Vera Ivanovna Zasulich was a Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n Marxist writer and revolutionary

Revolutionary

A revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, when used as an adjective, the term revolutionary refers to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor.-Definition:...

.

Radical beginnings

Zasulich was born in Mikhaylovka

Mikhaylovka

-Armenia:*Mikhaylovka, Armenia*Chambarak, Armenia; founded as Mikhaylovka*Hankavan, Armenia; formerly Mikhaylovka-Russia:*Mikhaylovka, Volgograd Oblast, a town in Volgograd Oblast, Russia...

, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, one of four daughters of an impoverished minor noble. When she was 3, her father died and her mother sent her to live with her wealthier relatives, the Mikulich family, in Byakolovo. After graduating from high school in 1866, she moved to St. Petersburg, where she worked as a clerk. Soon she became involved in radical politics and taught literacy classes for factory workers. Her contacts with the Russian revolutionary leader Sergei Nechaev led to her arrest and imprisonment in 1869.

After Zasulich was released in 1873, she settled in Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

, where she joined the Kievan Insurgents, a revolutionary group of Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...

's anarchist supporters, becoming a respected leader of the movement. As her lifelong friend and fellow revolutionary Lev Deich wrote:

Because of her intellectual development, and particularly she was so well read, Vera Zasulich was more advanced than the other members of the circle. ... Anyone could see that she was a remarkable young woman. You were struck by her behavior, particularly by the extraordinary sincerity and unaffectedness of her relations with others."

The Trepov incident

In July 1877, a political prisoner, Alexei Bogolyubov, refused to remove his cap in the presence of Colonel Theodore Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg famous for his suppression of the Polish rebellions in 1830 and 1863. In retaliation, Trepov ordered that Bogolyubov be flogged, which outraged not only revolutionaries, but also sympathetic members of the intelligentsia

Intelligentsia

The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...

. A group of six revolutionaries plotted to kill Trepov, but Zasulich was the first to act. She and her fellow social revolutionary Maria (Masha) Kolenkina

Maria (Masha) Kolenkina

Maria Alexandrovna Kolenkina, Russian socialist revolutionary from a merchant family in Temzhuk, a small town on the Sea of Azov. While studying to midwife in Kiev in the early 1870s she became part of the populist movement in Russia...

 were planning to shoot two government representatives, the prosecutor Vladislav Zhelekhovskii in the "trial of the 193" and another enemy of the populist movement; following the Bogolyubov flogging they decided that the second target should be Trepov. Waiting until after the verdict was announced at the Trial of 193, on January 24, 1878 they went for their respective targets. Kolenkina's attempt against Zhelekhovskii failed, but Zasulich using a British Bulldog revolver

British Bulldog revolver

The British Bull Dog was a popular type of solid-frame pocket revolver introduced by Philip Webley & Son of Birmingham, England in 1872 and subsequently copied by gunmakers in Continental Europe and the United States. It featured a barrel and was chambered for five .44 Short Rimfire, .442 Webley,...

 shot and seriously wounded Trepov.

At her widely publicized trial the sympathetic jury found Zasulich not guilty, an outcome that tested the effectiveness of the judicial reform of Alexander II

Judicial reform of Alexander II

The judicial reform of Alexander II is generally considered one of the most successful and the most consistent of all the reforms of Alexander II. During the reform a completely new court system and a completely new order of legal proceedings were established...

. On one interpretation it demonstrated the courts' ability to stand up to the authorities. However Zasulich had a very good lawyer, who turned the case on its head so that it "very soon became obvious that it was Colonel Trepov rather than his would-be assassin who was really being tried". That Trepov and the government now appeared as the guilty party demonstrated ineffectiveness in both the courts and the government.

Fleeing before she could be rearrested and retried, Zasulich became a hero to populists and the radical part of the Russian society. Despite her previous record, she was against the terror campaign that would eventually lead to the assassination of Tsar

Tsar

Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...

