Shakhovskoi, Dmitrii

Shakhovskoi, Dmitrii Ivanovich 

Born 1861 in Moscow; died Apr. 15,1939. Russian state and public figure. Prince. Grandson of the Decembrist F. P. Shakhovskoi.

D. I. Shakhovskoi graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1885. He served in the district zemstvo (assembly) of the city of Ves’egonsk. A contributor to the journal Osvobozhdenie, which he had helped found, Shakhovskoi was a member of the council of the Union of Liberation. He took part in the zemstvo congresses of 1904 and 1905.

Shakhovskoi joined the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) Party in 1905. In the following year he was a deputy to the State Duma and secretary of both the Duma and the Cadet faction. After the February Revolution of 1917, Shakhovskoi became minister of welfare in the bourgeois Provisional Government. In August 1917 he joined a committee of the Council of Public Figures, and in 1918 he helped establish the counterrevolutionary Union for the Rebirth of Russia.

During the 1920’s, Shakhovskoi engaged in literary activity and published material pertaining to P. Ia. Chaadaev (Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols. 22–24,1935).