Vyacheslav von Plehve

Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve (; – ) was a Russian politician who served as the director of the police from 1881 to 1884 and later as the minister of the interior from 1902 until his assassination in 1904.

Biography Born in Meshchovsk, Kaluga Governorate, Russia, on 20 April 1846, Plehve was the only son of schoolteacher Konstantin von Plehve and Elizaveta Mikhailovna Shamaev, daughter of a minor landowner. In 1851, Plehve's family moved from Meshchovsk to Warsaw in Russian-controlled Congress Poland, where his father accepted a job as an instructor in a gymnasium.

After studying law at Imperial Moscow University, he joined the Ministry of Justice in 1867. After a brief attempt at conciliation with the zemstvo conservatives failed, he relapsed—disbanding the police-supported labour unions (zubatovshchina). The same year, Plehve used his position as minister of interior to insist that Hirsh Lekert, who had tried to assassinate the governor of Vilnius, Victor von Wahl, be tried under wartime law. This virtually guaranteed a death-sentence.

In August 1903, Plehve met with Theodor Herzl in Saint Petersburg and discussed the establishment of Zionist societies in Russia. He proposed a Russian government request to the Ottoman Turks to obtain a charter for Jewish colonisation of Palestine.

Plehve became a target for Jewish revolutionaries after his meeting with Theodor Herzl although he had forwarded Herzl's proposals to Tsar Nicholas II.

Legacy Because Plehve carried out the Russification of the provinces within the Russian Empire, he earned bitter hatred in Poland, Lithuania and especially in Finland. He despoiled the Armenian Apostolic Church, and was blamed for being accessory to the Kishinev pogroms. His logical mind and determined support of the autocratic principle gained the tsar's entire confidence. He opposed commercial development on ordinary European lines on the ground that it involved the existence both of a dangerous proletariat and of a prosperous middle class equally inimical to autocracy.