Background
Vladimir L'vovich Burtsev was born on November 17, 1862, in Fort- Aleksandrovsky, in the Transcaspian Oblast of the Russian Empire (present-day Kazakhstan) to a military family.
Saint Petersburg State University
Kazan Federal University
publisher scholars revolutionary activist
Vladimir L'vovich Burtsev was born on November 17, 1862, in Fort- Aleksandrovsky, in the Transcaspian Oblast of the Russian Empire (present-day Kazakhstan) to a military family.
In 1882, Vladimir L'vovich was expelled from Saint Petersburg State University and in 1885 from Kazan State University (now Kazan Federal University) for taking part in student disturbances. As a member of Narodnaya Volya, he was imprisoned for two years (for about a year in the Peter and Paul Fortress) and in 1886 exiled to the Irkutsk region of Eastern Siberia.
In 1888 Vladimir L'vovich managed to escape from exile and emigrate to Switzerland. In 1889 he co-founded magazine Svobodnaya Rossiya (Free Russia). In 1890 he, wanted by the czarist police, boarded a British boat bound from Constantinople to London. When the ship found itself surrounded by Turkish police vessels with Russians on board, the captain refused their demand to hand over the fugitive, announcing: "This is English territory. And I am a gentleman!"
In 1898, Vladimir L'vovich was arrested by British police for advocating, in his magazine Narodovolets (Narodnaya Volya Comrade), the assassination of Nicholas II. He was found guilty and sentenced to 18 months at hard labour. On his release he went on to publish it in Switzerland, resulting in his permanent ban from that country.
In London, Vladimir L'vovich published the two-volume book Za Sto Let (1800-1896) (For Hundred Years). He founded and published six issues of Byloye (The Past), a historical magazine. After the Russian Revolution of 1905, he briefly returned illegally to Russia and founded the Russian version of the Byloye magazine. Upon his return to the West in 1907, Vladimir L'vovich began publishing the magazine Obshcheye Delo (Common Cause) which was a continuation of the foreign edition of Byloye beginning with the 7th issue.
At the outset of World War I in 1914 Vladimir L'vovich repatriated, was arrested at the border, and again exiled to Siberia. Amnestied in 1915, he returned to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg). Vladimir L'vovich spent the rest of his life as an emigre, first in Finland, then Sweden and later in France. During the Russian Civil War, he supported the White Movement of Admiral Kolchak and General Anton Denikin.
As a teenager, Vladimir L'vovich was inclined to religious exaltation and dreamed of monasticism. In the late 1870s, he lost faith in God.
Vladimir L'vovich strenuously opposed the Bolsheviks. In 1917 he accused Lenin and his comrades of being agents of Germany. In his article Either Us or the Germans and Those with Them (Russian Freedom, July 7, 1917). On the day of the October revolution, he was arrested on orders of Leon Trotsky, which led some historians to count him as the first political prisoner in the USSR. Despite their political differences and public disputes in the press, Maxim Gorky pleaded for Burtsev's release and in February 1918 he was indeed freed and left Soviet Russia.