Pyotr Berngardovich Struve
Пётр Бернгардович СтрувеFrom Marxism through liberalism to conservative anti-Bolshevism: the thinker who traced the arc of a Russian intelligentsia
Vasily Shulgin recalled asking him: “So you too should have been crushed?” Struve, trembling his white beard, rose and shouted: “Yes! Me first! The moment a revolutionary raises his head — whack! — a rifle butt to the skull!”
A thinker who moved from legal Marxism through liberal activism, co-founding the Union of Liberation and contributing to Vekhi (1909), to becoming a White ideologue. He wrote the first RSDLP Manifesto (1898) and sustained anti-Bolshevik scholarship in emigration.
Career timeline
- 1894Critical Notes on Russia's Economic Development, leading legal Marxist
- 1898Drafted the Manifesto of the 1st RSDLP Congress
- 1902–1905Edited Osvobozhdenie; co-founded the Union of Liberation
- 1905–1915Kadet CC member; contributor to Vekhi (1909)
- 1907Deputy to the Second State Duma (Petersburg)
- 1917Full Academician; Director of Economic Dept, MFA
- 1918–1920White ideologue; foreign relations for Denikin and Wrangel
- 1921–1944Émigré editor and scholar, Vozrozhdenie and other journals