Ivan Betskoy
Russian philanthropist
Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy or Betskoi (Russian: Ива́н Ива́нович Бецко́й; 14 February [O.S. 3 February] 1704 – 11 September [O.S. 31 August] 1795) was a Russian statesman and figure of the Russian Enlightenment. He was educational reformer who served as Catherine II's advisor on education and as president of the Imperial Academy of Arts for from 1764 to 1794. Perhaps the crowning achievement of his long career was the establishment of Russia's first unified system of public education.
Life
Betskoy's parents were Prince Ivan Trubetskoy, a Russian field marshal, and his Swedish mistress, Baroness von Wrede. His surname is the abbreviated form of his father's – a tradition for Russian surnames of illegitimate children.
He was born in Stockholm, where Trubetskoy was held captive throughout the Great Northern War, and went to Copenhagen to get a military education before joining a Danish cavalry regiment. It was in the Danish service that he sustained a fall from a horse which forced him to retire from the service. Field Marshal Trubetskoy, having no other sons but Betskoy, called him to the Russian Empire in 1729. At first he served as his father's aide-de-camp but later would be sent on diplomatic missions to various capitals of Europe.
Betskoy was actively involved in a coup d'etat that brought Elizaveta Petrovna to the Russian throne.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ivan Betskoy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.