Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich

Born in 1869 in Tsarskoe Selo, now Pushkin; died Mar. 28, 1922, in Berlin. Russian criminologist and political figure.

After graduating from the faculty of law at the University of St. Petersburg in 1890, Nabokov served in the chancellery of the State Council. From 1896 to 1904 he was a professor of criminal law in the Jurisprudence College, editor of the bourgeois-liberal legal journals Pravo and Vestnik prava, and a contributor to the journal Osvobozhdenie. Because he defended persons in tsarist courts, he was deprived of his aristocratic title of kammerherr in 1904.

Nabokov took part in the Zemstvo congresses of 1904–05 and in the Union of Liberation. He was one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Cadets) and cochairman of its central committee and editor and publisher of its organ, Vestnik partii narodnoi svobody, as well as of the newspaper Rech’. He was a deputy to the First State Duma and a signer of the Vyborg Appeal. Nabokov was brought to trial for his correspondence relating to the Beilis case in 1913.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Nabokov managed the affairs of the bourgeois Provisional Government. After the October Revolution, in accordance with the decree of the Soviet government of November 28 (December 11) regarding leaders of the Cadet Party, he was subject to arrest. In December 1917 he went into hiding in Gaspra, in the Crimea. In 1919 he became minister of justice in the bourgeois nationalist government of the Crimea.

Nabokov, in emigration after 1920, joined the right wing of the Cadet Party. With I. V. Gessen he published the newspaper Rul’ in Berlin. He was killed by a monarchist émigré. Nabokov’s memoirs about the Provisional Government were reprinted in Moscow in 1924.