N. D. Avksentiev Papers

N. D. (Nikolai) Avksentiev (1878-1943) was a key figure in the right wing of the Social Revolutionary Party, who played a leading role in the Duma after the February 1917 revolution in Russia and held several positions in the Kerensky government. Arrested by the Bolshevik authorities in December 1917, he fled from Moscow to Omsk, where he and several other SR leaders participated in the attempt to set up a coalition Directorate, dominated by Admiral Kolchak. Soon falling out with his right-wing "allies," he fled again, under the protection of the British military authorities, by way of Vladivostok to Paris, where he lived and wrote as a political emigre and was active in the Freemason movement. After the fall of France in 1940, he and his wife Berthe came to the United States, with the assistance of the Jewish Labor Committee and the American Federation of Labor, on an emergency visitors visa.