accusations of the royal family members of treason and harshly criticized the government. Every part of Milyukov’s speech ended with “What Is This: Stupidity or Treason?” The speech was denied publication, but became popular through many private copies and later received the name of “The Attacking Sign.”
After the February revolution Milyukov served as the foreign minister in the Provisional Government. Milyukov’s note of April, 1917, declaring support for fulfilling obligations to the allies provoked antigovernmental demonstrations and caused him to retire. Milyukov attacked the Bolsheviks, demanding Lenin’s arrest, and criticized the Provisional Government for its inability to restore order. After the October Revolution, Milyukov left for the Don, and wrote, at the request of general Mikhail Alexeyev, the Declaration of the Volunteer Army. In the summer of 1918, while in Kiev, he tried to contact German command, hoping to receive aid in the struggle against Bolshevism. Milyukov’s “German orientation,” unsupported by a majority of the Cadet Party, led to the downfall of his authority and caused him to retire as chairman of the party. In November of 1918, Milyukov went abroad, living in London, where he participated in the Russian Liberation Committee. From 1920, he lived in Paris. After the defeat of White armies, he proposed a set of “new tactics,” the point of which was to defeat Bolshevism from within. Milyukov’s “new tactics” received no support among most emigr? Cadets and in 1921 he formed the Paris Democratic Group of the Party, which caused a split within the Cadets. In 1924 the group was modified into a Republican-Democrat Union. From 1921 to 1940 Milyukov edited the most popular emigr? newspaper The Latest News (Poslednie Novosti). He became one of the first historians of the revolution and the civil war, publishing History of the Second Russian Revolution (Sofia, 1921-1923), and Russia at the Turning-point (in two volumes, Paris, 1927).
In 1940, escaping the Nazi invasion, Milyukov fled to the south of France, where he worked on his memoirs, published posthumously. He welcomed the victories of the Soviet army and accepted the accomplishments of the Stalinist regime in fortifying Russian Statehood in his article “The Truth of Bolshevism” (1942). Milyukov died in Aix- les-Bains on March 31, 1943. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION HISTORIOGRAPHY; LIBERALISM; OCTOBER REVOLUTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Emmons, Terence. (1999). “On the Problem of Russia’s ‘Separate Path’ in Late Imperial Historiography.” In Historiography of Imperial Russia, ed Tomas Sanders. Armonk, NY: M. E.Sharpe. Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich. (1942). Outlines of Russian Culture. 3 vols., ed. Michael Karpovich; tr. Valentine Ughet and Eleanor Davis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich. (1967). Political memoirs, 1905-1917, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, tr. Carl Goldberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich. (1978-1987). The Russian Revolution. 3 vols., ed. Richard Stites; tr. Tatyana and Richard Stites. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich; Seignobos, Charles; and Eisenmann, L. (1968). History of Russia. New York: Funk amp; Wagnalls. Riha, Thomas. (1969). A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Stockdale, Melissa K. (1996). Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880-1918. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
OLEG BUDNITSKII
(1816-1912), count (1878), political and military figure, military historian, and Imperial Russian war minister (1861-1881).
General Adjutant Milyutin was born in Moscow, the scion of a Tver noble family. He completed the gymnasium at Moscow University (1832) and the Nicholas Military Academy (1836). After a brief period with the Guards’ General Staff, he served from 1839 to 1840 with the Separate Caucasian Corps. While convalescing from wounds during 1840 and 1841, he traveled widely in Europe, where he decided to devote himself to the cause of reform in Russia. As a professor at the Nicholas Academy from 1845 to 1853, he founded the discipline of military statistics and provided the impulse for compilation of a military-statistical description of the Russian Empire. In 1852 and 1853 he published a prize-winning five-volume history of Generalissimo A. V. Suvorov’s Italian campaign of 1799. As a member of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society he associated with a number of future reformers, including Konstantin Kavelin, P. P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, Nikolai Bunge, and his brother, Nikolai Milyutin. An opponent of serfdom, the future war minister freed his own peasants and subsequently (in 1856) wrote a tract advocating the liberation of Russian serfs.
As a major general within the War Ministry during the Crimean War, Milyutin concluded that the army required fundamental reform. While serving from 1856 to 1860 as chief of staff for Prince Alexander Baryatinsky’s Caucasian Corps, Milyutin directly influenced the successful outcome of the campaign against the rebellious mountaineer Shamil. After becoming War Minister in November 1861, Milyutin almost immediately submitted to Tsar Alexander II a report that outlined a program for comprehensive military reform. The objectives were to modernize the army, to restructure military administration at the center, and to create a territorial system of military districts for peacetime maintenance of the army. Although efficiency remained an important goal, Milyutin’s reform legislation also revealed a humanitarian side: abolition of corporal punishment, creation of a modern military justice system, and a complete restructuring of the military-educational system to emphasize spiritual values and the welfare of the rank-and-file. These and related changes consumed the war minister’s energies until capstone legislation of 1874 enacted a universal military service obligation. Often in the face of powerful opposition, Milyutin had orchestrated a grand achievement, although the acknowledged price included increased bureaucratic formalism and rigidity within the War Ministry. Within a larger imperial context, Milyutin consistently advanced Russian geopolitical interests and objectives. He favored suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863-1864, supported the conquest of Central Asia, and advocated an activist policy in the Balkans. On the eve of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, he endorsed a military resolution of differences with Turkey, holding that the Eastern Question was primarily Russia’s to decide. During the war itself, he accompanied the field army into the Balkans, where he counseled persistence at Plevna, asserting that successful resolution of the battle-turned-siege would serve as prelude to further victories. After the war, Milyutin became the de facto arbiter of Russian foreign policy.
Within Russia, after the Berlin Congress of 1878, Milyutin pressed for continuation of Alexander II’s Great Reforms, supporting the liberal program of the Interior Ministry’s Mikhail Loris-Melikov. However, after the accession of Alexander III and publication in May 1881 of an imperial manifesto reasserting autocratic authority, Mi-lyutin retired to his Crimean estate. He continued to maintain an insightful diary and commenced his memoirs. The latter grew to embrace almost the entire history of nineteenth-century Russia, with important perspectives on the Russian Empire and contiguous lands and on its relations with Europe, Asia, and America. See also: MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; GREAT REFORMS; MILITARY; SUVOROV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brooks, Edwin Willis. (1970). “D. A. Miliutin: Life and Activity to 1856.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Menning, Bruce W. (1992, 2000). Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Forrestt A. (1968). Dmitrii Miliutin and the Reform Era in Russia. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
(1818-1870), government official and reformer.
Nikolai Milyutin was born into a well-connected noble family of modest means. One of his brothers, Dmitry, would serve as Minister of War
from 1861 to 1881. Nikolai entered government service at the age of seventeen and served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1835 until 1861. A succession of ministers, recognizing his industry and talent, had him draft major reports to be issued in their names. He was largely responsible for compiling the Urban Statute of 1846, which, as applied to St. Petersburg and then to other large cities, somewhat expanded the number of persons who could vote in city elections.
Until 1858, Milyutin was a relatively obscure functionary. In the next six years he was the principal author of legislation that fundamentally changed the Russian empire: the Statutes of February 19, 1861, abolishing serfdom; the legislation establishing elective agencies of local self-administration (zemstva), enacted in 1864; and legislation intended to end the sway of the Polish nobility after their participation in the insurrection of 1863. He exercised this
