Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
years of wandering and disease, Miklukho-Mak-
lai returned with his family to St. Petersburg in
1887. Less than a year later he died in a hospital
on April 14, 1888, at the age of 41. Although
well known in the latter years of his life, Mik-
lukho-Maklai and his work were forgotten soon
after, despite the efforts of his friends and col-
leagues. In 1923 the Soviet government began
to recover his scholarly legacy by publishing the
diaries of his travels in New Guinea. Other more
complete scholarly editions followed in the
1950s, while the Institute of Ethnography of the
USSR Academy of Sciences was renamed in his
honor.
October 1964, Mikoyan played an important,
and by all accounts sincere, role in easing the
power transition from Khrushchev to Brezhnev,
once the Politburo turned against his former ally.
Mikoyan remained in ceremonial roles for a few
more years before retiring. When his old ally
Khrushchev died in 1971, Mikoyan managed to
send a wreath to the funeral. In 1988 his son,
Sergo Mikoyan, was the first of the children of
the old elite to acknowledge openly the responsi-
bility of their parents for the terrible Russian past
since the revolution.
Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich
(1859-1943)
historian and politician
The leading liberal politician between the 1905
and 1917 Revolutions, Miliukov served as for-
eign minister in the first Provisional Government
after the abdication of NICHOLAS II . Miliukov lec-
tured at Moscow University from 1886 to 1894,
but was dismissed for his sympathies with the
student movement. When the 1905 Revolution
broke out, Miliukov was lecturing in Chicago,
but he quickly returned to Russia and played a
crucial role in that turbulent year. Uncompro-
mising in his rejection of the Czarist regime, Mil-
iukov emerged as the dominant figure in the
newly formed Party of Constitutional Democrats
(Kadets), Russia's preeminent liberal party until
the October Revolution. In 1905, his politics
were slightly to the left of those of his liberal col-
leagues, rejecting the czar's October Manifesto
and pressing for a Constituent Assembly in con-
junction with more extreme revolutionaries.
Eventually, he came to terms with the post-1905
semiconstitutional settlement. He served as a
Kadet deputy in the Third and Fourth DUMA s
(1907-12, 1912-17). During World War I, he
was one of the loudest critics of the government's
war effort, joining the Progressive Bloc that
demanded a role in managing the wartime econ-
omy. He became notorious in November 1916 in
a thunderous speech in which he catalogued the
government's failings and then queried whether
Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich
(1895-1978)
Soviet official
Mikoyan was an astute Bolshevik politician who
managed to survive the turbulence of high Soviet
politics and remain close to the levels of power
under STALIN , KHRUSHCHEV , and BREZHNEV .An
Armenian by ethnicity, Mikoyan received a the-
ological education but joined the BOLSHEVIKS in
1915. In the early stages of the Russian Revolu-
tion, he served as a Bolshevik organizer in the
Caucasus. When anti-Bolshevik forces captured
Baku in 1918, through sheer luck Mikoyan
escaped the fate that awaited the famous 26
Baku commissars, who were rounded up, trans-
ported across the Caspian Sea, and shot in the
desert. Close to Stalin from the early moments of
the civil war, Mikoyan rose rapidly inside the
COMMUNIST PARTY hierarchy in the 1920s and
1930s, joining the Central Committee in 1923
and the Politburo in 1935. As a government offi-
cial, he specialized in trade and distribution;
between 1926 and 1949, he served in succession
as people's commissar for trade, supplies, food,
and, finally, foreign trade. After Stalin's death in
1953, he astutely threw his lot with Khrushchev,
eventually becoming deputy prime minister from
1955 to 1964. Khrushchev sent Mikoyan to
Cuba, where he fell in love with Castro's revolu-
tion, saying that it reminded him of his youth. In
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