Olga
Liubatovich,
the daughter of a political refugee from Montenegro, was born in 1854.
Liubatovich wanted to train as a doctor but this was impossible in
Russia so in 1871 she went to Zurich to study
medicine.
In Zurich
she met Vera Figner and was recruited
into the revolutionary socialist movement. Liubatovich joined Pan-Russian
Social Revolutionary group and in 1875 returned to Russia where she
attempted to spread socialist propaganda among industrial workers.
Liubatovich
was arrested in Tula and was kept in prison for two years before appearing
in court. Found guilty of distributing illegal publications, Liubatovich
was sentenced to nine years hard labour. This was subsequently reduced
to banishment to Siberia. In Tobolsk she was able to employ her medical
knowledge to help the local people and became known as the "miracle
worker".
In 1876
Liubatovich managed to escape from Siberia and she went into hiding
in St. Petersburg. She joined a unit of the Land
and Liberty group led by Sergei
Kravchinskii and Nikolai Morozov.
Liubatovich
also spent six months in Geneva where she lived with a group of political
émigrés who had escaped from the Russian authorities.
This included Vera Zasulich, whose attempt
to murder General Trepov, the police chief of St. Petersburg, had
made her a national figure in the revolutionary movement.
In October,
1879, the Land and Liberty group split into
two. One faction, Black Repartition, rejected
terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda campaign among workers
and peasants. However, Liubatovich became a member of People's
Will, the faction who favoured a policy of terrorism.
At a meeting
of the Executive Committee of the People's Will
on 26th August, 1879, it was decided to assassinate Alexander
II. Liubatovich took part in three unsuccessful attempts to kill
the Tsar.
In 1880
there was strong disagreement in People's Will
about the purposes of terrorism. One group that included Liubatovich
argued that the main objective was to force the government to grant
democratic rights to the people of Russia. However, another faction,
led by Lev Tikhomirov, who had been
deeply influenced by the ideas of Sergi
Nechayev,
believed that it was possible for a small group of revolutionaries
to capture power and then hand over its powers to the people.
Liubatovich
and Nikolai Morozov strongly disagreed
with the ideas of Lev Tikhomirov.
They argued that this was an example of Jacobinism and would result
in the kind of dictatorship that had taken place after the French
Revolution.
In 1880
Liubatovich and Nikolai Morozov left
the People's Will and went to live in Geneva.
While in exile Morozov wrote The Terrorist
Struggle, a pamphlet that explained his views on how to
achieve a democratic society in Russia. Based on ideas developed with
Liubatovich, Morozov advocated the creation of a large number of small,
independent terrorist groups. He argued that this approach would make
it more difficult for the police to apprehend the terrorists. It would
also help to prevent a small group of leaders gaining dictatorial
powers after the overthrow of the Tsar.
Nikolai
Morozov returned to Russia in order to distribute The
T errorist Struggle. He was soon arrested and imprisoned
in Suvalki. Liubatovich, who had recently given birth to their child,
decided to try and rescue him. Her attempts ended in failure and she
was herself arrested and sent to Siberia
in November, 1882.
Liubatovich
was released in the political amnesty that followed the 1905
Revolution. After her return to St. Petersburg she wrote her memoirs.
Olga
Liubatovich died
in 1917.
(1)
Olga Liubatovich first met Sergei
Kravchinskii in 1876.
There were a number of people in the room by the time
Kravchinskii walked in, but I felt my attention shift involuntarily
to his strong, manly figure and distinctive face. He carried a top
hat and was dressed like a gentleman; his Napoleonic goatee made him
look like a foreigner. Although several other women were present,
he walked directly toward me and extended his hand in a free, comradely
gesture.
He was
older than me and had more experience among the people; I regarded
him as a senior comrade. Although I was extremely shy with people
in my youth, we somehow struck up a sincere, unconstrained conversation;
and as we talked, I glanced freely at his open, bold face, a face
in which ugly, irregular features and broken lines became beautiful.
We became friends immediately.
(2)
In the book, Knowledge and Revolution: the Russian Colony
in Zurich, Francisca Tiburtius described meeting Olga Liubatovich
for the first time.
Olga Liubatovich had a roundish, boyish face, short-hair,
parted askew, enormous blue glasses, a quite youthful, tender-coloured
face, a course jacket, a burning cigarette in her mouth - everything
about it was boylike, and yet there was something which belied this
desired impression. She took no notice at all of my presence and remained
absorbed in a large book, every now and then rolling a cigarette which
was finished in a few droughts.
