Burtsev, Vladimir

Born 1862; died 1942. Russian publicist and publisher; member of the People’s Will in the 1880’s. He was close to the Socialist Revolutionaries and later to the Cadets. Born in the city of Fort-Aleksandrovskii.

In 1885, Burtsev was arrested and exiled to Siberia; in 1888 he fled abroad, where he published the magazines Svobodnaia Rossiia (Free Russia; 1889) and Narodovolets (People’s Will Member; in the 1890’s) in London and Geneva. In 1900, Burtsev began to publish the magazine Byloe (The Past). In 1905 he returned to Russia, and in 1906 he continued to publish Byloe in St. Petersburg. He went abroad again in 1907.

Burtsev gained fame with his exposure of the pro-vocateurs of the Okhranka (tsarist secret police) who operated in Russia and abroad, specifically E. F. Azef and R. V. Malinovskii. From 1911 to 1914 he published the newspaper Budushchee (The Future) in Paris. In 1915 he returned to Russia. After the February Revolution in 1917 he began to publish the counterrevolutionary newspaper Obshchee delo (Common Cause); he subsequently transferred its publication to Paris. As a White émigré, Burtsev participated in the creation in Paris in 1921 of the anti-Soviet “National Committee” to unify the forces of counterrevolution in the struggle against the Soviet state.