Nikolay Gredeskul

Nikolay Andreyevich Gredeskul (1864-1941) was a Russian liberal politician.

After graduating from the University of Kharkiv's law school, Gredeskul became a law professor (1890) and later dean of the law school there . In late 1904, with social tensions rising as Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese War mounted, he joined other prominent Russian professors in calling for political reform and an academic union and was instrumental in founding the liberal Soyuz Osvobozhdeniya (Liberation League). Gredeskul admitted that the professoriat's traditional hostility to student protests, e.g. during the student unrest in 1899, may have been a mistake . With the easing of restrictions on independent press during the Russian Revolution of 1905, he founded and edited Mir, a liberal newspaper in Kharkiv.

In October 1905, at the height of the revolution, Gredeskul became one of the founding members of the Constitutional Democratic party (aka the Kadet party) and a member of its Central Committee. In December 1905, after the suppression of the Moscow uprising, Gredeskul's paper was closed by the authorities, he was arrested and then exiled to the Arkhangelsk region. While in exile, he was elected to the First State Duma from the Kadets in February 1906, which ended his exile. He went to the capital, St. Petersburg, where he was elected Second Deputy Chairman of the Duma when it was convoked in April 1906. After the government dissolved the Duma on July 9, 1906, Gredeskul signed the Vyborg Manifesto, which called for passive resistance to the government. He was arrested, imprisoned for three months and barred from running in future Duma elections.

During the revolution, Gredeskul moved to St. Petersburg and became a professor of law at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. He coined the term "psychology of despair" to describe the psychology of the Russian society in the wake of the revolution's defeat . Considered one of the Kadets' leading theoreticians, Gredeskul defended radical traditions of the Russian intelligentsia against criticism from the Right by Vekhi authors in 1909. In late 1911, after the assassination of prime minister Pyotr Stolypin by Bogrov, a former secret police informer, Gredeskul argued that with the decline in revolutionary terrorism after 1907, the government should abandon its covert operations as well .

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