Gentlemen, Moscow and every other Russian capitalists!

Gentlemen, Moscow and every other Russian capitalists! Will you let the French, Germans, Swedes, English and Americans exploit this Russian wealth too and make a handsome profit from it, or will you think of taking it yourselves, when it is pointed out to you once more as a great lucrative enterprise by one who has long followed the fortunes of the Russian oil industry and wants nothing more than to see it develop to the dimensions that correspond to the natural reserves of the country? Show the world, if only in this one affair, that you are able to manage your own wealth when you are granted broad and reasonable freedom and there is a Russian example before you. It falls to you, gentlemen, Russian capitalists, to light and to lubricate Russia and Europe, to share this service with America, and on the way to turn a four-kopeck product into a five-rouble one, whereby something will stick to your hands as well, and to the hands of the thousands of workers who will be needed to shift these millions of poods lying idle beneath the ground.

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev.

But somehow it did not all go quite according to plan.