Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshchersky
(1839 - 1914) Russia
Novelist, publisher
Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshchersky was a State Councilor, and Imperial Chamberlain. He was a staunch reactionary monarchist who opposed moderate and liberal reforms of any kind. He was the publisher of the extreme right-wing government-sponsored newspaper Grazhdanin (the Citizen). He was an advisor to Alexander III and was given the nickname "the Knower" at Court because he usually knew what the Tsar would do before the Tsar acted.
Vladimir Meshchersky, an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Society of the Followers of Homeopathy, was a close friend to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and to the poet Alexei Apukhtin. His lover was Nikolai Fedorovich Burdukov.
When Meshchersky got involved in a scandal because of his affair with a bugle boy from the imperial marching band in the late 1880s, czar Alexander III ordered the case to be quashed and the witnesses silenced. His family was less tolerant of his behavior (they were outraged in part that he lived openly with his lover Nikolai Burdukov). His brother Nikolai refused to even allow Vladimir into his home.
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