Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov
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Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (July 15, 1870 – March 28, 1922) was a Russian criminologist, journalist, and liberal politician.
Nabokov was born in Tsarskoe Selo into a wealthy and aristocratic family (his father Dmitry Nabokov was a Justice Minister in the reign of Alexander II, and his mother was a Baroness from a prominent Baltic German family in Courland). He studied criminal law at the University of St. Petersburg and taught criminology at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. From 1904 until 1917 he was the editor of the liberal newspaper Rech ("The Speech").
A prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (the "Kadets"), Nabokov was elected to Russia's parliament, the so-called First Duma. In 1917, after the February Revolution, Nabokov was made secretary to the Russian provisional government, but was forced to leave St. Petersburg in December of that year when the provisional government was overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution. In 1918 he served as minister of justice in the regional government of Crimea, where he and his family had taken refuge. In 1919 the Nabokovs fled to England and later settled in Berlin. From 1920 until his death, Nabokov was the editor of the Russian émigré newspaper Rul ("The Rudder"), which continued to advocate a pro-Western democratic government in Russia.
He was in Berlin in 1922, attending a political conference, when two right-wing Russian assassins began firing, with the intention of killing the publisher and politician Pavel Miliukov. In response Nabokov jumped off the stage and attempted to disarm one of the gunmen, but being shot twice, died instantly. One of the assassins was none other than Piotr Shabelsky-Bork, the promoter or publicist of the notorious Protocols of Zion. Shabelsky-Bork was subsequently convicted of the crime and received a sentence of fourteen years imprisonment, but served a short period before being released--the judicial system of Germany being especially lenient to right-wing political criminals, as in the case of Hitler. Upon his release, Shabelsy-Bork befriended Alfred Rosenberg, the notorious Nazi ideologue.
Nabokov's demise was tragic but fitting for a lifelong democrat: he died defending one of his political opponents. Although the assassins failed to wound their intended target, they were pleased to learn that they had killed a prominent democrat.
V. D. Nabokov married Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov in 1897, with whom he was to have five children. Their eldest son was major 20th century author Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who portrayed his father in his memoirs (Speak, Memory, 1967). The younger Nabokov also included in his novel Pale Fire an assassination scene that parallelled the death of his father.
