Nikolay Vasilyevich Chaykovsky

Nikolay Vasilyevich Chaykovsky (born Jan. 7, 1851, [Dec. 26, 1850, Old Style], Vyatka [now Kirov], Russia—died April 30, 1926, Harrow, Middlesex, Eng.) was a revolutionary socialist and leader of the early Narodnik movement in Russia.

Having joined a radical students’ circle in St. Petersburg in 1869, Chaykovsky became its leader when its founder, Mark Natanson, was arrested (1871); the group became known as the Chaykovsky Circle. Dedicated to spreading socialist ideas as widely as possible, the circle distributed legally published political books and organized discussion groups among industrial workers. It attracted members from a variety of schools of radical thought, grew into the first major populist movement in Russia, and formed the foundation of the revolutionary parties that emerged in the late 1870s.

A change in his own personal philosophy prompted Chaykovsky to part from the Chaykovsky Circle and immigrate to the United States (1873), where he lived in a socialist commune in Kansas (1875–77). After the commune failed, he went to London and again became involved in the Russian revolutionary movement, collecting funds, publishing a nonparty newspaper, and joining the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1907 he returned to Russia and assumed a leading role in the cooperative movement.

During 1917 Chaykovsky opposed the Bolsheviks; and, after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he became the head of an anti-Bolshevik (White) government at Arkhangelsk, which he represented at the Paris peace talks (January 1919) after World War I. After the Arkhangelsk government collapsed (1920), he shifted his support to the nonsocialist White Russian leader General Anton Denikin and then moved to Paris and later, England.