Alexander von Meyendorff

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Alexander von Meyendorff

Baron Alexander von Meyendorff , Russian Александр Феликсович Мейендорф (born April 10, 1869 in Baden-Baden , † February 20, 1964 in London ) was a Russian administrative lawyer and politician as well as a professor at the London School of Economics in exile in Britain .

Live and act

Alexander von Meyendorff came from a German-Baltic noble family and was the son of the diplomat Baron Felix von Meyendorff and his wife Olga, nee. Princess Gorchakov, daughter of Prince Mikhail Dmitrievich Gorchakov . Both Georgi Wassiljewitsch Tschitscherin and Pyotr Arkadjewitsch Stolypin were his cousins.

After the early death of his father in 1874, his mother moved through with her four sons Peter (* 1858 in Stuttgart; † 1918 in Copenhagen), Michael (* 1861 in Stuttgart; † 1941 in Copenhagen), Clemens (* 1863 in Rome, † 1885) Suicide in St. Petersburg) and Alexander to Weimar . The Meyendorffs had known Franz Liszt since 1863 and had made friends with him from 1867, when Felix von Meyendorff was ambassador in Weimar. Alexander vom Meyendorff attended the humanistic grammar school in Weimar, where he passed his Abitur in 1888, and received private lessons in Russian language and culture from a Russian tutor .

He studied law at the University of Saint Petersburg and entered the civil service in 1893. In 1896/97 he was an assessor at the District Court in Riga; then he was assigned to the Department of Rural Problems in the Ministry of the Interior. At the same time he was a private lecturer at the St. Petersburg Law Faculty. In 1904 an inheritance from his relative who died in France enabled him to be financially independent and to leave the civil service.

In the wake of the revolution of 1905 , Meyendorff began to be politically active. He joined the Octobrists . In 1907 he became a member of the Livonian landowners' deputy in the Duma . Until 1909 he was also one of the deputy presidents of parliament. During the First World War he became a delegate of the Red Cross . Shortly before the revolution of 1917, he became a member of the governing senate .

After the February Revolution of 1917 , he was designated by the Provisional Government (Russia) under Georgi Evgenjewitsch Lwow as ambassador to London and took part in the preparations for the Stockholm Peace Conference of 1917 . During the turmoil of the October Revolution , he managed to escape to the Klein-Roop family estate ( Latvian Mazstraupe ) northeast of Riga in Latvia . From there he got to Copenhagen shortly before the occupation of Riga by Soviet troops in early January 1919 and from there to London on a British warship.

In London he received a lectureship at the London School of Economics and at the same time gave courses in Russian for British officers. In 1927 he became a citizen of Latvia , but stayed in London. In 1928 he went on a lecture tour to the USA . In 1930 he received an honorary doctorate in law from Durham University . After retiring in 1933, he moved into Monrepos Castle in Vyborg . In 1939 he fled to London again before the outbreak of the Winter War . During World War II he made his knowledge of the Soviet Union available to the British government. He taught in prisoner-of-war camps and campaigned for British entry permits for Baltic refugees.

In 1934 he sold Liszt's letters to his mother, who later came to Dumbarton Oaks . Meyendorff's own rich estate can be found partly in London, partly in the Finnish Imperial Archives in Helsinki , in the Central State Archives of the October Revolution in Moscow, in Columbia University in New York City and in the Herder Institute (Marburg) .

Works

Wikisource: Author: Alexander Feliksovich Meyendorff  - Sources and full texts (English)
  • The background of the Russian revolution. New York: H. Holt and Co. 1929 (Colver lectures 1928) ( digitized , HathiTrust )
  • (with Stanislav Kohn): The cost of the war to Russia. The vital statistics of European Russia during the World War, 1914-1917. New Haven: Yale University Press; London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, for the Carnegie endowment for international peace, Division of economics and history, 1932.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the family, see Genealogical Handbook of the Livonian Knighthood Volume 1, Görlitz 1919 digital copy, pp. 503-532
  2. ^ Edward N. Waters (Ed.): The letters of Franz Liszt to Olga von Meyendorff. Dumbarton Oaks 1979, p. XII
  3. ^ Meyendorff Collection in the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
  4. ^ Archive holdings on the history of Liv, Estonia and Courland in the document collection of the Herder Institute. Digitized version ( memento from October 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 7.4 MB), p. 37f.
personal data
SURNAME Meyendorff, Alexander von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Мейендорф, Александр Феликсович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian administrative lawyer and politician as well as university professor at the London School of Economics in British exile
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden-Baden
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1964
Place of death London