Nikolay Andreyevich Gredeskul (Ukrainian: Гредескул Микола Андрійович; Russian: Николай Андреевич Гредескул; 20 April 1865 – 8 September 1941[1]) was a liberal politician from the Russian Empire.
He was from an old noble family of Moldavian boyars, who emigrated to Russian Empire (Kharkiv region, today Ukraine) together with Dimitrie Cantemir.[2]
After graduating from the University of Kharkiv's law school, Gredeskul became a law professor (1890) and later dean of the law school there [1]. In late 1904, with social tensions rising as Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese War mounted, he joined other prominent Russian professors in calling for political reform and an academic union and was instrumental in founding the liberal Soyuz Osvobozhdeniya (Liberation League). Gredeskul admitted that the professoriat's traditional hostility to student protests, e.g. during the student unrest in 1899, may have been a mistake [2]. With the easing of restrictions on independent press during the Russian Revolution of 1905, he founded and edited Mir, a liberal newspaper in Kharkiv.
In October 1905, at the height of the revolution, Gredeskul became one of the founding members of the Constitutional Democratic party (aka the Kadet party) and a member of its Central Committee. In December 1905, after the suppression of the Moscow uprising, Gredeskul's paper was closed by the authorities, he was arrested and then exiled to the Arkhangelsk region. While in exile, he was elected to the First State Duma from the Kadets in February 1906, which ended his exile. He went to the capital, St. Petersburg, where he was elected Second Deputy Chairman of the Duma when it was convoked in April 1906. After the government dissolved the Duma on July 9, 1906, Gredeskul signed the Vyborg Manifesto, which called for passive resistance to the government. He was arrested, imprisoned for three months and barred from running in future Duma elections.
During the revolution, Gredeskul moved to St. Petersburg and became a professor of law at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. He coined the term "psychology of despair" to describe the psychology of the Russian society in the wake of the revolution's defeat [3]. Considered one of the Kadets' leading theoreticians, Gredeskul defended[3] radical traditions of the Russian intelligentsia against criticism from the Right by Vekhi authors in 1909. In late 1911, after the assassination of prime minister Pyotr Stolypin by Bogrov, a former secret police informer, Gredeskul argued that with the decline in revolutionary terrorism after 1907, the government should abandon its covert operations as well [4].
Although at first Gredeskul was somewhat to the Left of the Constitutional Democratic party's center [5], after 1910 he moved to the Right and in 1912-1914 argued for an alliance with the Progressive faction and the Left wing of the Octobrists [6]. In 1916, at the height of World War I, he published a pamphlet on the problem of ethnic minorities in Russia, which suggested that his views were evolving in the nationalist direction [7]. In 1916 he began writing for Alexander Protopopov's Russkaya Volya (Russian Will), a nationalist newspaper, which led[4] to Gredeskul's resignation from the Kadet Central Committee. Gredeskul edited Russkaya Volya between the February Revolution of 1917 and the October Revolution of 1917, when it was closed down by the new Bolshevik government.
After the Bolshevik takeover, Gredeskul stayed in Soviet Russia [8] and argued that Russian intellectuals should come to terms with the new government, which he saw as evolving in a more nationalist direction, anticipating Nikolay Ustryalov's ideas by a few months. In the summer of 1920, Bolshevik authorities arranged a speaking tour of the country for him [9].
In the 1920s, Grudeskul joined the Communist Party and was employed by the government as a university professor in Leningrad. He tried to combine Marx and Nietzsche [10] in his book Russia, Before and Now (Rossiia prezhde i teper):