After the abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire, the idea of personal merit, self-improvement and some state support became popular. Merchants in the nineteenth century remained the bearer of the old patriarchal culture. However, gradually in his circle formed a fundamentally new worldview, based on a combination of traditional and progressive. Noble farms are no longer playing an important role in the economic life of the country. The ancestral estates were for sale, the nobles were ravaged. They are replaced by a generation of merchants, industrialists, and entrepreneurs who had no noble background but had the money, ambition and desire to enter the elite nobility. It is charity itself that becomes one way of achieving this goal.