Aleksey Mikhailovich Tcherkassky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prince Aleksey Mikhailovich Tcherkassky (Алексей Михайлович Черкасский in Russian) (1680 - 1742) was a Russian chancellor.

In 1702, Aleksey Mikhailovich Tcherkassky held a post of senior stolnik (tsar's personal assistant) and was soon assigned to assist his father Mikhail Yakovlevich Tcherkassky, who had been a voivod in Tobolsk at that time. Tcherkassky served under his father for 10 years and in 1714 was summoned to Petersburg. There, he was appointed member of the Urban Construction Commission. In 1719, Aleksey was sent to Siberia as governor. In 1726, he became a senator. During the election of Anna Ivanovna for the Russian throne in 1730, Tcherkassky, the richest man in Russia in terms of the amount of serfs he owned at that time, was in charge of the gentry party, which had been in opposition to the so-called verkhovniki (members of the Supreme Privy Council). For this, he was appointed one of the three cabinet ministers and promoted to the rank of grand chancellor in 1740. As a cabinet minister, Tcherkassky signed a trade agreement with the Great Britain in 1734. As a chancellor, he signed a treaty with Prussia in 1740 and Great Britain in 1741.

Tcherkassky's only daughter from his second marriage to Princess Maria Yurievna Trubetskaya - Varvara Alekseyevna - was a fräulein at the empress's bed chamber. She was considered one of the richest fiancees in Russia and was proposed to Prince Antiokh Kantemir as a wife. The latter, however, turned down the proposal. She was then proposed to Count Pyotr Borisovich Sheremetev with the dowry of 70,000 serfs. This was exactly why Sheremetev would come to have such enormous fortune.