged merchant) Iakov Shustov traded salt along the Volga and the Oka. The gosti Gri-gorii Fedorovich and Vasilii Fedorovich Shustov established a saltworks between the 1670’s and the 1690’s on the Lenva River, in Solikamsk District. By September 1696, the Shustovs owned 32 salterns, 16 brine pipes, 13 salt storehouses, several granaries, and more than 110 dvory (homesteads) for “working people.” The annual output of the Lenva saltworks reached 2 million poods of salt in the 1690’s.

The Shustovs used their own ships to deliver salt via the Kama and the Volga to Nizhny Novgorod, where part of their cargo was sold on the local market. The rest of the salt continued, via the Oka, to Kaluga, from which it was shipped for sale in western and southwestern cities.

Between 1695 and 1697, the saltworks on the Lenva were turned over to G. D. Stroganov. Some Shustov gosti are known to have lost their capital to the state in the early 18th century.