Vladimir Posse

Who was Vladimir Posse?

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Posse was a Russian socialist journalist and editor who typically signed his articles V. A. Posse.

Posse grew up in Saint Petersburg the youngest of six children; his brother Konstantin was a mathematician who wrote a calculus textbook widely used in Russia. Vladimir was intellectually precocious, attending Fyodor Dostoyevsky's public readings and his funeral in 1881. He attended Saint Petersburg University, being expelled in 1887; the following year he took a degree in law. In the 1890s, he slowly moved from the narodniks' populism to Marxist social democracy. In early 1899 he took over as editor of Zhizn, previously a moderate populist magazine, in an attempt to merge populism and Legal Marxism. He thought he had an understanding with the leading Legal Marxists, but at the last moment they founded their own magazine, Nachalo. Nachalo, however, was shut down by the government in June 1899, and the Legal Marxists moved to Zhizn, since Posse was willing to forgive and forget. Posse continued to edit the magazine until it was suppressed by the Tsarist government in April 1901. He put his friend Maxim Gorky in charge of the magazine's literary section, giving the 30-year-old Gorky an opportunity to try his hand at editing.