Nikolai von Meck

Nikolai Karlovich von Meck (Russian: Никола́й Ка́рлович фон Мекк; 28 April 1863 – 24 May 1929) was a Russian Empire engineer and entrepreneur involved in the development of the Russian Empire during the first part of the twentieth century. He was put on trial as part of the Shakhty Trial and executed in 1929. Life Nikolai was the sixth son of Karl Otto Georg von Meck, who came from an old Baltic-German noble family originally from Silesia, and Nadezhda von Meck out of eleven children in total. His father, Karl, was among the Russian Empire's first railroad builders after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War motivated the tsar to modernize. Karl died suddenly in 1876. Nadezhda inherited a substantial fortune and became a patron of the arts. Alongside her intense but platonic relationship with Pyotr Tchaikovsky, she also brought Nikolai into contact with such people as Claude Debussy, who stayed with the family as a young man. Nikolai...