Iakushkin, Viacheslav

Born Oct. 4 (16), 1856, in Moscow; died there Dec. 2 (15), 1912. Russian historian, journalist, and public figure. Son of E. I. Iakushkin.

A member of the nobility, V. E. Iakushkin graduated from the faculty of history and philology at Moscow University in 1879. In 1890 he defended his master’s dissertation, Essays on the History of Russian Land Policy in the 18th and 19th Centuries (1890). He was a privatdocent at Moscow University until 1899, when he was exiled to Yaroslavl because of a paper on A. S. Pushkin’s social views that he had delivered at the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word.

Iakushkin was a prominent figure in the zemstvo (local self-government) movement and a member of the Union of Liberation. He helped found the Constitutional Democratic Party and became a member of its central committee; he belonged to the left wing of the party. Iakushkin was a deputy to the First State Duma. In 1907 he was sentenced to three months in prison for taking part in the drafting of the Vyborg Appeal.

In the early 1880’s Iakushkin became a leading contributor to the newspaper Russkie vedomosti and the journals Vestnik Evropy and Russkaia starina. He wrote a description and a survey of Pushkin’s manuscripts (Russkaia starina, 1884, nos. 2–12), and he produced a scholarly edition of Pushkin’s works, lakushkin’s numerous other works deal with the history of the agrarian question in Russia, domestic policy in the 18th and 19th centuries, Russian social thought, and Russian literature.