Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov

Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov (1917)

Pavel Milyukov ( Russian Павел Николаевич Милюков ., Scientific transliteration Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov ; emphasis: Pavel Milyukov ; born January 15 ^{. Jul} / 27 January 1859 ^{. Greg} in Moscow , † 31 March 1943 in Aix-les-Bains ) was a Russian historian and politician of the pre-revolutionary era. He was chairman of the Constitutional Democrats Party and, for a short time in 1917, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government .

Family and education

Pawel Nikolajewitsch Milyukov was born on January 15, 1859 in Moscow as the son of the architecture professor Nikolai Pawlowitsch Milyukov.

He attended the 1st Moscow high school and then studied at the historical-philosophical faculty of Moscow University, among others with the famous historians Wassili Ossipowitsch Kljutschewski and Pawel Gavrilowitsch Vinogradow .

After the father's death, he covered the family by giving private lessons. He was temporarily excluded from the university because of attending a student assembly in 1881. In 1882 he was finally able to finish his studies.

Activity as a historian

From 1886 to 1895 he taught as a private lecturer at the Faculty of Russian History at Moscow University , while teaching at the grammar school and giving college courses for daughters of higher society.

In 1892 he received for his work "Gosudarstwennoje chosjaistwo Rossii w perwoi tschetwerti XVIII weka i reformy Petra Velikogo" ("The state economy in Russia in the first quarter of the 18th century and the reforms of Peter the Great ") the degree of a master's degree in Russian history.

Due to political unreliability he had to give up his teaching activity in 1895 and was exiled to Ryazan . There he actively participated in the work of the local archives commission. He initiated systematic archaeological excavations in the Ryazan Governorate for the first time and was a deputy of the Ryazan Archives Commission at the 10th Archaeological Congress.

In the spring of 1897 he received an invitation to the chair of general history in Sofia , where he gave lectures on historical-philosophical systems, Roman history, and Russian and Czech early history for a year. At the instigation of the Russian government, however, he had to stop his lectures.

In 1898 he took part in a scientific expedition to Macedonia equipped by the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople and the Imperial Academy of Sciences , which others followed.

In 1899 Miliukov returned to Russia. At the beginning of 1901 he was arrested for oppositional activity and spent around four months in custody. He was sentenced to six months in prison by the special counseling service at the Ministry of the Interior, but was released early from prison.

Between 1903 and 1905 Milyukov lived in the United States of America , where he lectured at the University of Chicago and Harvard University . In 1906 his book "Russia and its Crisis" appeared in English , which was also translated into French. Miljukov's major historical work is entitled “Otscherki po russkoi kulture” (“Sketches on Russian Cultural History”) and comprises three volumes. His most important historiographical work "Glawnyje tetschenija russkoi istoritscheskoi Mysli" (" Mainstreams of Russian Historical Thought") was based on his university lectures and offers an overview of Russian historical science from the 17th century to the first third of the 19th century.

Political activity

Milyukov participated in the organization of the Liberation League ( "Soyuz oswoboshdenija" ) and participated in its congresses abroad and in Russia. He also worked on the opposition émigré magazine "Oswoboshdenije" ("Liberation"), which was published abroad by Pyotr Berngardowitsch Struwe . Miliukov published several editorials there on political life in Russia and became an ideologist of Russian liberalism.

In 1905 Miliukov returned to Russia and participated as one of the organizers and leaders of the Union of Associations ( "Soyuz soyuzov" ), of which he was chairman from May to August 1905. He played a key role in the development of the program and the founding of the Constitutional Democratic Party in October 1905, which provided a platform for large sections of the intelligentsia and noble Zemstvo representatives.

On August 7, 1905, Milyukov was arrested again, but released without charge after a month. In December 1905 Milyukov was prosecuted as editor of the newspapers "Swobodny narod" ("Free People") and "Narodnaja swoboda" ("People's Freedom") and was therefore not admitted to the elections for the first State Duma .

Miliukov was also not allowed to participate in the elections to the second State Duma. As chairman of the Central Committee of the Party of Constitutional Democrats since March 1907 and head of the party newspaper " Retsch " ("Die Rede"), he retained his leading position and later made it into the third and fourth State Duma, to which he belonged between 1907 and 1917 (Re-elected in 1912). He headed the “ Cadets ” faction and gave speeches mainly on foreign policy.

After Germany declared war, Miliukov, as one of the organizers of the Russian national movement, took a clearly nationally conservative stance and in his articles called for a temporary cessation of the party struggle in order to gather all forces against the external enemy. He campaigned for the formation of a "progressive bloc" in the State Duma and took over its leadership. The younger of his two sons, whom Miliukov had urged to serve in the army, died in 1915 when the Russian army withdrew from Galicia . Because of his resolute advocacy of gaining control of the Turkish Straits, he was nicknamed " Dardanelles -Milyukov". His speech to the State Duma on November 1, 1916, in which he heavily criticized the government and repeatedly asked the rhetorical question “What is that? Stupidity or betrayal? "

After Nicholas II renounced the throne and the February Revolution , he was a member of the Provisional Duma Committee and campaigned for the preservation of the constitutional monarchy, which the majority of the members of the "Progressive Bloc" rejected.

