Peter Demens - Early Life

Early Life

Pyotr A. Dementyev was born to a wealthy family in Vesjegonsk district, Tver Oblast, Russia. Demens was a liberal minded, well educated aristocrat, a first cousin of Prince Petroff and a captain in the Imperial Guard. "Demens' father had left him two estates, one near the czar's capital of St. Petersburg and another close to Moscow." "His father died when he was an infant he was 4, his mother died." He reportedly "grew up in a huge stone house with never fewer than 30 servants" and "was the master of his family estate" at 17. He received training as a forester managing his large family estates, which would serve him well in the future.

Demens was raised by his maternal uncle Anastassy Alexandrovich Kaliteevsky, marshal of the Vesyegonsk district nobility, who became the boy's tutor and guardian of his land estates. When he was 10, Demens "was sent to St. Petersburg to study Gymnasium No. 3 (today it is School No. 181 in Solyanoi Pereulok), was one of the best in the city." Demens did well enough to eventually transfer "to the newly founded First Technical School in St. Petersburg."

In 1867, "he entered the military service of Alexander II as a lieutenant in the czar's infantry guard." "He rose to command the sentries at the czar's Winter Palace and the home of Crown Prince Alexander III," but "after four years of military duty, he was old enough to own his family estates "he resigned his commission as a captain and lived as a country squire." He married Raisa Borisenko, who, reportedly, was "also an orphan brought up by relatives." "He spent the 1870s selling off the trees of the estates' dense woodland and converting his land to agriculture." "Elected by gentry peers as county marshal of nobility, he became an outspoken writer and active in his rural government." "Never adopting Marxist or radical notions, Demens sympathized with populist leaders."

He became outspoken about the Czarist regime when "radical terrorist groups murdered Alexander II his son tightened his political pressure on radicals and abandoned his father's reforms." He thus left Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. Reportedly, many of the accounts of Demens being forced to flee Russia are "based on Demens' attempts to romanticize his departure from Russia by implying he escaped just before a military raid on his estate" despite never being "more than 'on the fringe' of peaceful populist organizations." According to the biographer Albert Parry, Demens' departure was "more likely his troubles with an embezzlement scandal that engulfed Demens and others in government posts" ("trials brought only one conviction for a minor government official and acquittals for Demens and 15 others"). In 1880 he was exiled from Russia, and he anglicized his name to Peter Demens.