Unkovskii, Aleksei

Born Dec. 24, 1828 (Jan. 5, 1829), in the village of Dmitriukovo, in what is now Kalinin Oblast; died Dec. 20, 1893 (Jan. 1, 1894), in St. Petersburg. Russian public figure.

A member of the nobility (dvorianstvo), Unkovskii was close to the Petrashevsky circle and was a friend of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. In 1850 he graduated from the faculty of law at Moscow University, and from 1857 to 1859 he was the marshal of the nobility of Tver’ Province. Unkovskii drafted a liberal plan for the abolition of serfdom that provided for the immediate emancipation of the serfs and the allotment to them of the land they already occupied. In August 1859, as a deputy of the nobility he was invited to take part in a discussion of plans for the Peasant Reform of 1861. He was one of the authors of the Address of the Five, which demanded bourgeois changes in government and administration. In late 1859, when the Tver’ nobility protested the ban on discussions of the serf question in the press, Unkovskii was exiled to Viatka. In 1861, while engaged in legal work, he began making public statements on peasant affairs, but in 1862 his activities in this area were forbidden. In 1865 he became the chairman of the Nizhy Novgorod Control Board, and in 1866 he became a prisiazhnyi poverennyi (sworn attorney) in St. Petersburg.

Unkovskii’s “Notes” were published in the journal Russkaia mysl’ (1906, no. 6–7).