Pavel Milyukov

Pavel Milyukov was born in 1859 in Moscow, in an upper-class family of a professor of architecture. He studied history and philology at the Moscow University, where he was influenced by the liberal ideas of Konstantin Kavelin and Boris Chicherin. He became a prominent scholar of Russian history and culture, writing the acclaimed Outlines of Russian Culture (3 vol., 1896–1903). He also became involved in the populist revolutionary movement and joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He was elected to the First Duma in 1906 as a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), which he founded and led. He was one of the leaders of the Progressive Bloc, a coalition of liberal and moderate parties that demanded political reforms from the tsarist regime. He was also a vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies that emerged after the February Revolution of 1917. He joined the Provisional Government that replaced the monarchy and became the foreign minister. He tried to balance the demands of the Soviet and the Allies, who wanted Russia to continue the war against Germany. He faced increasing opposition from the radical socialists, especially the Bolsheviks, who denounced him as a bourgeois politician. He resigned in May 1917 after a major crisis over his declaration of war aims, which contradicted the Soviet's demand for peace without annexations or indemnities. He was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution and fled the country. He lived in exile in France, where he continued to write and lecture on Russian history and politics. He died in 1943 in Aix-les-Bains and was buried in Paris. He is remembered as one of the greatest of Russia's liberal historians and a spokesman for imperial Russia's nascent liberal movement.