ABSTRACT
Piotr Ivanovich Stuchka was born to a peasant family on July 27, 1865, near Riga in the Latvian province of the old Russian empire. Little has been recorded about his early years, but it is known that he completed the Gymnasium at Riga in 1884 and then entered the law department of St. Petersburg University. It was during his years at St. Petersburg that he began to immerse himself in the writings of the intellectual precursors of the Russian revolutionary movement, the writings of Marx and Engels, and those of the Russian Marxist Plekhanov. Stuchka received his law degree in 1888 and immediately began work as a political activist and a progressive journalist on liberal Latvian newspapers. During this period his recorded work on questions of law and politics consisted of not quite two dozen newspaper articles and polemical essays in socialist periodicals. These included specialized articles on such topics as labor legislation, the many problems of judicial and criminal law reform in the Baltic provinces, and various issues of tactics and strategy in the revolutionary movement.
