Mikhail Tereshchenko

Born Mar. 18 (30), 1886, in Kiev; died Apr. 1,1956, in Monaco. Russian large landowner and sugar manufacturer.

The son of a descendant of cossack merchants from the city of Glukhov, Tereshchenko inherited sugar refineries built by his father, who amassed an enormous fortune. He graduated from the Kiev Gymnasium and the University of Leipzig. He was a member of the Progressive Bloc and was elected in 1912 to the Fourth State Duma. During World War I (1914–18), he was instrumental in organizing Red Cross hospitals, and from 1915 to 1917 he was chairman of the Kiev Regional War Industries Committee. After the February Revolution of 1917, he served in the bourgeois Provisional Government as minister of finance from March 2 (15) and as minister of foreign affairs from May 5(18). A supporter of the war “to the victorious end,” Tereshchenko was arrested, along with other ministers of the Provisional Government, in the Winter Palace on the night of October 26 (November 8). He escaped from detention to Western Europe, first to Norway and then to France, and was one of the organizers of the counterrevolution and the military intervention against Soviet Russia. In the 1920’s and 1930’s he conducted large-scale financial operations in France and Madagascar.