Afinogen Jakowlewitsch Antonowitsch

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Afinogen Jakowlewitsch Antonowitsch ( Russian Афиноген Яковлевич Антонович ; born 1848 ; died July 7, 1917 ) was a Russian economist and statistician . He worked as a university lecturer, publicist and in the Russian government, temporarily as deputy finance minister.

Afinogen J. Antonowitsch 1897

Antonovich graduated from the law faculty of the Imperial University of St. Vladimir, the predecessor institution of the University of Kiev , and was professor of economics , statistics and law at the newly established Institute of Agriculture and Forestry in Nova Aleksandria from 1873 to 1882 . He then became a professor of law and political science at the University of Kiev.

His thesis was on The Theory of Values (published in Warsaw in 1877). Antonovich received his doctorate with a thesis on the theory of paper money circulation (1883). He published other Russian-language monographs on Fundamentals of Economics (Warsaw 1879), The Course of Political Economy (Kiev 1886) and The Course of Administrative Reform (Kiev 1890).

From 1887 to 1892 he wrote for the Kiewer Wort founded by Sergei Witte ( Russian Киевское слово , Kijewskoje slowo ), a moderately conservative newspaper that appeared twice a week. Witte wrote in his memoir that he had started the newspaper in order to build a journalistic counterweight against the Kiev economics professor and newspaper operator Dmitri Pichno , who had sharply criticized Witte's railway projects. In order not to appear himself, Witte put the newspaper in Antonovich's hands, the beginning of a close relationship of trust.

From March 1893 to March 1896 Antonowitsch was deputy Russian finance minister under Sergei Witte, who valued him for their previous cooperation and had chosen him for his dissertation on the circulation of money , because Witte was planning a metal standard for the currency reform . In retrospect, however, he accused Antonovich of having collapsed because of the public opposition to these plans and of intriguing against Witte. As a provincial, he has become a mockery in government circles. His later successor Vladimir Kokovtsov judged in his memoirs that Antonovich had come to St. Petersburg as a “good scientist”, but was “clearly in the wrong place” as a newcomer, who was unable to do even routine tasks such as reports to the State Council, which is why he came first on leave and then ordered back to Kiev. The conservative politician Vladimir Gurko put this portrayal into a different perspective in his memoir; Accordingly, Antonovich had set out with the declared aim of promoting trade and industry in Russia by greatly increasing the circulation of money and for this purpose relaxed the statutes of the central bank for lending; only later did Witte decide in a U-turn in favor of the gold standard and thus also against Antonovich's line.

After returning to Kiev, Antonovich became a member of the Board of Directors of the Ministry of Education. Sergei Witte reports that Antonowitsch became a supporter of the autocratic Black Hundred , loyal to the Tsar, in 1905 for career reasons , but that he was still retired.

The Brockhaus-Efron judged that in his writings he paid little attention to practical relevance and left out the burning social questions, which he understood as an "invention" of interested circles. In addition, he ignored contemporary scientific developments and stuck with the status of economic classics such as Adam Smith , Andrej Karlowitsch Schtorch and Frédéric Bastiat . Witte called Antonovich a "better professor than Pichno, his books showed more talent", but Pichno was "undoubtedly more intelligent, more persuasive and stronger in character". Witte valued Antonovich's “simplicity” and “cunning”, but he was also “rough” and “uncouth”.

literature

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ^ Natan M. Meir: Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN 2010, ISBN 978-0-253-35502-7 , p. 204 .
  2. ^ Sergei Witte: The Memoirs of Count Witte. A Portrait of the Twilight Years of Tsarism by the Man Who Built Modern Russia. Edited by Sidney Harcave. Sharpe, Armonk 1990, p. 84 .
  3. ^ Sergei Witte: The Memoirs of Count Witte. A Portrait of the Twilight Years of Tsarism by the Man Who Built Modern Russia. Edited by Sidney Harcave. Sharpe, Armonk 1990, p. 163 f.
  4. ^ A b Sergei Witte: The Memoirs of Count Witte. A Portrait of the Twilight Years of Tsarism by the Man Who Built Modern Russia. Edited by Sidney Harcave. Sharpe, Armonk 1990, p. 190 .
  5. ^ Sergei Witte: The Memoirs of Count Witte. A Portrait of the Twilight Years of Tsarism by the Man Who Built Modern Russia. Edited by Sidney Harcave. Sharpe, Armonk 1990, p. 247 f. Witte is completely depicted by Sidney Harcave: Count Sergei Witte and the Twilight of Imperial Russia. A biography. Routledge, Abingdon 2004, ISBN 0-7656-1422-7 , p. 51 .
  6. ^ Vladimir Kokovtsov: Out of My Past. Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov. Stanford University Press, New York 1935, p. 442 .
  7. ^ For more details on this policy, Clive Trebilcock: The Industrialization of the Continental Powers 1780–1914. Routledge, Abingdon 1981, p. 272.
  8. ↑ Wladimir Gurko: Features and Figures Out of the Past. Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II. Ed. By JE Wallace Sterling, Xenia Joukoff Eudin, HH Fisher. Russell & Russell, New York 1967, p. 55 .
  9. ^ A b Sergei Witte: The Memoirs of Count Witte. A Portrait of the Twilight Years of Tsarism by the Man Who Built Modern Russia. Edited by Sidney Harcave. Sharpe, Armonk 1990, p. 85 .
  10. ↑ Антонович (Афиноген Яковлевич). In: Brockhaus-Efron . Vol. 1, Saint Petersburg, 1905, p. 128 f., Here p. 129 (online at the Russian-language Wikisource).
personal data
SURNAME Antonowitsch, Afinogen Jakowlewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Антонович, Афиноген Яковлевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian economist and statistician
DATE OF BIRTH 1848
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1917