ИСТИНА

This paper studies the Europeanization of Russian banking through a biography of a banker, who had the opportunity to compare local and European practices and left some texts on banking. Efim Epstein worked his way up from an accountant to a deputy chairman of a bank. He had experience in the traditionalist Moscow banking and in the westernized St. Petersburg banking. As a member of Russia's banking elite, he underwent the financial collapse of the First World War and the last months of the Russian Empire, the imprisonment in The Peter and Paul Fortress after the Bolshevik revolution of December 1917, an attempt to take part in the commission for the nationalization of Russian banks, and eventually emigration to Paris. At the same time Epstein was the author of scientific papers on the history of banking, monetary and exchange, translator and editor of Russian publications of foreign studies on finance and banks, a lecturer on banking and stock exchange business in Moscow and St. Petersburg commercial colleges. Now his papers are valuable sources of pre-revolutionary Russian banking practice, the realities of war and revolution in Russian banking. Efim Epstein was a father-in-law of the French writer Irene Nemirovsky, the winner of the Renaudot prize 2004.