Vera
Zasulich was
born into a poor family in 1849. Her father died when she was three
years old and as her mother was unable to cope, she sent Vera to live
with wealthy relatives in Biakolovo.
When Zasulich
finished her schooling she moved to St. Petersburg and found work
as a clerk. She became involved in radical politics and met Sergi
Nechayev,
the co-author with
Mikhail Bakunin of Catechism
of a Revolutionist.
Zasulich
joined a weaving collective and became active in the movement to educate
workers, conducting literacy classes for them in the evenings.
In 1876
Zasulich found work as a typesetter for an illegal printing press.
A member of the Land and Liberty group,
when Zasulich heard that one of her fellow comrades, Alexei Bogoliubov,
had been badly beaten in prison, she decided to seek revenge. Zasulich
went to the local prison and shot Dmitry Trepov, the Governor General
of St. Petersburg.
Zasulich
was arrested and charged with attempted murder. During the trial the
defence produced evidence of such abuses by the police, and Zasulich
conducted herself with such dignity, that the jury acquitted her.
When the police tried to re-arrest her outside the court, the crowd
intervened and allowed her to escape.
Zasulich
was forced into hiding but remained active in politics and joined
the Black Repartition group. Zasulich was
a strong supporter of George Plekhanov.
Zasulich, like Plekhanov, was highly critical of the terror campaign
being carried out by the People's Will.
In 1883
Zasulich joined with George Plekhanovand
Paul Axelrod to form the Liberation
of Labour, the first Russian Marxist
group. Later she moved to Switzerland where she became active in the
Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) and
served on the editorial board of Iskra.
At the
Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London
in 1903, there was a dispute between Lenin
and Jules Martov, two of SDLP's leaders.
Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with
a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed
believing it was better to have a large party of activists.
Jules
Martov based his ideas on the socialist parties that existed in
other European countries such as the British
Labour Party. Lenin argued that the situation was different in
Russia as it was illegal to form socialist political parties under
the Tsar's autocratic government. At the end of the debate Martov
won the vote 28-23 . Vladimir Lenin was
unwilling to accept the result and formed a faction known as the Bolsheviks.
Those who remained loyal to Martov became known as Mensheviks.
Gregory
Zinoviev, Anatoli Lunacharsky,
Joseph Stalin, Mikhail
Lashevich, Nadezhda Krupskaya,
Mikhail Frunze, Alexei
Rykov, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev
Kamenev, Maxim Litvinov, Vladimir
Antonov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Gregory
Ordzhonikidze and Alexander Bogdanov
joined the Bolsheviks. Whereas Zasulich,
George Plekhanov, Pavel
Axelrod, Leon Trotsky, Lev
Deich, Vladimir
Antonov-Ovseenko,
Irakli Tsereteli, Moisei
Uritsky, Noi Zhordania and Fedor
Dan supported Jules Martov.
She returned
to Russia during the 1905 Revolution but
after its failure ceased to be active in politics. During the First
World War Zasulich supported the war effort and opposed the Bolshevik
Revolution. Vera
Zasulich died
in 1919.
(1)
When Vera Zasulich met Sergi
Nechayev he immediately tried
to recruit her into the revolutionary movement.
Nechayev began to tell me his plans for carrying out
a revolution in Russia in the near future. I felt terrible: it was
really painful for me to say "That's unlikely," "I
don't know about that". I could see that he was very serious,
that this was no idle chatter about revolution. He could and would
act - wasn't he the ringleader of the students?
I could
imagine no greater pleasure than serving the revolution. I had dared
only to dream of it, and yet now he was saying that he wanted to recruit
me, that otherwise he wouldn't have thought of saying anything. And
what did I know of "the people"? I knew only the house serfs
of Biakolovo and the members of my weaving collective, while he was
himself a worker by birth.
(2)
In 1876 Vera Zasulich
attempted to kill the police chief, General Trepov after he had given
the order to beat fellow revolutionary, Alexei Bogoliubov.
Now Trepov and his entourage were looking at me, their
hands occupied by papers and things, and I decided to do it earlier
than I had planned - to do it when Trepov stopped opposite my neighbour,
before reaching me.
And suddenly
there was no neighbour ahead of me - I was first.
"What
do you want?"
"A
certificate of conduct."
He jotted
down something with a pencil and turned to my neighbour.
The revolver
was in my hand. I pressed the trigger - a misfire.
My heart
missed a beat. Again I pressed. A shot, cries. Now they'll start beating
me. This was next in the sequence of events I had thought through
so many times.
I threw
down the revolver - this also had been decided beforehand; otherwise,
in the scuffle, it might go off by itself. I stood and waited.
Suddenly
everybody around me began moving, the petitioners scattered, police
officers threw themselves at me, and I was seized from both sides.
(3)
Olga
Liubatovich was in Geneva with Vera Zasulich when news arrived
that Alexander Soloviev had attempted to kill Alexander
II.
In the spring of 1879, the unexpected news of Alexander
Soloviev's attempt on the life of the Tsar threw Geneva's Russian
colony into turmoil. Vera Zasulich hid away for three days in deep
depression: Soloviev's deed obviously reflected a trend toward direct,
active struggle against the government, a trend of which Zasulich
disapproved. It seemed to me that her nerves were so strongly affected
by violent actions like Soloviev's because she consciously (and perhaps
unconsciously, as well) regarded her own deed as the first step in
this direction.
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