Nikolai Dmitriyevich Avksentiev
Николай Дмитриевич Авксентьев
SR Party founder who chaired the last unified anti-Bolshevik government, overthrown by Kolchak
Trotsky called him 'the complete caricature of a statesman. A really charming teacher of language in a ladies' seminary in Oryol — that is really all you can say about him.'
A founder and right-wing leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, he led the SR faction in the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet and served as Minister of the Interior and chairman of the Pre-Parliament in Kerensky's Provisional Government. During the Civil War, as the culmination of efforts to unite the anti-Bolshevik camp, he was elected chairman of the Provisional All-Russian Government (Ufa Directory) at the Ufa State Conference. Arrested and expelled by Kolchak's coup in November 1918, he continued émigré journalistic work in Paris and New York. His political trajectory encapsulates the collapse of democratic socialism in the Russian Revolution, crushed between armed extremes.
Career timeline
- 1905SR faction leader, vice-chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet
- 1907Elected to SR Central Committee; exiled to Obdorsk, escaped abroad
- 1907–1917Edited SR newspaper Znamya Truda in Paris exile
- 1917Chairman of All-Russian Soviet of Peasants' Deputies; Minister of Interior
- 1917Chairman of the All-Russian Democratic Conference and Pre-Parliament
- 1918Chairman, Ufa State Conference; headed the Provisional All-Russian Government
- 1918–1940Émigré political work in Paris; Freemasonry; published Sovremennye Zapiski
- 1940–1943Published Za Svobodu (For Freedom) in New York