Yakov Rostovtsev

Iakov Ivanovich Rostovtsev (9 January 1803 [O.S. 28 December] – 18 February [O.S. 6 February] 1860) was a leading figure in the formulation of statutes which effectively emancipated the Russian serfs.

Yakov Rostovtsev; portrait by
Sergey Zaryanko

Biography

Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Rostovtsev became a career soldier, and was a young officer at the time of the 1825 Decembrist revolt. When he was invited to join the plot, he instead reported it to Tsar Nicholas I, though without revealing the names of the officers involved.

Rostovtsev went on to hold posts in military education, and was involved in the administration of the cadet corps, reaching the rank of Full General.

In 1857, when the Tsar made public his plans under the Nazimov Rescript to reform the institution of serfdom, Rostovtsev was appointed to the Editing Commission charged with developing those plans, after a conservative leaning secret commission found Emancipation to be impossible. His subsequent report was well received, and brought him the chairmanship of the Commission whose task was to draft the necessary statutes.

The resulting statutes were issued on 19 February 1861, a year after Rostovtsev's death. On that occasion Rostovtsev's widow and children were made Counts of the Russian Empire.

gollark: Hmm. Well. I'd quite like to retain compatibility, so that's a bit irritating...
gollark: Does `write` in older versions accept a string too on binary files?
gollark: UPDATE: it works now since apparently I can still `readAll` and `write` strings in `wb`/`rb` mode for some reason.
gollark: I'm having some bizarre issues writing some binary data to files. I'll try and put together a bit of code to demonstrate this with, but basically it seems like `\13` bytes (carriage return) are being replaced with `\10` bytes (line feed). My code is using `"w"` and `"r"` modes instead of binary mode because according to the wiki binary mode doesn't let me use `readAll` and write a whole string; do I need binary mode and is there a way around reading/writing individual bytes for this?
gollark: Wait, an automatic nether portal? Won't that run out of flint and steel or something eventually?

References


    This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.