Sofia Panina

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Countess Sophia Vladimirovna Panina (1888)

Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina (Russian: Софья Владимировна Панина; 23 August 1871 – 16 June 1956) was Vice Minister of State Welfare and Vice Minister of Education in the Provisional Government following the Russian February Revolution, 1917. She was tried for appropriating the funds of the Ministry of Education after the October Revolution and released with "the lightest sentence possible"[1] after a payment from her friends. She was the last member of the aristocratic Panin family.

Family background

Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina was the daughter of Count Vladimir Viktorovich Panin and Anastasiia Sergeevna Maltsova. Her maternal grandfather, General

Catherine Institute in St Petersburg, one of the elite boarding schools for noble girls. Entering Petersburg society after graduation, Sofia Panina married a millionaire Alexander Polovstov in 1890. He was the homosexual son of Alexander Polovtsov by Alexander II's cousin. By 1896, however, she had divorced him and reverted to her maiden name. They had no children, and she never officially remarried.[2]

Charitable work

Ligovsky People's House, Prilukskaya Street

In 1891 Sofia Panina met a Petersburg schoolteacher twenty years older than herself, Aleksandra Vasil'evna Peshekhonova, to whose influence she attributed the decisive turn her life took in the 1890s, away from the world of aristocratic high society and toward progressive philanthropy. Panina and Peshekhonova first created a caféteria for poor schoolchildren in a working-class district of Saint Petersburg. They gradually added Sunday popular readings for the children's parents and older siblings, founded a library, and began offering evening courses for adults. In 1903 Panina employed Julius Benois to build one central building to house all of the diverse services she and Peshekhonova had started in the 1890s, known as Ligovsky People's House, for working-class residents of the same impoverished district on southern outskirts of Saint Petersburg. It pursued a progressive mission to advance popular education, cultural elevation, and rational entertainment for adults and children, as part of her project to support their development as citizens. The building still operates as a community center in Saint Petersburg today, under the name of the Railroad Workers' Palace of Culture.[3] Its evening courses and literary circles provided a meeting-place for working-class men with socialist sympathies, and during the 1905 Revolution, Panina opened Ligovsky People's House to various political groups for meetings and rallies. On 9 May 1906 Vladimir Lenin addressed his first mass meeting in Russia there.[4]

Panina also was a co-founder and major financial supporter of the Russian Society for the Protection of Women in 1900, an anti-prostitution organization. In addition to building schools and hospitals on her various estate, she also provided assistance to countless individuals. In 1901 she loaned her Crimean estate, Gaspra, to the novelist Leo Tolstoy, then suffering from a life-threatening illness; Tolstoy and his family lived at her estate for almost a year.

Political career

Ilya Repin's portrait of Countess Panina (1909)

Although her mother had married Petrunkevich, it was not until the

Constituent Assembly
, held in mid-November, but the party failed to gain enough votes to include her among its delegates.

However, when the Kadet Party was faced with the

Bolshevik rule after the October Revolution, on 15 November she authorised the transfer of the entire funds of the Ministry of Education (93,000 rubles in total) to an unidentified account, in all likelihood in a foreign bank, to keep them out of the hands of the new government.[6] An accusation was filed with the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Petrograd Soviet by the assistant commissar for education Isak Rogal’skii, who could not complete his takeover of the ministry, and Panina was arrested on 28 November.[7] During her initial interrogation, she admitted having ordered the removal of the funds but refused to disclose their destination on the grounds of her loyalty to the Provisional Government.[8] She was then offered a bail deal by a member of the Tribunal's Investigative Committee which she rejected as the amount was double the sum transferred away from the Ministry.[9]

Trial

The villa of Countess Panina in Gaspra, Crimea was built in the 1830s. She loaned it to Leo Tolstoy, among others.

Sofia Panina was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Petrograd Soviet on 10 December 1917 on the charge of embezzling 93,000 rubles from the Ministry of Education. The trial was held in the Nicholas Palace, with the foreign correspondents John Reed and Louise Bryant in attendance. Since the matter hinged on the defendant's refusal to recognise and cooperate with the new government, it has been argued in recent North American scholarship to constitute the first political trial in Bolshevik-ruled Russia, which echoes the claim Panina's lawyer made in court. Julie Cassiday has described the trial as showing "nascent theatricality of the Bolshevik law court."[10] Adele Lindenmeyr, Panina's biographer, has similarly analysed the trial in histrionic terms.[11] Such a perspective is in line with Panina's self-defensive account in her memoirs, where she casts doubt on the proceedings by calling them staged.[12]

The Tribunal was chaired by the worker

Sergei Oldenburg
accused him of lying, and Kramarov was removed for his complaints about not having been allowed to speak.

The Tribunal declared Panina guilty of "opposition to the people’s authority" but only sentenced her to public censure in view of her good reputation. She was remanded to arrest until the missing funds were released to the Commissariat for Education. She was released nine days later, on 19 December, after her friends gathered the sum and paid it to the Tribunal.[13]

Flight and emigration

In 1918 she joined General

takeover of Czechoslovakia, she left Europe in December 1938 for the United States. After living for about a year in Los Angeles, Panina settled in New York City, where she collaborated with Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy's youngest daughter, in founding the Tolstoy Foundation. First created to assist Russian emigres stranded in Europe as the threat of war grew, the Tolstoy Foundation soon became an important organization for assistance to prisoners of war and displaced persons. Panina died in New York City in June 1956.[2]

References

  1. ^ Panina's own words: Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 521.
  2. ^ a b Lindenmeyr 2001b, p. 50.
  3. ^ Lindenmeyr 2012.
  4. ^ Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 508.
  5. ^ Panina 1957, p. 192.
  6. ^ Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 510.
  7. ^ Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 510–511.
  8. ^ .Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 513. Panina would never publicise any information about the funds afterwards, including in her memoirs. Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 510 n. 27.
  9. ^ Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 513–514.
  10. ^ Cassiday 2000; quoted in Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 506.
  11. ^ See the discussions in Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 506–507, 524 and the rich "scenographical" detail of her account of the trial.
  12. ^ Panina 1957, p. 197: "Стучка, народный комиссар юстиции, ... руководил всей постановкой"; cf. Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 518: "Commissar of Justice Stuchka, ... according to Panina, “directed the entire performance”." Lindenmeyr stresses repeatedly (cf. p. 515) that the memoirs were written "years later" to distance herself from their subjective account, but this does not prevent her from framing the trial in the way they do.
  13. ^ Lindenmeyr 2001a, p. 516–521.

Bibliography

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