Nikolai Alekseevich Miliutin

Born June 6 (18), 1818, in Moscow; died there Jan. 26 (Feb. 7), 1872. Russian statesman. Brother of V. A. Miliutin and D. A. Miliutin.

Miliutin graduated from the Noblemen’s Boarding School at Moscow University and served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1835. A moderate liberal close to the Slavophiles, he drew up the Municipal Statute of 1846 for St. Petersburg. He also wrote and edited many works on statistics. From 1859 he was assistant minister of internal affairs and was virtually in charge of preparing the Peasant Reform of 1861. On the Editing Commissions he represented the liberal bureaucracy, which attempted, in opposition to the supporters of serfdom, to impart a more bourgeois character to the impending reform. From 1859 to 1861 he was also chairman of the commission that drafted the zemstvo (local self-government) Reform of 1864. When the government moved to the right in the spring of 1861, he was retired and was appointed a senator. In the autumn of 1863, at the time of the Polish Uprising of 1863–64, Miliutin was sent to Poland to prepare reforms. With lu. F. Samarin and V. A. Cherkasskii he drew up the Statute on the Structure of Rural Communes and Peasant Life in the Kingdom of Poland, which was adopted on Feb. 19, 1864. Appointed secretary of state for Polish affairs and chief of the civilian part of the governor-general’s Chancellery in Warsaw in 1864, Miliutin imposed a policy of Russification. From 1865 he was a member of the State Council, chief of the Chancellery for the Affairs of the Kingdom of Poland in St. Petersburg, and a member of the Main Committee on the Structure of Rural Estates. He retired from political life in 1867 because of poor health.