Alexandra Ivanovna Pashkova was the daughter of Colonel Ivan Gavrilovich Kruglikov, the hero of the Russian Patriotic War of 1812, and Sophiya Grigoryevna, née Countess Chernyshova.
Alexandra married Vasily Alexandrovich Pashkov, a graduate of the Page Corps and one of the largest landowners in the Russian Empire. The family had four children — a son Alexander and daughters Sophiya, Olga and Mariya. The Pashkovs lived in a huge house on the French Embankment in Saint Petersburg.
Alexandra Pashkova, like her twin sister Yelizaveta Ivanovna Chertkova, was a zealous follower of the British missionary Lord Granville Waldegrave Radstock and introduced her husband to him. Vasily Pashkov adopted Protestantism and joined the movement of Evangelical Christians. In their mansion, the Pashkovs organized cheap dinners for poor and destitute people, held spiritual conversations and distributed copies of the New Testament.
Vasily Pashkov preached at hospitals, factories, workshops and prisons and allocated a lot of money for organizations and missionaries of the evangelical movement. He wrote one of the first systematic dogmatic documents of Russian Evangelical Christians “Pashkov’s Profession of Faith” and established a special religious community called the Pashkovits. This displeased the emperor and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Vasily Pashkov was exiled from Russia.
In 1886, Alexandra Pashkova joined her husband abroad together with their children. She returned to Russia after her husband’s death and lived in the Pashkov family estate in Vetoshkino, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate.
After her only son died in 1903, Alexandra Pashkova turned to Alexander Ertel, who managed the estate of her sister Yelizaveta Ivanovna, and asked him to take over the affairs of Pashkov’s heirs. They included not only agricultural matters that Ertel was familiar with, but also issues that were completely new to him: running forest estates and factories and mining. The Pashkovs owned copper and iron mines and smelting plants in the Southern Urals. Alexander Ertel diligently and seriously undertook these new tasks. He tried to arrange the work in such a way that at any moment, even when he was absent, each manager could give a thorough and complete report on the situation of any branch of the entire business. He wrote about this in one of his last letters to Pashkova dated February 3, 1908.
