Nikolay Danilevsky

7 November] 1885)[1] was a Russian naturalist, economist, ethnologist, philosopher, historian and ideologue of pan-Slavism and the Slavophile movement.

Dissatisfied with the prospect of a military career, he began to attend the University of St Petersburg, where he studied physics and mathematics.

Having passed his master's exams, Danilevsky prepared to defend his thesis on the flora of the Black Sea area of European Russia but in 1849 he was arrested there for his membership in the Petrashevsky Circle, which studied the work of French socialists and included Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Danilevsky was imprisoned for 100 days in the Peter and Paul Fortress and then was sent to live under police surveillance in Vologda, where he worked in provincial administration.

In 1852, he was appointed to an expedition, led by Karl Ernst von Baer, to assess the condition of the fishing industry on the Volga and the Caspian Sea.

The expedition lasted four years, and Danilevsky was then reassigned to the Agricultural Department of the State Property Ministry.

Aside from his work on fisheries and the seal trade, he was the head of the commission setting the rules for the use of running water in Crimea from 1872 to 1879.

He thus characterised Peter the Great's reforms in Russia as doomed to failure, as they had attempted to impose alien values on the Slavic world.