Russian accounts in the educational process and on the tables of accountants

You will be incredibly surprised, but computers did not always exist - before they were invented, for at least two and a half centuries, our ancestors-accountants used the so-called Russian accounts.
Under the cut are old drawings and photographs, clearly demonstrating how this happened.

Let us begin with the end of the nineteenth century: earlier photographs are absent, since it was tight then with photographic apparatuses.
Exemplary workplace accountant - drawing from the magazine "Accounting" (the first Russian accounting journal, by the way).


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And this is a bookkeeping lesson at the Moscow Commercial School, a photograph from the jubilee edition of 1904. There they are, on the teacher's desk.



Another well-known educational institution is the Moscow Practical Academy of Commercial Sciences. Also from the jubilee edition, but already from 1910. The teacher is a very famous person in accounting circles: Alexander Vasilyevich Prokofiev, the author of the course in double-entry bookkeeping, reprinted at least twenty times (well, boring, probably!).



And this is the audience of the St. Petersburg higher commercial accounting and railway courses of Mikhail Vladimirovich Pobedinsky, also a very famous person. Somewhere in 1914 or a little earlier. On the tables, of course, accounts - where without them?



The revolution did away with the royal educational institutions, but was unable to do away with the Russian accounts. Look, the bills on the tables of the workers of Chrezuchet - there was such an office in Petrograd, which intended to take into account all the property of the revolutionary city down to the last nail.



One of the few non-covered revolutions of educational institutions were Yekaterinoslav courses "Polyglot". An indulgence came out because courses were formed literally several days before the October Revolution. Photo from the anniversary edition of 1927



Of course, the accounts used not only in the educational process, but also in practice.
Picture from an accounting journal (which, not to mention, the end of the 1920s). In general, if the artist wanted to draw an accountant, he painted a man with bills, and everything became clear.



And this is the account office of the Leningrad Regional Industrial Economic College, 1928. Accountants are trained.



The above-mentioned courses "Polyglot", but a few years later and renamed the Azov-Black Sea Training Complex. On the right hand of future accountants - Russian accounts, and on the left - calculators. The competition between gadgets is in full swing, and its outcome is completely unclear.



A picture from a book from 1929. The book was called “What is the use of records and calculations in the household” and told about how an intelligent man wrote down his operations in a notebook and he had a type-top, and his short-sighted neighbor laughed and teased until he was left at the broken trough.



The following drawings of the mid-1930s, on the subject of agricultural accounting, but not one-man but collective-farm. Trend, you know. From the journal "Accounting in socialist agriculture."





In 1935, the journal “Accounting in Socialist Agriculture” was renamed “Accounting and Finance on Collective Farms”. New computing equipment was stepping on its heels, but photographs of accountants with invoices continued to be regularly published. Here are a lot of them, and this is only from my collection, a minuscule of the total number, clicked by restless Soviet photo reporters.











And finally, a photo from the magazine “Sputnik Bookkeeper” from 1932, also on agricultural topics. Collective farm brigadier counts workdays.



Actually that's all. A few decades later, smuggling personalities from China appeared, and accountants healed like white people, for their own pleasure.