Pyotr Berngardovich Struve

Pyotr Berngardovich Struve (born Feb. 7 [Jan. 26, Old Style], 1870, Perm, Russia—died Feb. 26, 1944, Paris, France) was a liberal Russian economist and political scientist.

While studying economic theory and history at the University of St. Petersburg, Struve became a Marxist. The Marxist analysis of Russian capitalism that he presented in 1894 in his Kriticheskiye zametki k voprocy ob ekonomicheskom razviti rossi (“Critical Remarks on the Subject of Russia’s Economic Development”) procured for him a reputation among the left-wing intelligentsia, and in the late 1890s he served as the editor of several Marxist journals, including the influential periodical Novoye Slovo (“New Word”). Having become acquainted with Georgy Plekhanov and V.I. Lenin, Struve was asked to compose the manifesto for their nascent Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party after the party held its first congress in 1898.

After his arrest and exile from Russia in 1901, Struve broke with revolutionary Marxism, turning instead to a radical form of constitutional liberalism in which he maintained his highly critical stance toward the tsarist autocracy.

He was perhaps most influential as the editor of the illegal journal Osvobozhdeniy (“Liberation”), which appeared from 1902 to 1905 and was published successively in Stuttgart and Paris. The journal, which was regularly smuggled into Russia and had a wide readership, advocated the granting of full civil rights in Russia and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Struve had by this time drifted to the right of the socialist movement, and soon after his return to Russia in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905, he joined the newly founded Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). He was elected to the second Duma (1907), but his moderate views and bitter criticism of revolutionary ideologies increasingly alienated him from other Russian progressives. Struve supported the Russian war effort during World War I and continued to edit the independent moderate journal Russkaya mysly (“Russian Thought”) as he had done since 1905. He opposed the October Revolution of 1917 and participated for a time in White Guard resistance to the Bolsheviks before taking up residence in Paris, where he edited anti-Soviet émigré publications. After 1928 he lived in Belgrade, where he taught and did research on Russian topics.