Demetrius Alekseyevich Gallitzin

Prince Dmitri Alexeievich Gallitzin FRS (21 December 1728 – 16 March 1803) was a Russian diplomat, art agent, author, volcanologist and mineralogist. He was a supporter of the recognition of the United States, and participated in the drafting of the League of Armed Neutrality. He was the first Russian educated people that made specific proposals on the abolition of serfdom in Russia.

Gallitzin, born in Saint Petersburg, was the son of Prince Alexei Ivanovitch Gallitzin and Princess Gagarin. In 1754 he was appointed at Collegium of Foreign Affairs. In 1760 he moved to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Diderot, Voltaire, d'Alembert, and Claude Adrien Helvétius. After the coup in 1762 Catherine the Great appointed him ministre plenipotentiair to France. In 1764 he introduced Étienne-Maurice Falconet to the tsarina. It was through Prince Dmitri that Catherine purchased the destitute Diderot's library (1766), with the stipulation that he take care of the 2900 books, at an excellent salary. Though nominally an Orthodox Russian, he accepted and openly professed the principles of a rationalist philosophy. Gallitzin was one of the first Russians that promoted the ideas of the Physiocrats.

Gallitzin was involved in the Polish question and recalled to Russia as it seems to discuss another appointment. Passing through Aachen, he met the Countess Adelheid Amelie von Schmettau, only daughter of the Prussian Field-Marshal Samuel von Schmettau. The nineteen-year-old Countess had accompanied Prince Augustus Ferdinand of Prussia (brother of Frederick the Great) and his wife Margravine Elisabeth Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt to the spa. An unpublished story by Diderot, Mystification, recalls how Gallitzin used the French author and an alleged Turkish doctor to intervene with a former mistress before the marriage to retrieve portraits of her lover.

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