Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode 313, Sergei Vite.

Last time, we ended the series on the Great Purge,

also known as the Great Terror of 1937 to 39.

Today we shift gears and discuss the life and times of Sergei Vite, the first prime minister of the Russian government under Zarr Nicholas II.

Born on June 29, 1849 to Julius and I-Katerina Fadeva Vite in Tiflis, now to Blee, Georgia.

Sergei Vite would be the first Prime Minister of Russia, a position traditionally held by the

Tsar. He would be responsible for turning Russia into an industrialized nation, although the country had a very long way to go.

Vite would write a memoir translated in 1921 six years after his death. His wife would write the forward,

and there was one part that caught my eye

when describing her husband.

Although a nobleman, he did not defend the privileges of the nobility, and while aiming in his political activities, mainly at improving the condition of the peasantry in accordance with the dictates of justice, as a statesman he remained

alien to that theoretical populism with which the majority of the Russian intellectuals was

infatuated.

He was not a liberal, for he did not sympathize with the striving of the liberals to reorganize

the political system all at once with a single stroke. Nor was he a conservative, for he

despised the coarseness and backwardness of the political thinking which was

characteristic of Russia's ruling bureaucracy.

My husband repeatedly said to those intimate with him, quote, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative. I am simply a man of culture. I cannot exile a man to Siberia merely because he does not think as I do, and I cannot deprive him of civil rights because he does not pray in the same church as I do.

Now hearing this, you can imagine why I picked Sergei Vite as the subject of today's episode.

He was an absolutely brilliant man, one who tried with all his heart and mind to do what was best

for Russia. He didn't always make the right decision in the long run, but he always

...