Peter (or Pyotr or Petr) Berngardovich Struve (; pronounced ; 26 January 1870 in Perm – 22 February 1944 in Paris) was a Russian political economist, philosopher, historian and editor. He started out as a Marxist, later became a liberal and after the Bolshevik Revolution joined the White movement. From 1920, he lived in exile in Paris, where he was a prominent critic of Russian Communism. Biography Marxist theoretician Peter Struve is probably the best known member of the Russian branch of the Struve family. Son of Bernhard Struve (Astrakhan and later Perm governor) and grandson of astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, he entered the Natural Sciences Department of the University of Saint Petersburg in 1889 and transferred to its law school in 1890. While there, he became interested in Marxism, attended Marxist and narodniki (populist) meetings (where he met his future opponent Vladimir Lenin) and wrote articles for legally published magazines—hence the term Legal Marxism, whose chief proponent he became. In September 1893 Struve was hired by the Finance Ministry and worked in its library, but was fired on 1 June 1894 after an arrest and a brief detention in April–May of that year. In 1894, he also published his first major book, Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (Critical Notes on the Economic Development of Russia) in which he defended the applicability of Marxism to Russian conditions against populist critics. In 1895, Struve finished his degree and wrote an Open letter to Nicholas II on behalf of the Zemstvo. He then went abroad for further studies, where he attended the 1896 International Socialist Congress in London and befriended famous Russian revolutionary exile Vera Zasulich. After returning to Russia Struve became one of the editors of the successive Legal Marxist magazines Novoye Slovo (The New Word, 1897), Nachalo (The Beginning, 1899) and Zhizn (1899–1901). Struve was also the most popular speaker at the Legal Marxist debates at the Free Economic Society in the late 1890s—early 1900s in spite of his often impenetrable-to-laymen arguments and unkempt appearance. In 1898 Struve wrote the Manifesto of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. However, as he later explained: Socialism, to tell the truth, never aroused the slightest emotion in me, still less attraction... Socialism interested me mainly as an ideological force – which... could be directed either to the conquest of civil and political freedoms or against them