pierre struve
Pierre Struve studied natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg before studying law from 1890. It was in this particularly active student environment that he began to take an interest in the works of Karl Marx. In the 1890s, he established himself as the main representative of "legal Marxism", which advocated the implementation of Marxism within the framework of a constitutional monarchy1 and not, as Lenin understood it, with the objective of a violent political revolution, aimed at establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Resigned in 1894 from his post at the Ministry of Finance, he was imprisoned for a few months.
In 1896, Pierre Struve participated in the congress of the Second International in London. He wrote the agrarian part of the presentation of the Russian delegation read by Gueorgui Plekhanov. Struve is editor of the first Russian Marxist reviews Novoié slovo (the New Word) in 1897 and Natchalo (The Beginning) in 1899. In March 1898, he participated in the Minsk congress, founding congress of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (RSDLP), whose manifesto he wrote. In 1903, he was arrested for participating in the demonstration in Kazan Square and was exiled to Tver, from where he smuggled abroad with the help of members of the local Zemstvo. In 1905, Serge de Witte, the new prime minister, asked him to return to Russia.
After the revolution of 1905, Struve became one of the main leaders of the Democratic Constitutional Party. He represented this party in the Duma of 1907, but reproaching the Democratic Constitutional Party for its radical opposition, he resigned from the latter's central committee in June 1915. After the February revolution, which he welcomed with hope, Struve was appointed to the Russian Academy of Sciences. However, he believes that Russia is headed for disaster. From the first days of the revolution, Struve decided to publish a weekly political supplement to The Russian Thought; Weekly "Russian Freedom" denouncing what he considers to be extremist excesses of the February Revolution, excesses which ultimately lead to the October Revolution, which Struve describes as a Bolshevik coup.
After the events of October 1917, Struve left Moscow in December of the same year, to join the volunteer army, one of the main white armies. He returned clandestinely to Moscow in March 1918, where he took part in the underground anti-Bolshevik organization “the national center” and published several books and articles, including the collective work Из глубины (De Deepis). Feeling threatened, he went to Finland before reaching Paris, where he sat in the “anti-Bolshevik government”. In 1919, he returned to the south of Russia controlled by General Denikin then by General Wrangel, where he became Minister of Foreign Affairs. After Wrangel's defeat against the Bolshevik troops in November 1920, Struve was evacuated to Bulgaria, where he tried to relaunch his newspaper La Pensée Russe which he published in Sofia in 1921, then in Prague (1922 - 1923), in Berlin. (1923 - 1926) and finally in 1927 in Paris. But as at that time, he gave all his strength to another of his productions; the Vozrojdenia (Renaissance) newspaper. He had to make up his mind to no longer deal with the writing of La Pensée Russe. At the same time, he teaches at the Russian Law School in Prague. PB Struve is slowly evolving towards what he will define as “conservative social-liberalism” or left-wing “conservative liberalism”, emphasizing the idea of Freedom as the necessary basis for the political and socio-economic future of Russia. Regarding the emergence in the political field of communism, fascism and later National Socialism, Struve will put them, in his own words, "in the same bag", asserting that with these ideologies, the terms left and right could no longer apply.Organized at Struve's initiative to unite Russian political organizations, The Congress of Russian Emigration, brought together representatives of the Russian diaspora from 26 countries, in Paris at the Hôtel Majestic from April 4 to April 11, 1926. The congress which brings together around 400 delegates, is chaired by Pierre Struve, Alexandre Trepov, Pyotr Krasnov, Nikolai Markov, Sergei Sergeyevich Oldenburg, Ivan Ilin and other figures of Russian emigration. The congress adopted an appeal to Grand Duke Nicholas. At the congress were discussed: the situation in Soviet Russia; the report of the future Russia and its national public authorities to the Russian people in the Red Army and Soviet service (report AM Maslennikov); the main features of the future economic structure of Russia (BN Sokolov report); the land question (VI Gurko Report)
In 1928, he moved to Belgrade, where he was offered the presidency of the chair of human sciences at the Russian scientific institute. He gives sociology courses both at the chair in Belgrade and at that of Subotica. At this time, Struve gradually gave up his political activities. In the last years of his life, he worked on The System of Critical Philosophy (of which the manuscript has disappeared) and The Socio-Economic History of Russia (the manuscript, unfinished, was published in 1952). World War II surprises him in Belgrade, where he is caught up in German bombs. In April 1941, Pierre Struve was arrested as a “Marxist” by the Gestapo and transferred to Graz prison in Austria. He was finally released a few months later. He returned to Paris in 1942, where he died in February 1944. At his funeral, Father Serge Bulgakov, his friend over the years, said of him: “Your work is finished; you were the crusader of Russian freedom ”.