 Alexander II

Alexander II of Russia

Alexander II , also known as Alexander the Liberator was the Emperor of the Russian Empire from 3 March 1855 until his assassination in 1881...

 in 1881.

Conversion to Marxism

After the trial had been annulled, Zasulich fled to Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

, where she converted to Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 and co-founded Emancipation of Labour

Emancipation of Labour

Emancipation of Labour group was the first Russian Marxist group. Founded by Georgi Plekhanov, Vasily Ignatov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and Pavel Axelrod in Geneva in 1883. Leo Deutsch left the group in 1884 when he was arrested and sent to Siberia. Sergey Ingerman joined the group at 1888...

 group with Georgi Plekhanov

Georgi Plekhanov

Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was a Russian revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the Social-Democratic movement in Russia and was one of the first Russians to identify himself as "Marxist." Facing political persecution, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland in 1880, where...

 and Pavel Axelrod

Pavel Axelrod

Pavel Borisovich Axelrod was a Russian Menshevik.- Early life and career :Born Pinches Borutsch in Potscheff near Chernigov and raised to Shklov, a small provincial town in and Mogilev, the biggest town of the three in the Russian Empire , Axelrod was the son of a Jewish innkeeper.In 1875 in...

 in 1883. The group commissioned Zasulich to translate a number of Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

's works into Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, which contributed to the growth of Marxist influence among Russian intellectuals in the 1880s and 1890s and was one of the factors that led to the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898. In mid-1900, the leaders of the radical wing of the new generation of Russian Marxists, Julius Martov

Julius Martov

Julius Martov or L. Martov was born in Constantinople in 1873...

, Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

 and Alexander Potresov

Alexander Potresov

Alexander Nikolayevich Potresov was a Russian social democrat and one of the leaders of Menshevism. He was one of six original editors of the newspaper the Iskra.-Life:...

, joined Zasulich, Plekhanov and Axelrod in Switzerland. In spite of the tensions between the two groups, the six founded Iskra

Iskra

Iskra was a political newspaper of Russian socialist emigrants established as the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Initially, it was managed by Vladimir Lenin, moving as he moved. The first edition was published in Stuttgart on December 1, 1900. Other editions were...

, a revolutionary Marxist newspaper, and formed its editorial board. They were opposed to the more moderate Russian Marxists (known as "economists") as well as ex-Marxists like Peter Struve and Sergei Bulgakov

Sergei Bulgakov

Fr. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox Christian theologian, philosopher and economist. Until 1922 he worked in Russia; afterwards in Paris.-Early life:...

 and spent much of 1900-1903 debating them in Iskra.

Menshevik leader

The Iskra editors were successful in convening a pro-Iskra Second Congress of the RSDLP in Brussels and London in 1903. However, Iskra supporters unexpectedly split during the Congress and formed two factions, Lenin's Bolsheviks and Martov's Mensheviks, Zasulich siding with the latter. She returned to Russia after the 1905 Revolution, but her interest in revolutionary politics waned. She supported the Russian war effort during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 and opposed the October Revolution

October Revolution

The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

 of 1917. She died in Petrograd on May 8, 1919.

In his book Lenin, Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

, who was friendly with Zasulich in London in 1903, wrote:

Sasulich was a curious person and a curiously attractive one. She wrote very slowly and suffered actual tortures of creation... "Vera Ivanovna does not write, she puts mosaic together, Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] said to me at that time", And in fact she put down each sentence separately, walked up and down the room slowly, shuffled about in her slippers, smoked constantly hand-made cigarettes and threw the stubs and half-smoked cigarettes in every direction on all the window seats and tables, and scattered ashes over her jacket, hands, manuscripts, tea in the glass, and incidentally her visitor. She remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. Sasulich's articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death.

External links

• Marxists.org Vera Zasulich Archive
• Vera Zasulich Anarchist Encyclopedia
• "Lenin" by Leon Trotsky
• The Trial of Vera Z.
  Richard Pipes
  Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
  
  , by Richard Pipes