The Groshev merchants of Penza originally came from the village of Olshanka in Valyaevskaya volost, Penza district. The most prominent family members are Ivan Efimovich Groshev and his nephew Ivan Alekseevich.
Ivan Efimovich Groshev (1843-1898), merchant of the 1st guild, sold grocery goods and wines. He owned 1008 dessiatines (dessiatina = 10,900 sq. metres or 2.7 acres) of land in the village of Nikolaevka in Penza district. He was a public representative of the Penza City Duma, a member of the board of the Penza branch of the state bank and the city head.
Merchant of the 2nd guild Ivan Alekseevich Groshev was born in 1876 (1875) into a family of a peasant who was a sole proprietor from Olshanka. In 1897, in Penza he got engaged in wholesale and retail trading. The subjects of trade were various: lime paint, Samara alabaster, lump and ground chalk, cement, refractory bricks and clay as well as tombstones and monuments. Those were made from the best materials, such as labradorite and various kinds of marble, which were always available at his warehouse for these purposes. Today, like a hundred years ago, construction and funeral services are considered to be the most profitable business areas. In 1910, Ivan Alekseevich set up a brick production (later Penza brick factory No.1) with two Hoffmann furnaces which produced 4 million bricks per year. And in 1914, together with I.G. Zhuravlev he established in Penza a business partnership called “Brick production and building materials trading.” He also had here in Penza some warehouses with rail-road siding, several houses and shops. One of his possessions, a two-story building, which had in 1911, an assessed value of 22,000 rubles, was located at the junction of Speranskaya and Seliverstovskaya streets. Another housemade of wood with a stone basement was located at No.17, Timakovka Street. Here lived the entire Groshev family.
Ivan Alekseevich had a high authority in Penza as an entrepreneur and public figure: he was elected the head of the city merchants. He held this position from 1907 to 1911. In 1909, at the suggestion of Ivan Alekseevich, the merchant society responded to the request of the Sisters of Mercy Community to help in constructing the building of the Red Cross Hospital on Dvoryanskaya Street. The building was put into service in 1913 (now it is the hospital named after N. A. Semashko).
In 1918 all the property of Groshev was confiscated except for the house on Timakovka where he was living with his wife Alexandra Grigorievna (nee Saburenkova), daughters Tamara and Julia and sons Andrey and Vasily. The elder daughter Antonina studied at the medical faculty of Kazan University and worked as a nurse in hospital number 177 in Penza. The elder son Michail had studied in the Penza 2nd Men’s Gymnasium and in 1919 he was in the Red Army in an engineer battalion.
Having been deprived of his money and business in 1918, Ivan Alekseevich entered a civil service and got a job of an agent of the Penza Gubsovnarkhoz (provincial soviet national economic enterprise); and his wife was engaged in housekeeping and floriculture. In 1921, in order to support his family and at the same time avoid observation in Penza Groshev organized handicraft production of building materials in the village of Klyuchiki on the Volga, but the following year he was dispossessed of his voting right and had to discontinue the production. Until 1930, he lived in Penza on Timakovka Street. Groshev was a donator of the Mitrofanov Church and took an active part in the parish life; he was a spiritual son of the Pulkhritudov priests who lived in his house and were arrested there. In 1930, Ivan was forced to abandon the house, and on November 19, he was arrested and sentenced to capital punishment. He was shot by a firing squad on January 20, 1931. That was the “gratitude” of Soviet power to the merchant Groshev for the Red Cross hospital and the brick factory, whose conveyor was being used then to build a new Penza.
Sources: GAPO, f. 109, op. 1, d. 803, l. 313; f. p-2, op. 4, d. 147, p. 87-87; Case UFSB for the Penza region. No. 7895-n; Tyustin AV For the good of the Fatherland, Moscow, 2004. pp. 317-318; Information Mashkov Alexander Ratmirovich.
