HERZENSTEIN, MIKHAIL YAKOVLEVICH

HERZENSTEIN, MIKHAIL YAKOVLEVICH (1859–1906), Russian economist. Herzenstein, who was born in Odessa, studied law and political economy. Despite his conversion to Christianity and his considerable professional competence, his appointment as a teacher at the Moscow Agricultural Institute was deferred for 15 years, presumably because of his liberal views. In 1903 he was named lecturer in political economy and statistics at the University of Moscow. In 1905 he was elected a deputy to the First Duma, where he became known as an expert on agrarian questions and called for the expropriation of the lands of the Russian nobility. The expropriated land would be distributed among the peasants, while the nobles would receive reasonable compensation. Herzenstein was bitterly hated by the reactionaries, both for his liberal agrarian views and for his Jewish origin. Ten days after the Duma was dissolved, Herzenstein was murdered by an agent of the "Black Hundred" at a Finnish summer resort.

His writings, principally on agrarian economics, include Kredit dlya zemstv i gorodov (1892; Credit to the Local Councils and the Cities), which is considered a major contribution to the subject of rural credit, and his highly regarded Noveyshiye techeniya v uchenii o pozemel'nom kredite v Germanii (1905; Recent Tendencies in the Theory of Agricultural Credit in Germany).

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Mikhail Yakovlevich Gertsenshteyn (Rus., 1906).