20 Facts About Peter Struve

Peter Struve started his career as a Marxist, later became a liberal and after the Bolshevik Revolution, joined the White movement.

Peter Struve is probably the best known member of the Russian branch of the Struve family.

In 1895, Peter Struve finished his degree and wrote an Open letter to Nicholas II on behalf of the Zemstvo.

Peter Struve then went abroad for further studies, where he attended the 1896 International Socialist Congress in London and befriended famous Russian revolutionary exile Vera Zasulich.

In 1898 Peter Struve wrote the Manifesto of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

In late 1900, Peter Struve went to Munich and again held lengthy talks with the radicals between December 1900 and February 1901.

Peter Struve was banished from the capital and, like other demonstrators, was offered to choose his own place of exile.

In 1902 Peter Struve secretly left Tver and went abroad, but by then the radicals had abandoned the idea of a joint magazine and Peter Struve's further evolution from socialism to liberalism would have made collaboration difficult anyway.

When German police, under pressure from Okhrana, raided the premises in October 1904, Peter Struve moved his operations to Paris and continued publishing the magazine for another year until the October Manifesto proclaimed freedom of the press in Russia.

In October 1905 Peter Struve returned to Russia, and became a co-founder of the liberal Constitutional Democratic party and a member of its Central Committee.

Peter Struve was the driving force behind Vekhi, a groundbreaking and controversial anthology of essays critical of the intelligentsia and its rationalistic and radical traditions.

In May 1917, after the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew monarchy in Russia, Peter Struve was elected as member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, until he was excluded by the Bolshevik-engineered expulsion of 1918.

Immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, Peter Struve went to the South of Russia where he joined the Volunteer Army's Council.

Peter Struve represented general Anton Denikin's anti-Bolshevik government in Paris and London in 1919, before returning to Denikin-controlled territories in the South of Russia, where he edited a leading newspaper of the White Movement.

In Bulgaria, Peter Struve left many followers in the field of economics, especially his students, who emigrated and took academic positions at Bulgarian universities.

Peter Struve's children were prominent in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

Peter Struve's father was Russian Orthodox while his mother was Lutheran.

Peter Struve taught at the University of California, Berkeley and befriended Vladimir Nabokov in the 1920s.

Pyotr's grandson, Nikita Peter Struve, was a professor at a Paris university and an editor of several Russian-language periodicals published in Europe.

Historian Bernard Pares said Peter Struve was one Europe's most powerful thinkers.