Krivoshein, Aleksandr Vasilevich

Krivoshein, Aleksandr Vasil’evich 

Born July 19 (31), 1857, in Warsaw; died Oct. 28, 1921, in Berlin. Russian statesman.

Krivoshein was deputy chief of the resettlement administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1896 to 1904 and chief of this administration in 1904–05. He was P. A. Stolypin’s closest colleague in the implementation of the agrarian reform involving the breakup of communal landholding and the promotion of individual farmsteads, as well as in the settlement and development of Siberia and Turkestan. Krivoshein was deputy administrator on land management and agriculture in 1905–06 and administrator of this department from 1908 to 1915. From 1906 to 1908 he was deputy minister of finance and administrator of the Banks of the Nobility and the Peasantry.

Appointed to the Council of State in 1906, Krivoshein was at first an extreme rightist, but later joined the zemstvo movement. He was influential in the resignation of Prime Minister V. N. Kokovtsov in January 1914 and in the dismissal of Minister of War V. A. Sukhomlinov. Krivoshein’s attempt to form a “government of public confidence” was rejected by Nicholas II and in October 1915 Krivoshein resigned. After the October Revolution of 1917 he was one of the founders of the counterrevolutionary Right Center in Moscow; in 1918 he fled to Kiev, where he organized the counterrevolutionary and monarchist Council for the State Unification of Russia. In 1920, Krivoshein became head of General P. N. Wrangel’s government in the Crimea; after the collapse of the Wrangel affair he emigrated to France.