Alexey Kharuzin

Who was Alexey Kharuzin?

Alexey Nikolayevich Kharuzin was a Russian ethnographer, anthropologist, and statesman.

Kharuzin was born in Reval to a Russian merchant family. Between 1873 and 1883, he attended the Reval Gymnasium. He later graduated from the Moscow State University Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. The Imperial Natural Science Lovers Society sent him on numerous missions to the South Caucasus, Crimea and the Aegean Sea, and Central Asia. In 1889, he became a Russian Geographical Society envoy to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Between 1889 and 1891, Kharuzin was an editor of the INSLS Department of Anthropology Journal.

In 1891, Kharuzin was appointed a special assistant to the governor of Estonia and later as a secretary for the former peasant committee, the provincial statistics committee, the provincial body for peasant affairs. In 1902, he was appointed head of the Vilno Governor General's office.

Between 1904 and 1906, Kharuzin served as a governor of Bessarabia and later as the director of the Department for Religious Affairs of Foreign Faiths. In 1911, he became Russia's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.