Theme Week Moscow – GUM department store on the Red Square

2 July 2014 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Shopping Reading Time:  8 minutes

© Otets/cc-by-sa-3.0-lu

© Otets/cc-by-sa-3.0-lu

GUM (an abbreviation of the Russian Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin; literally “main universal store”) is the name of the main department store in many cities of the former Soviet Union, known as State Department Store during the Soviet times. Similarly named stores were found in some Soviet republics and post-Soviet states. The most famous GUM is the large store in the Kitay-gorod part of Moscow facing Red Square, opposite of the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin. It is currently a shopping mall. Prior to the 1920s, the location was known as the Upper Trading Rows. Nearby, also facing Red Square, is a building very similar to GUM, known formerly as the Middle Trading Rows. It is about the same size as a large North American shopping mall.   read more…

First German department store ever located in Vladivostok: Kunst & Albers, a success story from Hamburg

3 January 2011 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Shopping Reading Time:  8 minutes

Kunst & Albers © ZDF

Kunst & Albers © ZDF

It is always interesting and exciting to learn more about outstanding pioneering and entrepreneurial efforts. An incredible success story began in Vladivostok, with the rise of the German trading house Kunst & Albers, which supplied South Siberia supplied with goods from all over the world. The first German department store ever, it was located at the end of the world and there it still stands. The building housed not only all sales departments, the accounting, banking and shipping departments and the shipment of goods, upstairs was even room for living quarters for employees. When the masonry structure of the present-day State Department Store, GUM, replaced the old wooden building in 1885, it immediately became a Vladivostok landmark. Today it remains one of the finest examples of the city’s commercial architecture. Known officially as the Kunst and Albers Trading House in the past, it was one of the oldest masonry multi-story buildings in the region. Having met in China, the two German entrepreneurs Gustav Kunst and Gustav Albers decided to go to Vladivostok and establish a trading house together (1864). Supported by the Deutscher Bank and different companies in Germany, Great Britain, and Japan, the Kunst and Albers Trading House soon grew into the largest trading house in Eastern Siberia with 16 affiliates in Russia, five in Manchuria, and one in Japan. Living in Hamburg, Kunst, who served as the head of the company, supplied mostly German commodities. The enormously beneficial impact of the trading house on commerce and everyday life in the region is impossible to exaggerate.   read more…

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