Dmitrii Akhsharumov

Born May 7 (19), 1823, in St. Petersburg; died Jan. 7 (20), 1910, in Baku. Russian public figure. A member of the Petrashevskii group. Son of the historian D. I. Akhsharumov.

Akhsharumov graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1846 and served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1847 on. He frequented the circle of the brothers Debu, then N. S. Kashkin’s circle and, from December 1848 on, M. V. Petrashevskii’s Fridays. He was a utopian socialist and a follower of C. Fourier. He desired the overthrow of the autocracy and its replacement by a republic or a constitutional monarchy; and he advocated propaganda and enlistment of the oppressed lower classes into the political struggle. Akhsharumov left behind a number of documents that are valuable for the study of the ideology of the Petrashevskii group, including a speech at a dinner on Apr. 7, 1849, in honor of Fourier. He was sentenced to be shot, but the sentence was commuted to four years of work in convict labor gangs in exile. After his release he graduated from the Academy of Medicine and Surgery in 1862. He is the author of many works on medicine.