Sergey Stepanovich Lanskoy

26 January] 1862) was the Russian Minister of the Interior from 1855 to 1861, being inaugurated during a reform-minded era and dismissed after the Emancipation Reform of 1861.

[1] In this regard, he has also been connected multiple-times with Leo Tolstoy and other Russian Liberals and Constitutionalists who had been involved in Masonic lodges.

[4] In 1855, Lanskoy was behind an initiative to tell Europe about Russia in liberal and progressive hues, establishing Le Nord as a newspaper in Belgium to give air to these views.

[5] During a meeting of nobles in 1856, Lanskoy tried to persuade a group of nobles to voluntarily abolish serfdom, because "it would be in their interests to grant the serfs emancipation before the peasants rebelled..." (which is what actually happened)[6] When Milyutin finally authored the Emancipation Proclamation for Russian serfs in 1861, just a year before Lanskoy's death, Lanksoy's place was considered important.

Being born in the 1700s and having a prestigious military career, he "was the only representative of an earlier generation of Russian civil servants.