Georgi Evgenyevich Lvov

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Georgi Evgenyevich Lvov (1919)

Prince Georgy Lvov ( Russian Георгий Евгеньевич Львов , scientific. Transliteration vov Georgy Evgen'evič L' ; born October 21, jul. / 2. November  1861 greg. In Dresden , † 6. March 1925 in Paris ) was a Russian politician and after the February Revolution of 1917 first Prime Minister of the Russian Republic .

Life

Origin, family and youth

Lwow came from a noble family that traced its origins back to the Rurikid princes of Yaroslavl , but was impoverished in the course of the 19th century. Lwow's father, a liberal, used what was left of his money to give his children a good education. Soon after the birth of his son Georgi, he and his family moved back to their ancestral home, the Popowka estate in the Alexin district , Tula governorate , to farm it themselves. Over time, the family succeeded, with the help Georgi Lvov, who attended a high school in Moscow and then at the local university had studied law to pay off their debt and to generate profits. Lvov's democratic convictions and his critical view of his own aristocratic upper class in tsarist Russia date from this period . He was married to Countess Julia Alexejewna Bobrinskaja (1867-1903), a great-great-granddaughter of Tsarina Catherine II and her lover Grigory Orlow .

Activity in Zemstvo and Duma

After his studies, Georgi Lwow worked in the civil service until he retired in 1893 due to dissatisfaction with the reactionary policies of Alexander III. quit. He then became involved in the Zemstvo Governorate , the self-government of his home region of Tula, of which he had been chairman since 1900. In the Russo-Japanese War 1904/05, he built an aid organization for the wounded similar to the Red Cross .

As a result of the first Russian Revolution of 1905 , Tsar Nicholas II had to approve the election of an all-Russian parliament for the first time. Lvov was elected to the 1st State Duma and belonged to the faction of the liberal constitutional democrats , later known as the Cadets. When the Tsar dissolved the Duma after a few months, Lvov switched from the moderate to the radical wing of the party. He also supported the Vyborg Manifesto , which called on the population - albeit unsuccessfully - to refuse tax payments and military service. However, since Lvov fell ill on the trip to Vyborg , he never signed the manifesto himself. In the time of the Stolypin agrarian reforms he dealt with questions of the colonization of Siberia . His election to the Moscow City Council in 1913 was declared invalid by Interior Minister Maklakov .

After the beginning of World War I in 1914 he became chairman of the newly formed All-Russian Zemstvo Association and in the following year a leading member of the United Committee of Zemstvo and City Council Associations of Russia ( Semgor ). Since the state bureaucracy proved to be largely incapable of supplying the army as well as the wounded and refugees with sufficient food and materials, the Semgor took on this task with the approval of the government. Lwow thus became the head of a civil subsidiary government. He became a leading member of the Progressive Bloc , which advocated the formation of a government controlled by the Duma rather than the Tsar.

Head of the Provisional Government

In the course of the February Revolution , Prince Lwow of the Duma was on July 3rd . / March 16, 1917 greg. until 8 jul. / July 21, 1917 greg. Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the bourgeois Provisional Government elected. He was the first democratically legitimized head of government in Russian history. He received the office mainly because of his balancing character and because he was the compromise candidate between two men who wanted to prevent the other from taking office: Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov , the chairman of the Constitutional Democrats, and the Social Revolutionary Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky .

The Lvov government could not agree on steps to fundamentally reform the land in favor of the poor peasants. In addition, she advocated the continuation of the First World War on the side of the Entente powers , especially at Miliukov's instigation . To make matters worse, with the Petrograd Soviet , a second power center had formed right at the beginning of the revolution, which claimed legislative powers in competition with the Duma . As the spring progressed, Lvov therefore increasingly lost popularity and authority. After the crushed Juliet uprising of the Bolsheviks , he resigned his offices and was replaced by Kerensky. However, this was just as unsuccessful as the Lvov government in overcoming the dual rule of the Duma and the Soviet.

After the October Revolution

Eight months after the fall of the tsar, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin took power in the October Revolution . After the October Revolution, Lvov and his family moved to Tyumen . In February 1918 the newly established Soviet secret police Cheka arrested him there and took him to Yekaterinburg . Three months later, he and two other people, including his predecessor Nikolai Dmitrijewitsch Golitsyn , the last Prime Minister of the Tsar, were dismissed subject to conditions. Despite his promise to stay in Yekaterinburg, Lvov immediately fled to Omsk . An anti-Bolshevik counter-government had been established there under the protection of the Czechoslovak legions . On their behalf, he traveled on to the United States to find support and money for the White Army in the Civil War .

Even before the final defeat of the whites, Prince Lwow emigrated to Paris , where he re-founded Semgor, which was banned by the Bolsheviks in 1919, as an organization to support the Russians in exile. To this end, he transferred the committee's assets, which were in American banks, to Europe. He himself lived impoverished in Paris, where he worked in the Russian emigre movement until his death in 1925.

literature

Web links

Commons : Georgy Lvov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Orlando Figes: The Tragedy of a People. The epoch of the Russian Revolution 1891 to 1924 , Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 67
  2. Orlando Figes: The Tragedy of a People. The epoch of the Russian Revolution from 1891 to 1924 , Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 239
  3. Orlando Figes: The Tragedy of a People. The era of the Russian Revolution from 1891 to 1924 , Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 362
predecessor Office successor
Nikolai Golitsyn Prime Minister of the Russian Empire
March 15, 1917 - July 21, 1917
Alexander Kerensky