Russia and Its Crisis (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

Paul Miliukov (1859-1943) graduated from both Moscow and St. Petersburg universities and began his professional life as a scholar. His political development, not dissimilar to that of many other Russian intellectuals of the time, led him to fight against all the terrors of Tsarist repression, then cherish the potential in Russia for European-style liberal democracy, and then fight, during the height of the October Revolution, to preserve the Tsar’s power in the face of Lenin and the Bolshevik marauders. Indeed, one lasting picture in To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson’s masterful study of the history of Soviet communism, has Miliukov, as the Provisional Government’s nattily dressed, bespectacled Minister of Foreign Affairs, frantically cabling his consuls in 1917 to prevent Lenin’s train from entering into Russia.