In the first Provisional Government he held the post of Minister for Foreign Affairs from March to May 1917, which he had taken over from Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Anatolyevich Neratov . He resolutely rejected calls for peace from the starving population. Instead, he secured the Allies in the so-called Miliukov Note of April 18th ^July. / May 1, 1917 ^greg. the fulfillment of all obligations by Russia and the continuation of the war to struggle for the international recognition of Russia and the maintenance of the guarantee of Russian control over Constantinople and the Turkish Straits.

Miliukov once again represented the traditional goals of Russian imperialism with Constantinople, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary , a South Slavic state extending far beyond the Drava , a Russian Poland within its ethnographic borders and a new Baltic Sea governor on the soil of East Prussia . When these plans and the related willingness to continue the war became known, violent riots broke out.

This culminated in the government's April crisis, as a result of which Prince Georgi Evgenjewitsch Lwow and Alexander Fyodorowitsch Kerensky formed a new coalition government with the socialists. Miliukov turned down the proposed secondary office of minister for popular education and left the government, but continued his work as chairman of the Constitutional Democrats.

He firmly refused to allow the Bolsheviks to take power and spoke out in favor of fighting them militarily. Because of his support for the Tsarist commander-in-chief, General Lavr Georgievich Kornilov , he had to leave Petrograd after his defeat and go to the Crimea. From there he traveled on to the Don, where he joined the military volunteer organization of General Mikhail Vasilyevich Alexejew , who fought against the Bolsheviks in the Volga region.

He later traveled to Kiev , where in May 1918 he conducted negotiations with the German Army Command, which saw him as a potential ally. Since the majority of his party comrades did not support him, he resigned from the office of chairman of the Central Committee of the Constitutional Democrats. He himself later described the negotiations as a mistake.

exile

In November 1918 Miliukov traveled to Western Europe to solicit support for the whites. He lived there first in England, from 1920 in France, where he became chairman of the Association of Russian Writers and Journalists in Paris and of the Council of Professors of the French-Russian Institute. Politically, he was a leader of the Paris group of the "Party of People's Freedom" (This is the official name of the "Constitutional Democrats", not to be confused with the terrorist organization "People's Freedom" (" Narodnaja volja "), which was founded in 1879 is sometimes also called "Volkswille" in German due to the ambiguity of the Russian name.)

Since many of his party colleagues rejected the “new tactics” he had developed to combat the Bolsheviks from within and foreign intervention, he resigned from the Constitutional Democratic Party in June 1921.

On March 28, 1922, he survived an assassination attempt during a gathering of political emigrants in the Berlin Philharmonic . Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov , the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov , was fatally injured while attempting to disarm the assassin.

From April 1921 to June 1940 Milyukov worked as editor of the Paris newspaper Poslednije Novosti ("Latest News"), one of the most important publications of Russian emigration.

He also continued his historical studies and published his Istorija wtoroi russkoi rewoljuzii ("History of the Second Russian Revolution") and the works Rossija na perelome ("Russia in Transition") and Emigrazija na pereputje ("Emigration at the Crossroads") and began to write his memoirs, which, however, remained unfinished.

Although a monarchist and anti-communist, Milyukov supported Stalin's foreign policy and the USSR's war against Finland .

Miliukov died on March 31, 1943 in Aix-les-Bains. After 1945 his remains were transferred to the Parisian cemetery Les Batignolles , where they were buried at the side of his wife Anna Sergejewna.

literature

• Paul Miliukov: Political Memoirs. 1905-1917. Edited by Arthur P. Mendel. Translated by Carl Goldberg. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor MI 1967.
• Thomas M. Bohn : Russian history from 1880 to 1905. Pavel N. Miljukov and the Moscow School (= contributions to the history of Eastern Europe. Vol. 25). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1998, ISBN 3-412-12897-X
• Александр В. Макушин, Павел А. Трибунский: Павел Николаевич Милюков. труды и дни (1859–1904) (= Новейшая российская история. Исследования и документы. Том 1). НРИИ, Рязань 2001, ISBN 5-94473-001-3 .
• Thomas Riha: A Russian European. Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN et al. 1969.
• Melissa Kirschke Stockdale: Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia 1880-1918. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY et al. 1996, ISBN 0-8014-3248-0 .
• Michael Hagemeister : The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in court. The Bern Trial 1933–1937 and the “Anti-Semitic International” . Zurich: Chronos, 2017, ISBN 978-3-0340-1385-7 , short biography p. 551f.

Web links

Commons : Pawel Nikolajewitsch Miljukow  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Pawel Nikolajewitsch Miljukow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography, list of publications and references (Russian)
• Russian collection of biographies with a detailed list of publications

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Carsten Goehrke (Ed.): Russia (= Fischer Weltgeschichte . Vol. 31). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-436-01450-8 , pp. 256 and 268 ff.