Abstract
The problem of manufacturing money counterfeits by individuals during any historical period was acute for any state. Engaged in counterfeiting were not only the representatives of the wealthy, but also the poorer, the main representatives of the manufacturing professions who had advanced skills in metal processing and blacksmith. Based on the criminal cases stored in the state historical archives and newspaper reports, we conducted a study of the national identity of counterfeiters in Ukraine in the imperial era (1795-1917), identified national and ethnic sections of the population who were involved in counterfeiting money or their sales. Attempts to import into the Russian Empire with the purpose of selling counterfeit money were detained by representatives of various nationalities: Bulgarians, Turks, Germans. Among the counterfeiters there were also Persians, the British, the widespread sale of the forgeries was observed among the Gypsies. Citizens of the Ottoman Empire were repeatedly detained for selling counterfeit money in Kyiv, Minsk, Odessa and Dvinsk. Leadership among counterfeiters belongs to Jews, noting not only the active sale of counterfeit money, but also their production and importation from a non-legal mass-produced production center in England, using communications at the Brandenburg-Prussia border with the Kingdom of Poland. It should be noted that most of the newspaper reports in Galicia during the late 19 – early 20 centuries regarding the detention of counterfeiters of Jewish nationality, carried in their content by a considerable part of anti-Semitic prejudice, using the technique of public opinion manipulation, attributing the majority of serious crime offenses to the Jews, describing the events in extremely humiliating tone to the Jews. In spite of the numerous facts of detention of Jews with the admission of their guilt in counterfeiting, the information in Galicia’s newspapers is exaggerated and is common by anti-Semitism for this time in the region. But despite this, there is the highest number of true verified data on counterfeiters among Jews in the Russian Empire, including the unconfirmed in the course of the investigation and the defamation of one Jewish merchant by another for the potential saving of counterfeits, mainly to eliminate competitiveness in commerce
Keywords
Russian Empire; money forging; national identity; archive materials; museum collections
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