Page:Pavel Ivanovich Biryukov - The New Russia - tr. Emile Burns (1920).djvu/8



an intimate friend and biographer of Leo Tolstoi, was born in 1860 at Kostroma in Russia. He studied first with the Corps of Pages, then at the School of Imperial Marine, and later, after a cruise in the Mediterranean, went to the Marine Academy.

Feeling no vocation for a military career, he transferred his services to the Academy of Sciences, taking a post at the Central Observatory of Petrograd. The social and moral ideas which were then current in high society in Russia attracted him greatly, and he soon abandoned his scientific career and took to popular propaganda for Christian and democratic ideals. He was one of the founders of the publishing house, Posrednich, which soon became the principal medium of propaganda for Tolstoi's ideas. Becoming acquainted with Leo Tolstoi, Paul Birukoff soon became one of his intimate friends, and later an interpreter of his ideals. In 1897 he took an active part in the anti-militarist movement of the Doukhobortsi, as a result of which he was exiled and deported to the Baltic Provinces near Mitau, where he had to spend a year under close police supervision. After that he was allowed to go abroad, and went first to England, then made a journey to Cyprus to establish there a colony of the Doukhobortsi, and finally settled in Switzerland