Nikolay Milyutin - Career

Career

Milyutin graduated from Moscow University and joined the Ministry of the Interior in 1835. A man of liberal views who sympathized with the Slavophile cause, Milyutin helped reform the municipal administration in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa during the 1840s.

As an Assistant Minister of Interior since 1859, he succeeded in defending his vision of ambitious liberal reforms against attacks by conservatives and disconcerted nobility. The Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 was largely drafted by him.

During the January Uprising he was dispatched to Poland in order to implement reforms there. He devised a program which involved the emancipation of the peasantry at the expense of the nationalist landowners and the expulsion of Roman Catholic priests from schools. Over seven hundred thousand Polish peasants were granted freehold land to farm as the result of Milyutin's reforms. A Russian university was established at Warsaw, and all secondary school lessons were required to be given in Russian, not Polish. Finally, the property of the Catholic Church was confiscated and sold. Although Milyutin had previously opposed the "direct and outright Russification" of Poland, according to one biographer, historian W. Bruce Lincoln, Milyutin's reforms effectively "hastened the coming of stern Russification policies" in Poland.

Milyutin resigned his office in December 1866, after having suffered a paralytic stroke, and spent the rest of his life in seclusion. He died on January 26, 1872 in Moscow.