(3)
In 1875 Olga Liubatovich joined
the Pan-Russian Social Revolutionary group.
Our program reflected in embryo the course of the
revolutionary movement in the seventies: from peaceful propaganda
to armed resistance and disorganization of the government by means
of terror. Many people subsequently told me that the solidarity we
had achieved served as a model for the revolutionary organizations
that came after us, particularly Land and Liberty. Our group did not
produce a single traitor, thanks to the principle on which I was based:
the complete freedom and equality of all its members.
(4)
When the Land
and Liberty movement split in October, 1879, Olga Liubatovich
joined the People's Will group.
Stefanovich
became the head of the Black Repartition, and his friends Vera Zasulich
and Lev Deich joined him. But even ardent populists like Vera Figner,
who had been working in one of the countryfolk settlements in the
provinces, and Sophia Perovskaia joined the People's Will, the group
that had taken up arms to defend the people and their apostles.
Black Repartition
was stillborn; it left no visible traces of its work among the people
at the end of 1879 and the beginning of 1880, because no such activity
was possible on a broad scale. After a series of failures, Stefanovich,
Deich, Plekhanov, and Zasulich returned abroad.
As for
me, naturally I joined the People's Will. The Executive Committee
of the People's Will soon began to chart its own course. Its initial
plan had been to carry out a number of actions against the governor-generals,
but this decision was called into question at one open-air meeting
in Lesnoi: shouldn't we concentrate all our forces against the Tsar
instead, it was asked. We resolved that this should indeed be the
goal of the Executive Committee. The implementation of that decision
engaged the People's Will right up to March 1, 1881.
(5)
Olga Liubatovich left the People's Will
over the issue of Jacobinism in 1880.
During the debates, the question of Jacobinism - seizing
power and ruling from above, by decree - was raised. As I saw it,
the Jacobin tinge that Tikhomirov gave to his program for the Executive
Committee gave to his program for the Executive Committee threatened
the party and the entire revolutionary movement with moral death;
it was a kind of rebirth of Nechaevism, which had long since lost
moral credit in the revolutionary world. It was my belief that the
revolutionary idea could be a life-giving force only when it was the
antithesis of all coercion - social, state, and even personal coercion,
tsarist and Jacobin alike. Of course, it was possible for a narrow
group of ambitious men to replace one form of coercion or authority
by another. But neither the people nor educated society would follow
them consciously, and only a conscious movement can impart new principles
to public life.
At this
point, Morozov announced that he considered himself free of any obligation
to defend a program like Tikhomirov's in public. I too, declared that
it was against my nature to act on the basis of compulsion; that once
the Executive Committee had taken on a task - the seizure of state
power - that violated my basic principles, and once it had recourse
in its organizational practice to autocratic methods fraught with
mutual distrust, then I, too, reclaimed my freedom of action.
(6)
Olga Liubatovich was
living in St. Petersburg when she heard of the assassination of Alexander
II.
One morning I awoke to an unusual commotion in the
streets. On every corner, small groups of people were standing around
talking about something, shaking their heads. Obviously something
important had happened - but what? I went outside. Couriers were tearing
madly through the streets. I thought back to the previous evening,
March 1, when carriages had been hurrying to the governor's house,
which was lit up as for a ball, although there was no sign of a large
gathering. Judging from the rumours that were now circulating among
the crowd - the sovereign had been killed. Toward noon, the notice
of Alexander II's death and Alexander III's accession to the throne
appeared, and people started gathering in synagogues and churches
to take the oath of allegiance.
(7)
After the arrest of Nikolai Morozov
in 1881, Olga Liubatovich
returned to Russia to try and help him escape from prison. This meant
that she had to leave her young baby behind with friends. The baby
died of meningitis when it was six months old.
By early morning, I was at Kravchinskii's. Sergei
was remarkably thoughtful: he had already obtained a crib for my little
girl and set it up in a clean, light room. He left me alone with the
child. For a long time I stood like a statue in the middle of the
room, the tired baby sleeping in my arms. Her face, pink from sleep,
was peaceful and filled with the beauty of childhood. When I finally
decided to lower her into the bed, she opened her eyes - large, serious,
peaceful, still enveloped in sleep. I couldn't bear her gaze. Not
daring to kiss her lest I wake her up. I quietly walked out of the
room. I thought I'd be back; I didn't know, didn't want to believe
that I was seeing my little girl for the last time. My heart was numb
with grief.
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