Elizabeth
Kovalskaia,
the daughter of a serf, was born in 1850. Her father was a wealthy
landowner and in 1857 agreed to give Elizabeth and her mother their
freedom. When he died he left his illegitimate daughter his large
estate.
She joined
the Kharkov Society for the Promotion of Literacy. While carrying
out her charity work she became interested in socialism and feminism.
Impressed by the work of Robert Owen, she
used one of the houses she inherited as a college for young women
seeking further education.
In 1869
she met Sophia Perovskaya
and began
attending her women's meetings. Later the two women joined the Land
and Liberty group.
When the
Land and Liberty group split into two in
October, 1879, Kovalskaya joined the Black Repartition, a group that
rejected terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda campaign among
workers and peasants, whereas Sophia Perovskaya
became a member of People's Will, the faction
who favoured a policy of terrorism.
Although
only involved in propaganda work, Kovalskaia a was arrested in 1881.
Found guilty of being a member of an illegal organization, she was
sentenced to hard labour for life. During the next twenty-three years
Kovalskaia went on several hunger strikes and made two unsuccessful
prison escapes.
Kovalskaia
was released from prison in 1903. She moved to Geneva and joined the
Socialist Revolutionary Party.
After the
February Revolution Kovalskia returned
to Russia and worked in the State Archives and served as a member
of the editorial board of a journal devoted to the history of the
revolutionary movement. Elizabeth
Kovalskaia died
in 1933.
(1)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia was born a serf
and the illegitimate daughter of a large landowner.
From my earliest years, life seemed incomprehensible
and cruel to me. I think I was barely six when I became aware that
there were landowners and peasant serfs in the world; that landowners
could sell people, that my father could separate my mother and me
by selling her to one neighbouring landowner and me to another.
Another
discovery struck me as equally cruel: children were divided into legitimate
and illegitimate, and the latter were always treated with contempt
and subjected to insults and mockery, regardless of their personal
qualities. The children of the house serfs to tease me with the dirty
word then used to describe illegitimate children.
(2)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia first met Sophia
Perovskaya at a party held in the home of Alexandra Kornolova
in 1869.
She was short and strongly built, with close-cropped
hair, and she wore an outfit that seemed almost to have the become
the uniform for the advocates of the woman question: a Russian blouse,
cinched with a leather belt, and a short, dark skirt. Her hair was
pulled back revealling a large, intelligent forehead, and her large
grey eyes, in which one sensed exceptional energy, radiated cheerfulness.
In general she looked more like a young boy than a girl.
The group
began to disperse long after midnight. Alexandra Kornolova, who lived
in the apartment, made me stay. When everyone but the girl in grey
had gone, she introduced us: the girl was Sophia Perovskaya. Perovskaya
suggested that I join a small circle of women who wanted to study
political economy, and I agreed.
(3)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia was a member
of Land and Liberty and later joined the
Black Repartition.
In the spring of 1879, after Governor Krapotkin was
assassinated, there was a wave of searches and arrests in Kharkov.
I had to flee and go understanding for good. I spent brief periods
of time in various cities, reaching St. Petersburg in the fall of
that year. By this time, Land and Liberty had split into the People's
Will and Black Repartition. Firmly convinced that only the people
themselves could carry out a socialist revolution and that terror
directed at the centre of the state (such as the people's Will advocated)
would bring - at best - only a wishy-washy constitution which would
in turn strengthen the Russian bourgeoisie, I joined Black Repartition,
which had retained the old Land and Liberty program.
Joining
Black Repartition had involved accepting the basic principles of the
Land and Liberty program. Those principles had, in fact, guided my
own political work previously; my reservations about joining the organization
concerned tactics. The experiences of the revolutionaries who had
worked in the countryside had not been very successful. From my various
approaches to the masses, I had gradually come to the conclusion that
two activities should be paramount. The first was economic terror.
Now, the program of Black Repartition included this, but the party's
emphasis was on local popular uprisings. In my opinion, economic terror
was more readily understood by the masses; it defended their interests
directly, involved the fewest sacrifices, and stimulated the development
of revolutionary spirit. The other major task was organizing workers'
union, the members of which would rapidly spread revolutionary activity
from the cities to the native villages; and there, too, economic terror
should be the heart of the struggle.
(4)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia was opposed
to the idea of a small group of revolutionaries capturing power for
the people.
Any revolution
that did not involve the participation of the people - even one carried
out by a socialist party - would inevitably be merely political; that
is, it would bring the country freedom similar to that enjoyed in
Western Europe without changing the economic situation of the working
people at all. It would simply make it easier for the bourgeoisie
to organize itself and thus become a more formidable enemy of the
workers.
(5)
In her memoirs Elizabeth Kovalskaia
records the repression of the Russian government.
When we returned to Kiev in April 1880, we found everyone
in a militant, revolutionary mood. The governor-general, Chertkov,
was quick to sign death sentences. He had executed one man, Rozovskii,
merely for refusing to name the person who had left a suitcase of
illegal literature with him, and another, Lozovskii, for possession
of an illegal proclamation.
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