Pyotr Struve

Peter (or Pyotr or Petr) Berngardovich Struve (Russian: Пётр Бернга́рдович Стру́ве; pronounced [pʲɵtr bʲɪrnˈɡardəvʲɪtɕˈstruvʲɪ]; January 26, 1870 in Perm – February 22, 1944 in Paris) was a Russian political economist, philosopher and editor. He started out as a Marxist, later became a liberal and after the Bolshevik revolution joined the White movement. From 1920, he lived in exile in Paris, where he was a prominent critic of Russian Communism.

Peter Struve is probably the best known member of the Russian branch of the Struve family. Son of Bernhard Struve (Astrakhan and later Perm governor) and grandson of astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, he entered the Natural Sciences Department of the University of Saint Petersburg in 1889 and transferred to its law school in 1890. While there, he became interested in Marxism, attended Marxist and narodniki (populist) meetings (where he met his future opponent Vladimir Lenin) and wrote articles for legally published magazines—hence the term Legal Marxism, whose chief proponent he became. In September 1893 Struve was hired by the Finance Ministry and worked in its library, but was fired on June 1, 1894 after an arrest and a brief detention in April–May of that year. In 1894, he also published his first major book, Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (Critical Notes on the Economic Development of Russia) in which he defended the applicability of Marxism to Russian conditions against populist critics.

...
Wikipedia