BESTUZHEV-RYUMI N, ryoo'men, Alexei Petrovitch, COUNT, Rus sian statesman: b. Moscow 1693, of a family of English origin, and of the second class of nobles in Russia; d. Saint Petersburg, 21 April 1768. He entered the civil service un der Peter the Great, and became a diplomatist. Under the Empress Anne he was made a mem ber of the Cabinet, and the Empress Elizabeth, %%hose fullest confidence he possessed, created him count, great chancellor of the empire, and his influence in the government became almost boundless. He was strongly opposed to the Prussian and French diplomatic influenc.e, and was disliked on this account by Peter III, nephew and presumptive heir of Elizabeth He concluded several treaties with England, Swe den and Denmark, favorable to English policy. By a treaty concluded in 1747, he paved the way for the union of Schleswig and Holstein with the kingdom of Denmark. By his influence, the Russian troops supported Austria against Fred erick the Great in the Seven Years' War. But their commander, Aprattin, retired to Russia, and this occasioned the fall of Bestuzhev. He was banished to his country seat, but Catharine II, in 1762, restored him to liberty and made him a field marshal. He is regarded as the inventor
of a chemical preparation known in medicine under the name of tinctura tonica Bestucheffi.
Konstantin Nikolayevitch, Russian historian: b. Kud resh, government of Nizhni Novgorod, 1829; d. 1897. After graduating from the University of Moscow, where he had studied law, he taught school. In 1856 he became associate editor of the Moscow Gazette. Later he removed to Saint Petersburg, where, in 1865, he was appointed professor of Russian history at the university. In 1890 he was elected to membership of the Imperial Academy of Science. He and Tiblin collaborated in trans lating Buckle's 'History of Civilization' into Russian. Among the more important of his works are